The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (review)

For anyone who studies the history of Los Angeles, there comes a painful moment when learning that the west coast evacuation and internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II freed Little Tokyo for residence by local African Americans. Challenged for decades by racially restrictive covenants and confronting housing shortages created by the Depression and extended by the wartime population explosion, Black Angelenos, as well as new southern migrants, moved quickly into the vacated neighborhood. The abrupt transition of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo into Bronzeville reads like a sped-up version of twentieth-century U.S. urban history and prompts myriad questions: What does the wholesale replacement of one marginalized group for another in an already racially circumscribed neighborhood tell us about the political economy of space in Los Angeles? What social and cultural relationship did these two groups have with one another before the war and what relationship could they possibly have afterward? What did this transition do to multiethnic coalition-building in Los Angeles? Could an organized collective response to white racism emerge from this episode? How did both groups respond to internment? What uncomfortable choices had to be made by those caught up in an opportunity created by others’ misfortune? What does this moment of urban transition tell us about social, cultural, and political integration into the American polity after World War II?

It was with these questions in mind that I welcome Scott Kurashige’s The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles to on-going conversations within the fields of Los Angeles and urban history about race, politics, and space. In this remarkable work of research and analytical precision, Kurashige recounts the complex political history of Japanese and Black Americans in the city, seeking moments of interethnic cooperation, competition, and cultural exchange as each group faced different, but equally devastating, racialized challenges. Kurashige’s research opens many possible interrogative avenues, but the one that most haunts the book is how the actual and metaphoric intersection of these two social groups at Little Tokyo/Bronzeville produced entirely different political narratives after World War II. As he explains, the cumulative effects of HOLC red-lining, decades of racially restrictive housing covenants, the dissolution of public space and public transit, and the freeways’ damage to previously stable working class neighborhoods led to patterns of severe racial segregation and the systematic “ghettoization” of southern Los Angeles. African Americans were ensnared in this troubling political economy, which would produce the Watts uprising of 1965, while Japanese Americans, though hardly untouched by features of the postwar urban crisis, were instead cast as the new American model minority. Kurashige argues that Japanese American participation in the US war effort and in particular the performance of the all-Nisei 442^nd Regiment in Italy, supported white narratives about “successful” Japanese assimilation and helped promote the official story “of America as a land of opportunity and a nation that had defeated racial prejudice. In fact, the federal government argued that the internment itself had been a benevolent endeavor consistent with modernist notions of progress and racial integration” (187). In a terribly poignant moment, Kurashige shows how the Nisei effort to advocate the model citizen paradigm obscured tragic tales of Japanese American grief, failure, and even insanity in the aftermath of the internment experience. But the myth of the model minority was powerful stuff and had political traction in the United States well into the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the Left and the labor movement in the face of the reactionary 1950s undermined the twenty-five-year-old collaboration between the CPUSA, the CIO, and Black activist groups in Los Angeles. As Kurashige writes, “most devastatingly, the demise of the Left-led CIO deprived the city of its most significant organizational vehicle for building a multiracial and class-conscious social...