Dr. Ronald Takaki

I heard a highly intelligent and eloquent and entertaining man speak last night, an immigration scholar and a scholar of multiculturalism whose works I used when I was a grad student. It was an honor and a pleasure and a great deal of fun to hear him.

But there’s another man I hear often on the radio.

The man I heard last night, Dr. Ronald Takaki, told us that to write is to think, and he required his students to write and, in writing, to think critically. He posed an epistemological question: “How do we know what we know?” And he told us that the how is more important than the what. And then led us on a rhetorical journey showing us how he once knew what he knew and how his knowledge changed after time and experience.

Dr. Takaki said that if the man I often hear on the radio had conducted a critical investigation, had thought critically, we would perhaps not be in a war.

When will people hold the President of the U.S. accountable? He said weapons of mass destruction, and people believed him. The U.S. went to war and there was no evidence of such weapons, and he kept his job.

People said: not another Vietnam. It is becoming even more than Vietnam. And the President has kept his job.

The President informed us that the U.S. economy is robust. Apparently his economy is robust. The markets are crashing. My economy is not robust. Suddenly. My friend may lose her home and cannot afford to keep her home. Another friend has been unemployed for over 3 years and, at 60, has little chance of finding another job. He could lose him home and his pension.

Would it be so terrible if the people at the top of the failing money institutions had to live in a normal ranch style house with maybe three bedrooms and a bath and a half? They would still be far better off than many in the world. I imagine the homes they will probably be able to keep would house an entire village.

Dr. Takaki spoke politically last night. He talked about memory, and he said that memory is political.

He told me and my Cambodian-American colleague, whose father was present at her birth and was killed when she was only a few days old and whose mother fed her baby watered down rice gruel while she herself was starving, that memory is important, and that people like him and Obama must speak out. I would wish that more people would hear Dr. Takaki’s voice and fewer would hear President Bush’s.

Oh, yes, Dr. Takaki didn’t only tell us things, he asked us questions. And he listened. And over and over, he encouraged students at Hamline University to think, to push ahead, to write, to realize their potential.

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