Rarely does a book cast a well-known, heavily trafficked subject area such as civil rights in an entirely new light. However, Mark Brilliant's The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California accomplishes precisely that. In writing a history of rights reform in California, Brilliant uncovers a fascinating parallel universe to the well-trod South, a place where many of the issues that would come to occupy the Southern movement in the 1950s and 1960s were tackled earlier, in the 1940s. Among these were battles over school segregation, residential segregation, fair employment, and interracial marriage; many of which became confounded by the natural emergence and eventual exploitation of tensions among racial groups. Such tensions, particularly among Japanese-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Blacks, are one of the central foci of Brilliant's study, making it a lens through which to better understand “the unique challenges and disparate shapes of civil rights making in multiracial places” (6).

Divided into eight chapters, The Color of America begins with a discussion of early efforts to unite civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) through “interracial” vehicles such as the California Federation for Civic Unity (CFCU), only to be confounded by the “almost complete isolation between the various racial and cultural groups” in the state (23). Particularly isolated were Japanese- Americans who faced substantial property losses in the 1940s under both internment and an Alien Land Law aimed at robbing immigrants and their children of their homes and farms. As groups such as JACL challenged such laws, they drew the attention and support of the NAACP; however, Blacks and Asians never “converged into a civil rights movement river” as did African-Americans in the South (127).

Confounding California's river were competing agendas as well as complicated state responses to conflicting questions of minority rights. Mexican-Americans, for example, were formally considered white but segregated in schools along linguistic lines. Meanwhile, Japanese-Americans and Blacks both suffered racial exclusion even as they endured different forms of state-sponsored discrimination – land appropriation for the Japanese and restrictive covenants for African-Americans. Whereas the “toppling” of such statutory discriminations occurred in “less than a decade during the 1940s,” subsequent efforts to move from “Jim Crow litigation” to “antidiscrimination litigation” proved much harder, confounded by a “Cold War political climate” that cast a pink pall over “antidiscrimination activism” (114, 123). Here, the very Cold War initiative that spurred federal endorsement of desegregation in Brown worked the opposite way when it came to achieving racial parity in California. Further problems emerged when white conservatives “appropriated civil rights rhetoric” to counter fair housing legislation, most notably the Rumford Act covering “owner-occupied, single-family homes” (192, 206). As fears of plummeting property values spurred racial prejudice, aspiring Republican governor Ronald Reagan used the language of private rights to coax unprecedented numbers of “lower income” whites out of the Democratic Party and into the GOP; a move that Reagan augmented by skillfully exploiting tensions between Mexican- Americans and Blacks (220). Adopting the Spanish slogan “Ya Basta” (we've had enough), Reagan cleverly embraced “bilingualism” to fight busing, stop desegregation, and “break up coalitions of minority people” (219, 229, 248). By 1978, such moves culminated in a new rights paradigm, a move away from antidiscrimination and toward the celebration of cultural and racial “diversity,” as endorsed by the Supreme Court in Regents v. Bakke, a California case brought by a white applicant to the UC Davis School of Medicine (257).

Although some have tried to reconcile Bakke with Brown, Brilliant does a convincing job of showing how the ruling was in fact destructive of early civil rights aims, more aligned with fracture than with unity. However, it is precisely the fracturing of rights politics in California that makes Brilliant's book compelling, both as a counterpoint to the “civil rights movement river” that swept through the United States South for much of the 1950s and 1960s, and as a vital referent for understanding challenges to rights reform today. Here, Brilliant's work takes into account not simply a long civil rights movement, to borrow from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, but also a “wide” one (14). Historians assigned to teach civil rights will find Brilliant's book a provocative addition to their standard southern-focused syllabi, as will scholars covering courses on race, rights, and reform generally in the twentieth century United States.