If the Mexican eateries strung along Koreatown's Western Avenue corridor or the annual springtime protests against the Armenian Genocide that spill off Hollywood Boulevard into Thai Town make Angelenos, at the very least, obliquely aware of the “new urban majority” that has positioned Los Angeles as the prototypical “world city” of the twenty-first century, scholars have been rather slow to trace the arc of this historical trajectory from the twentieth century. Oftentimes, the history of multiethnic Los Angeles is recast in terms that are literally and figuratively black/white.

For Scott Kurashige, this recasting not only creates a “chronological and intellectual void” in our understanding of how a city governed by white supremacy in 1918 can become a “centre of multiculturalism” in 2008 but also sells short the transformative potential of interethnic conflict and cooperation in the struggle against racialized hegemony (8). In order to fill this void, Kurashige traces the historical evolution of black and Japanese American efforts to secure jobs, protect homes, and gain political voice in the face of increasingly insidious forms of white racism, illustrating how intraethnic experience with forces of integration and segregation create both interethnic convergence and divergence over time and across space.

Beginning in the interwar period, for instance, African American emigrants from the Jim Crow South and Issei immigrants from Japan faced “overlapping” or converging processes of racial segregation. Race-restrictive housing covenants ensured that the region's expanding suburban Westside was immune to the deleterious effects of racial mixing whilst “open-shop” labour practices reinforced cyclical class disparities cleaved along racial lines (24–27). Yet these overlapping processes nevertheless encouraged distinct interethnic responses that, in turn, created intraethnic understanding. The economic niche carved out by Issei truck farmers provided African American leaders with a model of economic resistance (albeit one that was highly paternalistic and patriarchical) while African American efforts in the courtroom similarly provided a model for manoeuvring around race-restricted housing (albeit one that was problematic for a group still classified as “aliens ineligible to citizenship”) (51–55, 69–71).

In what is arguably his strongest analysis, Kurashige closes with a brilliant elaboration of the overlapping processes of integration that ultimately set black and Japanese American experience apart, giving rise to the multicultural embrace of Los Angeles as the “world city” of the postwar era. The dramatic shift of public sentiment from the wartime paranoia of Japanese American “disloyalty” to the postwar celebration of a “model minority” is impressive in itself but Kurashige's location of this shift in a Cold War foreign policy that saw Japan (and, by extension, Japanese Americans) as an instrumental “subordinate ally” in the fight against communist insurrection in Asia is exemplary (200–5).

Likewise, Kurashige deftly illustrates how virulent anticommunist sentiment in the United States severed the “Negro–Labor alliance” that was so vital to wartime gains for African Americans while the concurrent rise of “special rights” or “reverse discrimination” rhetoric (epitomized in the passage of Proposition 14 in 1964) helped to retrench segregationist tendencies and position African Americans as the “problem race” of the postwar era (209–12, 261). In the wake of Watts and at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, nonwhite Angelenos like Mayor Tom Bradley were indeed indicative of some sort of progress, but a progress nevertheless that resulted from the neoconservative fracturing of broad-based, intraethnic progressive–left politics.

Well crafted and well researched, Kurashige's book provides an invaluable framework for reconstructing a “multiethnic historical narrative from the ground up,” lending nuance to the manner in which white racism and white privilege operate in the home, on the factory floor, and in the voting booth. Historians of all stripes would do well to heed Kurashige's call for a “transcendence” of “conventional notions” of “majority” and “minority,” in studies not only of Los Angeles or California, but, increasingly, of (sub)urban America as a whole.