We Are Not So Ambiguous

A reflection on growing up in Maui, Hawai’i, and the cultural intersectionality, ambiguity, and, yet, clear racial and ethnic divides that are normalized in the islands.

At first, my mother didn’t want to move our family to Hawai’i. She had just read Kiana Davenport’s brilliant, searing novel Shark Dialogues, and now especially aware of the brutal modern history of the Hawaiian islands felt that it would be strange to go to the one place where she felt that we would be occupying. Nevertheless, our small Caribbean family came to visit friends in Maui for a while, and it became our home. It reminded my mother of Jamaica, and was familiar to my father, who’d spent some of his early twenties there windsurfing.

At nine years old, I had been homeschooled all my life, and my utmost desire at that age was to go to school so I could make friends, like the ones I read about in books, which were my primary informants about the world. School was nothing like I had imagined it to be (although what exactly I had imagined was not necessarily clear either). Not only was it not what I had imagined from my picture of it created by story books, it was nothing like what the island had told me either. It was easy to see the difference between the institution and the place surrounding it. At the gas station, literally minutes away, my mother pointed out, there were other brown people: Hawaiian people, Asian people, and migrants from different parts of the Pacific and the world. In stark contrast,  the small private school’s racial demographic was predominantly white, with a few East Asian students and teachers, and one or two other Black students and teachers. As a racially ambiguous biracial child, I had the privilege of not needing to think about race much in my very early years. I was sheltered from such concerns. My mother had taught me about beauty in a way that did not center certain radicalized features, and had taught me about kindness and mutual acceptance as necessary elements of the world, and that I should expect that from others and do the same. That part of my childhood rapidly began to change. 

While I was not always the primary target of microaggressions or racism, I found that from a young age that I often seemed to be the only one in my predominantly white peer groups who questioned microaggressions or racist practices among my teachers and peers. In truth I was not particularly concerned by peers telling me that my lips were too dark a shade, or that my skin was the color of dirt, or that my behind was too big (features which the same peers began to covet a few short years later—in the early teenage years I would relax in the shade while my counterparts slathered themselves in oil, laid in the sun for hours, and did sumo squats daily). What I was concerned by was the lack of concern from adults when other children around me said things like “only Black people are robbers”, or a guest teacher at my middle school made racist jokes about Chinese people and pulled up the corners of his eyes in an appalling display of mockery. I heard especially horrible derogatory phrases used to target Micronesian people. It concerned me that when I was in high school and started outrigger canoe paddling (which became a passion for me) the white girls on my team were literally terrified of the “local” (which to them meant mostly Hawaiian and East Asian or mixed race) girls, and that those peers told me that the girls wouldn’t target me like they would target them. That my brown skin protected me. I didn’t understand what on earth my peers were talking about, and I said so. “They don’t look at you the same way, Kaya.” said one of my closest friends. “They’ll try to fight us if we look at them too long. They’re so scary.” I laughed at my friends, ridiculing them, but I was deeply disturbed. At thirteen or fourteen, I didn’t quite have the words to articulate the violent racist dynamic I was observing coming from people who I considered to be my dearest friends. 

What I did begin to understand was that while I was told I was loved by the white girl friends that surrounded me, much of that love was conditional and based on my quietness and would have changed were my appearance or voice not so ambiguous. What I did begin to understand was that the spirit of aloha as described by my white teachers and mentors was not exhibited by my white teachers and peers. Rather, I experienced the opposite of what my white peers believed to be true. I was often more accepted and shown compassion by Hawaiian people who hardly knew me than I was by white people who knew me well. The coach of the King Kekaulike team noticed my commitment to the paddling—she was encouraging to me in a way I had never experienced encouragement from a white female teacher before, and we hardly knew each other. While I had experienced affection from teachers and peers before because I was pretty, that affection was often a symptom of exoticization. When other brown girls from the other schools though, told me that I was beautiful, I was able to believe them in a way I couldn’t believe my white peers. I joined a halau for a short while, and although my kumu was extremely strict, she exhibited a voluntary warmness towards me that I would never receive from white mentors. Hawaiian culture is not my native culture, but I was welcomed and accepted into some Hawaiian spaces without being questioned in the way I was used to being questioned; I was able to learn from and appreciate Hawaiian culture in a way my white peers would never be able to: not because they would not have been welcomed but because of their deeply racist fears. Racism takes different forms and shapes over time. People have become somewhat better at hiding it. But it still exists, and is inherently, pervasively, the same. 

Women of colour, globally, but especially in the United States, and especially Black and Indigenous women, are constantly labeled as aggressive and hypermasculinized. It is this racial stereotyping that my white peers used to justify their racist fears of Hawaiian girls, and this racial stereotype that would not much later be used against me when I began to be more outspoken and intolerant of racist behavior. I was labeled as the angry Black woman, constantly, and sometimes made to apologize to my peers for calling them out and bringing forth white tears as a result. My awakening broke down peer and mentor relationships, sometimes in ways I was completely unaware of. I have never been tolerant of non Black people saying the n-word, which meant I got into arguments with young people my age of all races, a fact which is symptomatic of the virulent anti-Blackness which is pervasive worldwide and especially in places influenced by the United States and other colonial powers. The driving force of racism which I have experienced and observed in Hawai’i in particular is a combination of fear and, obviously, a sense of racial hierarchy and superior intelligence from white people. Hawaiian pidgin, for example, is often disparaged by teachers or mocked by non Hawaiian children and young people. I have often heard, and continue to hear, white occupants of Hawai’i speak about race in Hawai’i as if they are victim to racism or prejudice, especially using the word “haole” to incorrectly further their argument, even equating its use to the n-word; the goal of this desperate argument seems to be to prove that white people can somehow be racially oppressed by Indigenous people on land colonized by white people, on land which is still under that colonizing government. In order to argue that the word haole is derogatory or harmful in any manner, or any such ridiculous assertion, as Haunani-Kay Trask has pointed out, is to ignore the history of white supremacy and violence in Hawai’i.

I reflect on my childhood on Maui with absolute gratitude for the place and community which raised me. I learned to be especially appreciative of and protective of the environment because of how totally it surrounds us, and I learned how to appreciate and accept community from cultures that are not my own. Hawaiian culture is important to my upbringing and therefore to my identity and approach to the world. As a non Hawaiian person, I must continually consider the factual reasons that I was able to experience such a childhood, surrounded by the ocean and natural brilliance of Hawai’i, and how I experienced a culture that was I was not native to. It would be a disservice to the home and culture I love to do otherwise. Anyone who fits that description must continually question how it is we came to live on or occupy land in Hawai’i. In order to honestly love Hawai’i as home, we need to acknowledge that it is a place which is deeply segregated (racially, culturally, and socio-economically) and is land which has been desecrated by colonial violence, despite assertions by outsiders and non-Hawaiian people that it is the most peaceful and non-racist place in the world (consider the recent NYT article that claims that if you “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawai’i”, unsurprisingly written by a non Hawaiian, white man). This is not a statement that will be surprising to any native Hawaiian person or anyone who has lived here and learned to appreciate Hawaiian culture rather than appropriating it. 

There is rapidly spreading awareness of racial injustice, especially of injustice against Black people in the United States, and of Indigenous movements to protect people and land from further violence, such as the movement started and perpetuated by native Hawaiians to protect Mauna Kea from being further desecrated with the construction of a thirty meter telescope on the crater. This year, I have observed more than ever, performative actions taken by especially non Black and non Indigenous people—that is to say actions which do not actually benefit the movements they are claiming to benefit but benefit the performer: this is a function of privilege, especially white privilege. Those of us who are not Hawaiian and exist in Hawai’i are only here as a result of a violent system which feeds on the breaking down and consuming of non white cultures, stealing and desecration of land, and genocide. It is the hope that the mass awakening of non Black and non Indigenous people to situations and systems of injustice off of which they benefit leads to as much self interrogation. A former mentor recently told me that I needed to be more kind, peaceful, and tactful (while I was making an inquiry into an issue I had observed in an attempt to help foster a more inclusive environment). That I was pointing out something problematic was disruptive; it made that person feel uncomfortable, even fragile. There is a prevalent fear in Hawai’i that one can observe everywhere, which is that saying or doing anything to disrupt what I often hear described as an “easygoing” environment will, well, be disruptive and destroy the peace. I would urge you to reject this notion and offer you one different to consider: in order to create true peace and agreeability it is necessary to do what we can to disrupt our illusions of it. It is the least that we can do for Hawai’i, the place we claim as home and which claims us back.

Words: Kaya Frith (@kayaspencer)