Haoles in Hawaii

Chapter 2 - "No Ack!": What is Haole, Anyway?

33 chapter 2 “No Ack!” What Is Haole, Anyway? Having established the origins of haole in Hawai‘i’s colonization, this chapter considers the many different constructions of haole produced by haoles and others from “first contact” to present. As stated earlier, my interest is not so much in trying to define what haole is—as if one definition were possible—as in exploring the different ways it is produced. Haole is dynamic. Not only is it not just one thing, it is also never still—it changes across time, place, and context. How the early missionaries represented themselves differed radically from how Kanaka Maoli constructed them, which differed again from how plantation workers talked about their haole bosses. Understanding haole means thinking about all of these constructs and how they are interrelated with other racial constructions in Hawai‘i. Constructions of the three dominant racial-ethnic groupings in Hawai‘i—haoles, locals, and native Hawaiians—are what they are because of each other. Native Hawaiians trace their genealogies back to the time before Cook’s arrival. Local identity and culture originated in the plantation system and is an amalgamation of Kanaka Maoli culture with those immigrant groups brought to labor in the sugarcane and pineapple fields. These include Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and Samoan immigrants, among others. There could be no local without incorporation of certain elements of Hawaiian culture and resistance to haole hegemony. There could be no white colonizer without a racialized native. Processes of identity formation and racialization (the ways groups come to be understood in racial terms) do not just move in one direction; they move in many directions simultaneously. My analysis focuses on haole as a colonial/neocolonial form of whiteness situated in Hawai‘i, and thus I foreground processes of racialization. 34 chapter 2 Some literature refers to haole as an ethnic identity. Other authors slide easily between race, ethnicity, and nationality. Different constructions of haole contain elements of all three because they are intrinsically related. I choose to highlight race—race talk, racialization, racial formation, racial production, racial identity, racial politics, racism, and so forth. I focus on active processes of racialization because race is a sociopolitical means of classifying people, not a “natural” biological or scientific fact. Within the context of U.S. imperialism, race has been the foundation for dominant systems of power, the engine driving the imperial machine. By focusing on racial production in Hawai‘i, I look at the different deployments of power that produce and reproduce the violent fictions of race, dispossessing some, privileging others, and segregating us from each other and, for those of us with multiple racial identities, often from ourselves. Theories of racial production contend that racial identities are relational , that the formation of an “us” occurs simultaneously with the formation of a “them.” Furthermore, the two processes do not just occur simultaneously, but are also dependent on one another and are mutually constitutive. Whiteness produces itself in opposition to racialized others. It is, so the story goes, what “they” are not. Racialized “others ” in turn, produce certain counternarratives or counterdiscourses of whiteness—stories and knowledge about whiteness that runs against dominant (white) ideas. In studying haole, we see how constructions including “savage,” “Hawaiian,” “Oriental,” “Asian,” and “local” were, and are, used to mark and patrol the boundaries of haole constructions of haole. At the same time, Hawaiian and local constructions of haole help define the borders of those identities. It is through this interplay and its symbolic and material manifestations that haole gains meaning and significance in multiple, often conflicting, ways. I begin by exploring haole constructions of haole starting with discoverer and savior, the dominant projections in the first century of haole. I then turn to the more contemporary identities of kama‘āina, “Hawaiian at heart,” and hapa. Manifest destiny and Christian proselytizing animate the early constructions. A general resistance to being called “haole” and a desire to belong—a yearning to “go native” or become “Hawaiian”—drives the last three. If many haoles could have their way, the word “haole” would be banned as impolite at best, pejorative at worst. One can almost mark one’s calendar by the cyclical debate in local media over the use of the word (I analyze this in depth in the next chapter). It is a testament to Hawaiian-local resistance and cultural what is haole, anyway? 35 insistence that the term...