Haoles in Hawaii

Foreword

ix Foreword Haoles in Hawai‘i is the inaugural volume in a succeeding series on ethnicity planned by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Such a project is a reminder that academic presses are clusters of the energies and intelligences that help to make up and maintain a civil and literate society. Without such influences and resources our lives would all be poorer and meaner. We in Hawai‘i are fortunate to have such a press. That the press has launched this series with a volume whose title appears to make haole an ethnic identity will likely violate what most of us haoles have long assumed—that other people are ethnics, not us. The author, Dr. Judy Rohrer, compellingly sucks us in to this shock of recognition with an account of her own awakening to this social fact at age seven in rural Kaua‘i. In arguing that ethnicity is a sociopolitical construct, not a genetic fact, she marches us through several centuries of Hawaiian history and such fields as colonial, gender, and whiteness studies. She connects the emergence of the several ethnic identities in Hawai‘i to the history of its colonial rule that began after the “discovery ” of the islands in the late eighteenth century. Among the immediate consequences of “discovery” was the rapid depopulation of the Hawaiian Kingdom owing to the arrival of Western diseases against which native Hawaiian bodies carried no defenses. Such an invasion all but destroyed Hawaiian culture and society. Into this near void poured opportunists from other countries, chief among them Americans. Although there were some notable exceptions, in general their disdain for or ignorance of traditional Hawaiian practices provided them an easy right-of-way for the implantation of capitalist ways with land, its ownership practices, and social relationships. As a consequence, a century after their “discovery,” Hawaiians had become strangers in a strange land—their land seized, their queen deposed, and a (largely) white oligarchy in control. x foreword Needing vast numbers of fieldworkers for the plantation economy that they were creating, the white planters at the outset imported them from Asia (principally Japan and China) and, later, from Portugal and other Pacific Island cultures. Most of these workers stayed on. Within several generations their locally born children began to intermarry. In this way, the colonially shaped brew of races and cultures of the “local” people was produced. As for the whites, they became “haoles,” itself a Hawaiian word that is a portmanteau of meanings, including white, but white with its particular local history. These several decades later, color is no longer the master social code. Rohrer has set her task here as that of sorting out for us how both local and haole are now socially produced. Mixed ancestry is quite common; our means of distinguishing among us are based on the proportions of the cultures and behaviors we display both happily and unwittingly. The reach of Rohrer’s scholarship and the lucidity of her prose in untangling this complex social identity are a masterful introduction to the succeeding volumes in the series. Phyllis Turnbull Professor Emeritus University of Hawai‘i Political Science Department ...