Racial Galapagos

Being isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, life in Hawaii evolved unlike anywhere else. Just as Darwin studied how the isolation of the Galapagos Islands transformed species in unique ways, we should be able to observe how the isolation of Hawaii transformed its peoples in unique ways as well.

My thinking is that over the last 175 years race relations in Hawaii evolved more quickly and uniquely than they have in the past 450 in the continental United States. If the United States was the great American melting pot, then Hawaii was a pressure cooker.

Studying history is supposed to help prevent us from repeating it, primarily from repeating our mistakes. Maybe studying the dynamics of racial struggle, conflict, and tolerance in Hawaii can help alleviate racial tensions on the mainland or in other parts of the world.

Racism was and still is widespread in Hawaii, but it was unlike the racism of the American inner-cities, Jim Crow South, or other areas of the Pacific Rim.

After James Cooke put the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) on the map in 1778, seafaring peoples from all over the world began to travel there. During the early 1800's, the English, Irish, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russians, and other mariners used Hawaii as a way station and trade port. Later, Portuguese, Japanese, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos and other peoples were brought in to exploit and expand the agricultural potential of the rich soil.

Africans found their way to Hawaii as well, but not from their native lands. The first African-American man settled in Honolulu in 1810. Anthony Allen was a freed slave from New York who found work for King Kamehameha the Great and married a Hawaiian woman. Allen acquired six acres of land in what is now known as Waikiki. He died in 1835 owning a dozen houses and leaving a small fortune to his three children. Link

At the end of the 19th century the population of foreigners grew quickly. However, the number of Africans making Hawaii their home was small.

Soon after Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, Barack Obama's mother and grandparents settled in Hawaii in 1960 where his mother attended the University of Hawaii. There she met Barack Obama, Sr. from Kenya. They had a son, Barack, Jr. who was born in Honolulu in 1961.

When Barack was two his mother remarried and moved to Indonesia. After four years in Indonesia, he moved back to Honolulu where attended Punahou school for eight years. After he graduated from Punahou high school he moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College. Two years later he move to New York and completed college at Columbia University.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Obama was contracted to write his first book on racial relations in America. Having lived in both Hawaii and the mainland, he would have been able to write first hand about his experiences of racial injustice and tolerance in both. Unfortunately he was unable to complete the manuscript and the $100,000-plus contract was canceled.

Instead, he signed a second book contract for $40,000 and chose to write on his own personal experiences of racism and search for his racial identity. "Dreams From My Father" is primarily an exploration into Barack's personal struggle about how he became "a black man in America".

How would "Dreams" have been received had he provided similar as well as contrasting non-African views of racial identity growing up a Black Man in Hawaii?

Kill Haole Day

In my childhood neighborhood many of my friends and their brothers and sisters when to public schools. One day when I was eight or nine they mentioned that "Kill Haole Day" was coming up. That didn't sound very good for someone like me.

They said it was something that happened on the last day at their school. The local Hawaiian kids would seek out and beat up the Caucasian kids, usually in a bathroom. Boys beat up boys while girls beat up girls. Over time, anyone who was not a haole could join in on the fun.

Since the haoles caught on fast they would skip the last day of school. The locals responded by changing it to a random day in the last week.

Fortunately for me, this did not happen at a nice school like Punahou.

For a long time I thought that it was just a local tradition in my neighborhood. Even after I graduated from college on the mainland I would mention Kill Haole Day to friends and they wouldn't believe me. Years later, a Caucasian acquaintance of mine who was about my age and had gone to a public school in Honolulu said they remembered it happening at their high school.

If you don't believe me, read what someone else wrote about about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Haole_Day

I wonder how this would have changed the public's reception of Obama's book "Dreams" had he included his views about Kill Haole Day in Hawaii.

Adapt or Die

One thing I clearly remember when I was seven or eight years old was that I picked up Hawaiian slang or "pidgin" English pretty fast. At that age it wasn't a even a conscious choice, it was a response driven by fear. With my blond hair, skinny legs, and stubbed toes I was a pretty self-conscious haole boy. The local Hawaiian kids, or mokes, always appeared cocksure and ready to beef. After all, it was their land I was walking on. I needed to show the mokes I met at the playgrounds or beaches that we had something in common. Speaking their language seemed most convenient.

At times though, I found myself making up new "pidgin" words or butchering the English language even more just to distance myself from the real haoles.

I tried it and it seemed to work. Sometimes I'd be out numbered or they'd start pushing me around. The more scared I got the thicker my pidgin got. When it got real dicey, I started swearing. If I threw in some really foul words, I found the mokes would back off. I guess they thought that proper haoles didn't swear, so hearing this skinny haole kid swearing like one madda-fuckin' son-of-one-fuckin'-beetch made him okay.

Sometimes I'd get slapped in the face anyway.

Ray

After Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, his name came up more often in my conversations with my mother. Now that he was in the spotlight, so were all the places he'd been and the people that he'd known. Many of them are my old Punahou classmates, teachers, and coaches. They add to my two degrees of Barack Obama.

One evening at my last Punahou reunion, Keith Kakugawa's name came up in a conversation with some old classmates. Kakugawa, or Kaku, had graduated from high school with us. "Have you heard? Kaku's the first person from our class to have his picture on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.", someone pronounced. Everyone sort of grinned and chuckled over their cocktails. I had no idea what they were talking about. I wasn't in on the joke.

The last time I had seen and spoken to Kaku was at our tenth reunion many years before. He seemed to be trying to make a life for himself in LA like me. He had made an effort to attend the reunion, most graduates don't, and seemed to be doing okay.

As the conversation continued, I found why Kaku was the butt of their little joke. They explained, to my disappointment, that he'd been in and out of jail for drugs. He was living in out of an abandon car somewhere in South Central LA and had tried to call Barry Obama for money. I was pretty dismayed. Here were our classmates making fun of him in light of how fortunate and successful most of us were. None of them would last an hour alone in South Central.

"Poor Keith, what the hell happened to him?", I thought to myself. What went wrong?

After I returned home to the mainland I began reading articles about Obama on various news sites. From these articles I learned that he had written a book "Dreams From My Father" that included part of his life growing up in Hawaii. In it he discusses a person named "Ray" who helped Barry shape his search for his racial identity.

Investigative journalists had unveiled "Ray" as Keith Kakugawa. Reporters from the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, the London Times, and so on had interviewed and photographed him. There was Kaku making headlines living out a car! According to this book and all this press, Kaku and Barry were friends in high school and had spent a lot of time together.

All of a sudden this started to get personal for me.

I was in Kaku's class for three years. Having arrived at Punhahou in ninth or tenth grade from the mainland, he was one of the newer kids there. I was one of the old-timers. Somehow we developed an unlikely friendship, but we did share a passion for sports.

Obama's depiction of Ray in "Dreams", although somewhat dramatized, is consistent with my one-on-one talks with Kaku over the years. I knew many who considered him "abrasive" or to have a chip on his shoulder. He didn't seem to mind me calling his bluff or poking fun at him. I also don't think many knew where he was coming from. However, the notion of Kaku being a "perfect mix", as some articles pointed out, is not consistent with mine. I thought Kaku was funny but sensitive, passionate, hard-headed, and in the very tough position of being a new kid and being of African-Japanese-Hawaiian (or Hawaiian-Japanese-African?) descent.

He did, however, seem to embrace more of his African-American heritage when speaking. I remember laughing the first time he called me "chump". I'd been called far worst. In some ways, he was the most outspoken person in our class. At least with me, he always had an ear.

Some articles attempted to discredit or question Obama's depiction of Ray as an "angry black" referring to him instead as a "perfect mix" in Hawaii's multi-racial society. However, an African-Japanese-Hawaiian person doesn't exactly epitomize the perfect mixture for the type of melting-pot we were living in at that time. There was only one other person of that perfect mix I knew of and that was Kaku's younger brother. Keith may have been "black" and, at times, may have been "angry", but he just wanted to be heard like the rest of us.

In Barry's senior yearbook section, he thanks his grandparents and a person named "Ray", but not his mother. Why wouldn't Barry thank his friend "Keith" or "Kaku"? Why use a pseudonym or code name "Ray" for someone so influential in searching for his place in America?

Origins

I just finished reading (most of) Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father" and it really struck a cord with me personally. It stirred in me feelings that I hadn't given much attention to in over twenty five years. So I felt compelled to to explore them here, maybe explore them with other people like me, those with two degrees of separation of Barack Obama.

Although I'm not a half-blooded African-American, I'm pretty much a full-blooded Caucasian-American. Although I didn't spend much of my childhood in either Africa or Indonesia like Barry did, I lived most of my childhood in Hawaii in the 1960's and 1970's, too. Although his parents were mostly apart, my parents were mostly together. Although I wasn't in the same grade as Barry, we both went to Punahou School and had many of the same teachers, coaches, and friends. And although I didn't speak with him much, a friend of mine seems to have spoken to him a lot.

Since Barack is now the President-Elect of United States of America, I have learned that a lot of people I knew then seem to have spoken to him a lot.

This discussion centers on the early years of Barry's life, as described in Chapters Three and Four of "Dreams", as well as my own. I hope to explore the issues of race and identity in the unique "melting pot" of my youth that, in some ways, parallels his.

First off, congratulations to Barack for his achievement. It is, after all, an achievement and a lesson for all of us. It seems to be a result of both his ongoing quest for finding himself and making right in the world, as well as the support and belief in him by those who have and continue to surround him. To me, this is both amazing and yet not-so amazing that a person of mixed racial heritage would be voted into the highest office in the land, if not the world.

As for me, my family moved to Honolulu from the east coast in the mid-1960's. I started Punahou School in first grade and graduated from its high school in the 1970's. Punahou is a K-12 school. It is the oldest private school west of the Mississippi and celebrated its 125th anniversary while I was there.

Hawaii had been a state for less time than George W. Bush's has been president. Honolulu was transitioning from an romantic post-war vacation paradise into a major metropolitan city, cultural center, and trade port. It was a tropical Venice, the hub for most commerce in the Pacific Rim. Wooden galleys had been replaced by steel container ships while horse and cart had been replaced by 500 mph airliners. Millions of people per year from Asia, the south Pacific, and North America passed through its waters and skies. People from all different nationalities, backgrounds, and ethnic groups, and professions made the journey to the most remote land mass on earth.

All that and a war.

The Vietnam War was the longest, most remote, and most watched (declared or undeclared) war in U.S. GW II is getting close. Honolulu was central to the U.S. military's efforts to prevent the dominoes of communism from toppling over Indochina, Asia, the Pacific Rim, and beyond. Millions of combat troops and support personnel passed through the waters and skies of Hawaii. The dull gray outlines of destroyers and aircraft carriers were frequently on the horizon off shore. F4 fighters, C-5 transports, H-1 helicopters, and P-3 sub-hunters polluted the skies over downtown Honolulu. Military personnel from all branches of service from over of the country were easy to spot on any beach and in any night club. As the war waged on, new peoples with more exotic foods and harder to spell names fled to the safety of the U.S. looking for a better life.

From that all that activity came growth. With over 400,000 residents and even more tourists, 30-story hotels, shopping centers, and housing developments flowed from the valleys down over the red earth to the beach and splashed back up the mountain ridges. Honolulu was on the verge of sinking, literally, under the weight of statehood.

Against that backdrop, I entered Punahou as the new kid, an outsider. It was a strange land this paradise, but it was to become my sanctuary and salvation for the next twelve years.

When I first came across Barry Obama in middle school I assumed, because of his last name, he might be half Japanese or Samoan or even Tongan. I never played with him at recess or on sports teams because he was younger. In high school, however, I new him to be mostly a jock because I saw him in the locker room, on the basketball courts, and hanging out with other kids that played sports too. He looked nothing like he does today. His skin was deeply tanned from the Hawaiian sun, he had a mini-Afro, and he still had a little "baby fat" that made his cheeks shine. He was just a big sweet teddy bear. What he had back then that he still has today is that big bright genuine smile.

The next time I heard about Barry Obama was from my mother in 2004. She still lives in Honolulu. We had been discussing the elections and she asked me if I watched any of the Democratic convention on television, and I had. I could only recall listening to part of a speech by a young but very charismatic speaker wearing a dark suit and light blue presidential tie. He was very dynamic and left an impression with me. It wasn't just his speaking style that hooked me, it was that tie - right out of George W. Bush's closet. Very shrewd, I thought.

Then my mother offered, "Well you might find this of interest but that was Barry Obama. Do you remember him?"

The question stopped me mid-thought, throwing me for a loop. I had to dig that name out from deep in my past. "From Punahou?", I half-guessed, still trying to connect the dots.

"Yes, his real name is Barack Obama.", she said. "Barry was his nickname."

"Unbelievable", was the only word I could get out. Then it hit home, "You have to be kidding."

I never would have put that face together with that name. No wonder I hadn't recognized him.

"This guy is going to be huge.", I shouted into the phone. And then I connected another dot, "The Punahou alumni must be going nuts over there."