As Mark Brilliant documents in The Color of America Has Changed, the writer and activist Carey McWilliams noted in his 1943 book, Brothers Under the Skin, that the “color of America has changed” (p. 3). From his vantage point in California, issues of racial hierarchy and inequality could no longer be understood in conventional black-and-white terms. The issues and struggles of Californians of Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino descent, among others, also had to be addressed. Brilliant uses McWilliams’s prescient observation about the racial transformations of the state as the point of departure for his important and timely study of the impact such diversity had on the contours and trajectory of civil rights advocacy in postwar California. How did the presence of what McWilliams described as “multiple race problems” shape the assumptions and strategies of civil rights reform? Why did these conditions more often produce multiple and at times competing efforts rather than the movements of solidarity and unity often imagined by civil rights proponents? What might this history tell us about the nation’s multiracial present and future?
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Daniel Martinez HoSang (2011) studied this question.