My family moved to the Territory of Hawai’i in 1957, thanks to my dad’s job with Lockheed Aircraft. Outsiders often described it as a racial paradise, and since that was a kind of flattery, locals went with that. It always was more complicated than that, and has grown more so, but that’s a story for another day.
Just as children on the Mainland at that time could recount an abbreviated genealogy based on Western Europe, my classmates could tell the tale of Asia and Polynesia and Europe all within their own family tree. I grew up not being aware that I actually had an ethnic group myself — sure I looked like my immediate family, but doesn’t everybody? I was in my mid-30s back living in SoCal, when I visited Boston and saw “family members” on every street corner. Who knew “Irish” was ethnic and not generic?
I grew up knowing that “race” is fluid, though in the context of the turbulent era on the Mainland, it was all framed in Black and White outside the Islands. It took me many years to sort it out more expansively, based on my own lived experience of observing social fluidity — “one drop” of Hawai’ian ancestry as a positive claim and sign of belonging, are you “local,” can you speak “da kine,” and so much else. Do you belong.
I will never forget how Barack Obama’s first run for President was received here at DU. Our old archives tell the tale of confusion — and anger. He couldn’t be easily slotted into a known category. Was he too black? Was he black enough? Did his mother raise him to be white? What about those grandparents?
But once I read “Dreams from My Father,” I knew the racial and social fluidity of his upbringing. I knew how his birth in Hawai’i had shaped him, and how easily he could have decided to remain, marry there; his children and grandchildren would be “local kids.” It was his White mother who encouraged him to see farther beginning in their years in Indonesia, including playing him recordings of African American music and MLK’s speeches.
When he left Hawai’i for college as a young man, it was a journey of self-discovery as an African American, and he married Michelle — and we kind of know the rest. But I think his lived experiences of race as social construct and how fluid it could be meant he could not be easily slotted into categories Americans are used to — he didn’t even have to say it, though as a politician he ultimately told a story in terms of a kind of American mythology (Kansas/Kenya). Michelle gets it though.
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