Beyond Ethnicity by Camilla Fojas

Author:Camilla Fojas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

THE RACIAL IMPERATIVE

Rereading Hawai‘i’s History and Black-Hawaiian Relations through the Perspective of Black Residents

NITASHA TAMAR SHARMA

In line with the broader mission of this collection, this essay explores how race is central to group dynamics and contemporary life in Hawai‘i. It analyzes how race comingles with indigeneity through relationships between Blacks and Hawaiians in ways that disrupt the predominant paradigms of culture and ethnicity that tend to obfuscate dispossession, racism, and unequal power relations. Black people are an understudied group in Hawai‘i despite their lengthy history and growing numbers.1 I highlight this vital history and call upon my findings from interviews with Black residents in the islands, including Black Hawaiians (locals whose fathers are Black and whose mothers are Kanaka Maoli or Native Hawaiian), to reflect shifting evaluations of Blackness and Hawaiian-ness over time.

Race is the imperative analytic when we view the history and experiences of Hawai‘i through the eyes of those of African descent. In fact it is race—not ethnicity or culture—that is central to understanding social and political life in the islands through a review of the history of Black people in Hawai‘i, from the migration of whalers in the first part of nineteenth century to the arrival of military personnel, all the way through the ramifications of the Black Power movement upon Native Hawaiian political movements for sovereignty.2 Ultimately, an ethnographic examination of the experiences of Black people in Hawai‘i—and particularly Black Hawaiians—tells us how race operates in the islands in ways that affect all groups, including Native Hawaiians.

This chapter is part of a larger project in which I offer an ethnographic description of “the Black Pacific,” a growing field generally attended to by historians.3 My research focuses on people who belong—or attempt to belong—to what are seen as disparate Native or African descent communities.4 Although this essay rereads people of African descent into Hawaiian history, my larger project and articulation of racial dynamics in the islands centers the words of Black Hawaiians who have generally been overlooked in the scholarship in Pacific Island studies and in African American studies because they may not identify strictly as Black and because of their small numbers.5 The contemporary experiences of Black Hawaiians specifically and residents of African descent more generally narrate a history of the islands in which Blacks figure as a group that has long interacted with Kānaka Maoli to tell us how race is an alternative to the accepted paradigms of ethnicity.6

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