Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai'i

Notes

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. A revised version of my testimony was subsequently published in the Honolulu Advertiser as a commentary on May 25, 2005 on p. A16. 2. This lack of questioning can be contrasted with the lengthy grilling by several Regents of then interim UH Manoa chancellor Denise Konan when she discussed her decision against establishing a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) at Manoa at a Board of Regents hearing on January 20, 2006. In November 2004, the board had given its approval for proceeding with negotiations toward signing a contract with the U.S. Navy for a UARC. 3. I thank Michael Omi for drawing my attention to the applicability of Oliver and Shapiro’s arguments to the case of ethnic inequality in Hawai‘i. 4. The exceptions to this generalization would be ethnic groups with significant post-1965 immigrant segments, such as Filipino Americans and Korean Americans . 5. African Americans may be considered an exception to this generalization. 6. My article,“The Illusion of Paradise: Privileging Multiculturalism in Hawai‘i,” was written in 1996; in this section, therefore, I discuss publications on multiculturalism that have been published since then. 7. Another example by journalists of the representation of Hawai‘i as a model of multiculturalism is evident in the welcome message on the Web site for the18th Annual National Convention of the Asian American Journalists Association held in Honolulu in June 2006 (Asian American Journalists Association 2006): “Welcome to a place where diversity works, where Asian American and Pacific Islander men as well as women anchor the news on television . . . Hawai‘i is the most ethnically diverse state in the nation . . . Diversity is as much a part of Hawai‘i as surfing, hula, poi and rice. Our food, culture and traditions blend East, West and Polynesia like no other place in the world.” 8. Hall (2000: 210) has noted six different types of multiculturalism in the literature: conservative, liberal, pluralist, commercial, corporate, and critical. Perhaps questioning the usefulness of distinguishing those and other multiculturalisms, he ends his brief discussion of them with “And so on.” 9. The late Glen Grant taught an American studies course called “Multiculturalism: Is Hawai‘i the Answer?” in the early 2000s at UH Manoa. 10. Besides ethno-racial bloc, another term in Postethnic America that Hollinger introduced in place of race and ethnic group is “communities of descent.” This term is even less satisfactory than ethno-racial bloc since, as historian Henry Yu (2003) has noted for Asian Americans, “There is no evidence . . . that at any time historically people have considered themselves ‘Asian American’ because of a pan-Asian sense of shared descent.” 11. Similarly, Melissa Nobles (2005: 82) contends that the “myth of Latin American multiracialism,”like the myth of Latin American“racial democracy, functions as an ideology ” that obscures persisting racial injustice and thus hinders economic, political, and social change. 12. Even in Asian American studies, major works on race relations have not included Hawai‘i in their discussion, for example, The State of Asian Pacific America: Transforming Race Relations (Ong 2000); Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (Ancheta 2003); and Yellow: Race in America beyond Black and White (Wu 2002). Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedom, How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (2002), which has a chapter on “Japanese and Haoles in Hawaii,” is a notable exception, although it is a historical work. CHAPTER 2 1. The U.S. census data in this section are from“Race and Hispanic Origin, by Counties : 2000,” table 1.32, from the online version of The State of Hawaii Data Book 2002 (Hawai‘i Department of Business and Economic Development and Tourism 2003b), http://www.hawaii.gov/dbedt/. 2. In computing the percentage of the state population represented by an ethnic group, I used the figure for a group “alone or in combination with one or more other races.” This procedure means that the total percentage for all ethnic groups exceeds 100 percent because the figure for a group alone or in combination is based on responses rather than individuals. For example, a person who reported being White and Native Hawaiian for his or her race provided two responses. The total number of responses was about 1.57 million for Hawai‘i in the 2000 census. 3. The University of Hawai‘i still uses “Other Caucasian” as an ethnic category for student enrollment. Together with Portuguese Americans and “Middle Easterners,” they comprise the larger “Caucasian...