HAWAI'IIS MY HAVEN
HAWAI'IIS MY HAVEN
"Haven." "Sanctuary" "Reprieve." These are the words Black residents use to describe Hawai'i. They also experience racism, ostracism, and erasure. I illustrate this duality of Black life in Hawai'i through the life stories and experiences of hundreds of people of African descent. They include locals who were born and raised in the Hawaiian Islands as well as transplants, like the nurse Ellen, identified as "E" in my field notes, who moved here as adults. The title of this book came from my conversation with Ellen, whom I interviewed in two thousand nine (just my second interview of the project). While I have stayed in touch with her over the past decade (she read my work and let me identify her), it was only years later that I learned that Ellen had won one of the largest damage awards in an employment discrimination case in the Islands. When she mentioned her troubling encounters with fellow nurses at our initial interview, she had confided in me, saying, "It's good to speak to another minority that understands." Ellen personifies the irony of attempting to "escape" one's Blackness-or, rather, escape denigrating ideas about Blackness-while facing antiBlack racism in a place of sanctuary.
Jury awards former Queen's nurse three point eight million dollars in lawsuit
Jury awards former Queen's nurse three point eight million dollars in lawsuit
Hawai'i Is My Haven is the first ethnography of Hawai'i's Black civilian residents-a population virtually absent in the popular and scholarly imagination of the Pacific, with the exception of former President Barack Obama. "You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawai'i," says Michelle Obama. The former president concurred that the Islands shaped him when he explained, "No place else ... could have provided me with the environment, the climate, in which I could not only grow but also get a sense of being loved. There is no doubt that the residue of Hawai'i will always stay with me, and that it is part of my core, and that what's best in me, and what's best in my message, is consistent with the tradition of Hawai'i."
Yet in his memoir, Obama also describes the racism he faced growing up in Honolulu. Like almost one-fourth of the population of Hawai'i, Obama is multiracial, representing the almost fifty percent of Hawai'i's Black residents who identified as more than one race on the two thousand ten census. Black locals, or African-descended people who are born and raised in the Islands like Obama, often do not have access to Black communities in contrast to Black transplants who move to the Islands as adults from elsewhere, including members of the US armed forces. Raised within nonBlack families, it is their local Hawaiian and Asian community members who inform their feelings of belonging.
Black residents, both local and transplant, are a present absence: although more Black people live in Hawai'i than Samoans, who have a significant local imprint, few people recognize them. Hawai'i is at once a site of proliferating Blackness, through the popular local adoption of Black culture, and of Black absence, which includes the denial of the Black civilians who live among us. This absence is due both to the reduced salience of Blackness in the Islands, referred to in Ellen's discussion of "escape," and to the displacement of Black people onto the continental United States.
Contesting their erasure, Hawai'i's Black residents were impossible to ignore during the marches, rallies, and vigils held across the Islands in honor of George Floyd, an African American man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, on May twenty-fifth, twenty twenty. Among the attendees at local events were Black transplants who remarked on this unique moment of potential social transformation. In response to a youth-organized "Hawai'i for Black Lives" march on June sixth, twenty twenty, which drew nearly ten thousand people to the state capitol building, retired professor and Morehouse College graduate Robert Steele reflected, "One of the unique things not only here but nationally or internationally is how rally organizers hold a demonstration. The whole movement is so ethnically diverse. In fact, the majority of participants are people of color, which is so gratifying." A Black man from Georgia who attended an event a week earlier at Magic Island in Honolulu that drew around two hundred people to memorialize Floyd highlighted Hawai'i's uniqueness: "This is a fantasy to me, people of different hues, different backgrounds all together," he said. "This is how it should be."
The realities of racism, however, cloud sunny depictions of Hawai'i as a multicultural and harmonious society. A Black Hawaiian community organizer, Shayna Lonoaea-Alexander, told a reporter that "a lot of folks believe that because Hawai'i is a melting pot that anti-blackness doesn't exist here .. .. Anti-blackness and racism exists in Hawai'i and it's unacceptable and it's on all of us to fight for Hawai'i, to fight for a country where being black isn't a death sentence." Dr. Akiemi Glenn, a Black transplant to Hawai'i, explains in a June twenty twenty interview at the height of protests,
In addition to watching the stuff that's happening in North America over the last week, we're ... grappling with the blatant and often unrecognized antiBlackness that's a part of Hawai'i culture. I'd be remiss to talk about what's happening in North America without also contextualizing threats that have been made against Black people even . . . here in Hawai'i. . . . As people here have been organizing vigils and demonstrations and socially distanced gatherings, there have also been calls for nonBlack locals to come and keep an eye on us to make sure that we don't become violent.
Glenn, the cofounder and executive director of the Popolo Project, an organization documenting Black life in the Pacific, deciphers these responses as local adoptions of antiBlack racism: "So even though we live here and we are part of this community, there's still this suspicion of criminality that's associated with any kind of Black people and Black gatherings."
Hawai'i's Black population faces global anti-Black racism and local erasure simultaneously. On the one hand, locals presume that the Black people they encounter in Hawai'i are temporarily stationed in the Islands as part of the US military, and thus as agents of state power. On the other hand, local and tourist framings of the Islands as devoid of Black civilians allow this place to imagine itself as free from the racial problems that beleaguer the United States. As a result, Black locals appear an oxymoron, an impossibility. Speaking of sentiments expressed by Black community members in Hawai'i surrounding weeks of activism in response to George Floyd's murder, Glenn explains, "Many folks are feeling very tired. ... But what I think that tiredness is about is that exhaustion comes with constantly having to explain yourself and your humanity. And for many Black locals, having to explain that we live here, and that we are part of this community" and "part of the local people." Black people are not considered to be from the Islands but rather are an ignored minority in a mostly non-White place. It is more the case that Blackness has been adopted by Pacific Islanders who embrace Black cultural forms, such as reggae and Rastafarianism, and Black politics, including the ideologies of the Black Panthers expressed by the Polynesian Panthers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, without concrete reference to or knowledge about the African diaspora. This reduction of Blackness to culture and ideology results in the excision of actual African-descended people from our local and scholarly understanding of Hawai'i.
The prioritization of frameworks of culture and ethnicity in tourism, local discourse, and research on Hawai'i contributes to the erasure of Hawai'i's Black civilians. Without an analysis of race, we cannot understand, or even see, Black life in the Pacific. In a June twenty eighteen interview during one of her visits to
Hawai'i, the cofounder of the Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse Khan-Cullors stated:
Black struggles and freedom struggles, in particular, have had such an important impact on the globe. Everywhere I go, Black Lives Matter is understood as part of a long legacy, a movement, of Black people trying to fight for our freedom. It doesn't always mean that it's going to translate into a particular place .... Maybe Black Lives Matter doesn't make sense here, but maybe the conversation about Blackness makes sense here. And how do we translate that. . . . Let's talk about Blackness and its relationship to our context [in Hawai'i], not Black Lives Matter in the United States.
Khan-Cullors's sentiment that Black Lives Matter may not "translate" or "make sense" in Hawai'i is uncanny in light of the protests during the summer of twenty twenty. Her comments illustrate the widespread erasure of Black residents described by Glenn. Discussions of Blackness in Hawai'i before twenty twenty and even during these international uprisings pivoted to Melanesians, anti-Micronesian racism in Hawai'i, and reflections on the widespread adoption of reggae and hip hop. Few acknowledge the presence of Black people living within these communities, except for Black community leaders like Joy Enomoto, an artist and activist who is Black, Asian, and Hawaiian, and Akiemi Glenn, a Black, Asian, and Native American linguist with genealogical ties to the areas now known as North Carolina and Virginia. They have both been called on to "translate" the importance of the recent Black protests taking place across the nation to the Hawai'i context.
I join these efforts to address Khan-Cullors's call for a conversation about the value of Black life in the Pacific by providing the necessary context: mapping the histories, lives, and politics of Black people in Hawai'i. To realize the potential of solidarity that Khan-Cullors, a queer Black woman artist, organizer, and freedom fighter, hopes for requires us to address locally specific tensions that stall Black and Hawaiian comradeship. Khan-Cullors's travels across the Pacific led her to recognize the intersection of race and indigeneity. She observes, "Hawai'i has always been an interesting place for me when I think about indigeneity and Black Indigeneity in particular. . . . I've learned much more about colonialism in Hawai'i and the US military's impact here in Hawai'i and the kind of role Black Lives Matter has the opportunity of playing when it comes to having a broader conversation about globalization and a broader conversation about solidarity work." In the Islands, the local context necessary for understanding the particular contours of Black life includes its colonial history, military occupation, and Asian settler colonialism. This setting informs clashing ideas about what issues matter locally and how best to go about addressing them-dynamics that shape Black and Hawaiian relations.
Some of the tensions framing relationships between Black and Hawaiian people convened around two movements that reached a crescendo in twenty twenty, both of which I consider to be struggles for liberation: the Movement for Black Lives against police brutality and Kānaka (Native Hawaiians, or Hawaiians) self-determination represented by the kia'i, or Native Hawaiian protectors. The kia'i stationed on Maunakea, a mountain of ancestral significance that has also been claimed as a site for astronomy, have mobilized to stop the desecration of their land proposed by the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Earning global support, the protectors went to the mountain on the Big Island of Hawai'i to disrupt a planned groundbreaking ceremony on October fourteenth, twenty fourteen. Hawaiian activists, including the kūpuna (elders), have since camped out in the cold and faced arrest while successfully blocking the ongoing march of the settler state's attempt to bulldoze Hawaiians' rights to make decisions about their land.
Native Hawaiian activists have been guided by their kuleana (rights and responsibilities) and the practice of kapu aloha, or "the commitment to non-violent direct action" that fosters "compassion and respect while engaged in politicized expressions of outrage and disobedience." The same principles of kuleana and kapu aloha guide the protests against anti-Black racism in Hawai'i. More often, however, locals frame the struggle for Kanaka self-determination on the one hand and the desire for the recognition of Black humanity on the other hand to be discrete and contestatory aims. More concerning, when African-descended people in Hawai'i do voice their concerns in ways informed by a legacy of Black struggle, other locals dismiss their problems and disparage their strategies as not representative of "aloha." The Hawai'i reporter Anita Hofschneider reflected on this contradictory response to Black and Hawaiian activism: "Social media posts also compared violent protests [against police violence] on the continent with peaceful Native Hawaiian protests in Hawaii against the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea." She interviewed the Black Hawaiian organizer Shayna Lonoaea-Alexander, who explained, "There's a lot of online discourse right now around Kanaka (Native Hawaiians) trying to police the way black folks are grieving and protesting and I think it's so unacceptable," she says, speaking of the depiction of Black protest as "violent." Lonoaea-Alexander calls out the lack of reciprocity between Hawaiian and Black activists, saying, "We asked the world to stand with us [Hawaiians] (on Mauna Kea) and I think that the world really responded but when black folks are asking it's a different story. ... I'm tired of people who look like my dad or my brother or my sister being killed."
Despite these divisions, the Movement for Black Lives and protecting the Mauna against desecration are fighting against the same sources of oppression: state-sanctioned violence, racism, and colonialism. The police enforce the White supremacist settler state even when the officers are non-White and are even one's family members, as they often are in Hawai'i. By extending themselves to learn about Black struggles, two Hawaiian collectives cultivating Hawaiian knowledge and fighting for Indigenous self-determination, Pu'uhonua o Pu'uhuluhulu and the Hawai'i Unity & Liberation Institute, issued a "Joint Statement of Solidarity for the Protection of Black Lives" on June fifth, twenty twenty. The statement proclaimed their solidarity with Black communities fighting against police violence:
While we share in histories of oppression and colonialism, we recognize and understand that our lived experience is not the same as the Black experience in America and we refuse to use Kapu Aloha to judge their response to struggle for survival. We acknowledge with great pride and humility the influence that black struggle has had on the Hawaiian movement and political consciousness and call upon the lāhui to learn about the relationship between black and Hawaiian struggle.
The statement frames Black and Hawaiian people, experiences, and politics as distinct and calls for Kānaka to learn about their political cross-fertilization. They also recognize "our Black Hawaiian relatives," people whose voices I center in this ethnography: "Anti-blackness is a problem in our communities, and we must work to understand the many forms that it takes in Hawai'i. We must address this issue together and commit to stand as kia'i against anti-blackness and racism," the statement urges.
This book offers a framework for understanding these discussions that acknowledge agency and oppression. Hawai'i Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in Hawai'i that frame relationships among people in the Islands. It centers both Black locals and Black transplants to Hawai'i who encounter a life of integration and invisibility. My focus on Black residents includes Black Hawaiians, or the children of Black and Native Hawaiian parents, who do not abide by either the local Hawai'i or North American academic framing of Black and Indigenous people as disparate groups living in distinct geographies and advocating divergent politics. The kuleana of Hawai'i residents to urgently address anti-Black racism and Indigenous self-determination in a settler state is clear in the current predicament of Black residents. Akiemi Glenn expresses the specific needs of Hawai'i's Black residents during a period of mourning in the summer of twenty twenty: "Of course, we are feeling the 'eha and the heaviness of what's happening in North America very much, but we also love Hawai'i and will behave accordingly as we are grieving."
Black people grieve in a place they may consider their haven and sanctuary, far from the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic. Black transplants grew up in Black communities, and their perspectives are informed by the history of slavery and anti-Black racism. Their worldviews are challenged in the Black Pacific, where Indigenous epistemologies and local cultural practices take precedence. They are part of a two-centuries-long lineage of Black arrivals who have experienced historical acceptance and integration into Hawaiian society. This is what shapes a sense of optimism and possibility for African-descended people, notably personified by Obama. However, Black residents, both locals and transplants, also trouble this positive depiction through their accounts of invisibility and experiences with anti-Black racism in contemporary Hawai'i. Shifting the focus from what is exceptional about Obama, I ask, What alternative to elsewhere, and particularly the continental United States, does Hawai'i provide to members of the African diaspora? How is it that Black civilians experience anti-Black racism yet nonetheless declare Hawai'i to be their haven?