In chapter 1, "A Different Mirror: The Making of Multicultural America," Ronald Takaki's thesis about American history is that it's always been told wrongly as a story about how European settlers and their descendants are the true Americans.
Let me restate that thesis in a more detailed way, borrowing some of Takaki's wording: Embedded deep within American history is a "Master Narrative" that is "powerful and popular but inaccurate," acting as a "filter" that still affects our perceptions of each other as either American or "Other," and that false narrative is this: ". . . our country was settled by European immigrants, and Americans are white."
In other words, Takaki's thesis is that American history has always been told as a story with the wrong structure, the wrong basic belief. "Not all of us came originally from Europe!" he points out, citing how a third of us have no European ancestry and even how major cities—in addition to the state of California—are predominated by people with other ancestries.
In chapter 1, Takaki goes on to develop this thesis by spotlighting the historians whose work created the false narrative and allowed it to propagate. Takaki challenges the false narrative, pointing out how it's crumbling today in the face of reality. (The reality is that "our expanding racial diversity is challenging the Master Narrative.")
He strikes an optimistic tone when he traces how multiculturalism is now being acknowledged and embraced in universities across the nation, but he asserts that we must "study race and ethnicity" in an inclusive manner, rather than missing the point by studying one race at a time in isolation.
Next, he relates the history of the various ethnic groups who constitute America, explaining how and when they arrived en masse—and, in the case of Native Americans, how they were here all along. Takaki ties these groups together, conceptually, by arguing that they all shared "experiences and dreams" as well as a love of America's principle of "equality for everyone, regardless of race or religion."
He summarizes the history of all these multicultural Americans, tracing their participation in wars and major cultural upheavals such as the Civil Rights Movement.
Takaki concludes by reiterating his thesis: that the false Master Narrative must be replaced by the true narrative that America has been settled by "the people of all nations."
This question is referring to historian Ronald Takaki's 1993 book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. The title is significant, because it basically outlines Takaki's main argument. In the first chapter, Takaki takes aim at what he calls the "Master Narrative of American History." This, he argues, is a sort of assumption that pervaded the writing and teaching of American history for more than a century, described by Takaki as follows:
. . . [O]ur country was settled by European immigrants, and Americans are white. "Race," observed Toni Morrison, has functioned as a "metaphor" necessary to the "construction of Americanness": in the creation of our national identity, "American" has been defined as "white." Not to be "white" is to be designated as the "other"—different, inferior, and unassimilable.
In A Different Mirror Takaki offers a different narrative, one based on the conclusion of decades of historical scholarship that the United States is "a nation peopled by the world, and we are all Americans." He attempts to go beyond scholarship that has focused on one minority group in order to emphasize the multicultural nature of the United States.
Throughout the first chapter, he outlines the narrative, which includes, by way of analysis and comparison, the experiences of Americans of African, Asian, Irish, Jewish, Mexican, Muslim, and Native ancestry or cultural identification. United States history looks very different when seen from these multiple perspectives. It is Takaki's argument in chapter 1 that this understanding is more accurate, relevant, and explanatory than the so-called "Master Narrative."
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