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race / ethnicity john p. rosa Racial and ethnic relations in Hawai‘i are good, but far from perfect. In the early twentieth century, Hawai‘i was touted as a “laboratory of race relations,” and since the 1980s, the islands have even been proposed as a “multicultural model” for the world. No single racial/ethnic group makes up a majority in the islands. The rate of interracial marriages outpaces that of anywhere in the United States. And oh yes, Barack Obama—the son of a white woman and an African man who met in Honolulu in the 1960s—is now President of the United States. “Race” does not matter in Hawai‘i at all—right? While many of the statements above might be true, touting Hawai‘i as the Land of Aloha only gives us a superficial view of racial and ethnic relations here. As University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa Ethnic Studies professor Jonathan Y. Okamura tells us, it is the category of ethnicity, not “race,” that must be examined more closely. Inequality exists, and it is getting worse, precisely because we do not always acknowledge the link between ethnic difference and inequality in the islands.1 “ethnicity” vs. “race”: what’s the difference? Ethnicity—one’s cultural background, ancestry, and traditions—is a more important marker of difference than race because it is the category that has been most often used as the basis for decisions regarding social interactions in the islands. People here more commonly identify as “Hawaiian,” “Chinese,” “Filipino,” “Samoan,” or even “haole,” for example, rather than as one of the race designations found in Census 2000: White; Black or African American; American Indian and Alaska Native; Asian; and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander. “Ethnicity” more commonly relates to ancestry, cultural background, or country of origin. “Race” is usually understood as a larger category related to perceived physical or biological attributes of skin color, hair type, facial features , and so on. To complicate matters more, the U.S. Census uses the general term “race” to keep consistent with standard federal reporting categories 54 The Value of Hawai‘i established by the Office of Management and Budget. Persons who identify as “Hispanic” can be of any race, for instance. Of course, the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t exactly keep the terms distinct either: “The categories are designed for collecting data on the race and ethnicity of broad population groups in this country. They are based on social and political considerations—not anthropological or scientific ones. Furthermore, the race categories include both racial and national-origin groups.”2 In Hawai‘i, people commonly accept and understand an individual’s ethnic self-identification—recognizing a light-skinned girl with blond hair, blue eyes, and the last name of Kamaka, for example, as “Native Hawaiian.” People in the islands do not automatically decide what a person’s racial group might be on the basis of physical characteristics alone, as for example mistakenly assuming that an athletic, dark-skinned man is almost certainly a Pacific Islander . In our island society, residents are more likely to recognize—and act upon —a person’s self-declared ethnicity than they are his or her perceived race. We also need to recognize that interpersonal relationships (face-to-face interactions among people we often know or see routinely) are different from ethnic group relations (in which different groups might consistently, but unknowingly , treat other groups in prejudicial ways). Many of us can rightfully claim that we treat our neighbors-of-a-different-ethnic-group well, and that our families are indeed intermarried among a few or even several groups. These good interpersonal relationships, however, can obscure forms of institutional discrimination, in which different ethnic groups consistently receive unequal access to education, job opportunities, adequate housing, and avenues toward financial success. In Hawai‘i, for example, whites and older generation Chinese and Japanese might achieve higher education goals without being aware that their middle-class status and familiarity with college admissions processes makes their experiences relatively easy compared to those of Native Hawaiians, Filipinos , and Pacific Islanders, who historically have had lower rates of college attendance. When older, more established ethnic groups automatically expect newer minority groups to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” they simply repeat patterns of subtle but damaging structural discrimination. history Hawai‘i shares two characteristics with other geographically isolated locales. First, the islands experienced a rapid decline of the native population right after contact with the larger world, beginning with...

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