Race in Paradise

Growing up in Hawai’i, I was the only white kid in my kindergarten class, but I don’t remember any of my peers being at my birthday party or coming over for play dates. Our Halloween party was all wet white faces bobbing for apples and all of the kids were the children of friends of my parents, whom I’d become friends with in the way children do, not necessarily out of affection as much as default. My parents aren’t any more racist than the majority of progressive, educated people of their generation, but I don’t have a single memory of person in our house that didn’t look like us unless he was a coffee picker that needed a glass of water or the plantation owners assistant coming down to pick up rent. My father explains that it was impossible to be white in Hawai’i and make friends and break into the community. He tells stories of speaking pidgin (the language that takes from English, Portuguese and Hawaiian and disregards the grammar of all) over the telephone with offices on the other side of the island for weeks and when he’d have to stop by the secretary he’d been talking to was confused by his pallor. I wonder about this, and think of the success of other white families integrating. I wonder if, despite my dad’s grasp of the local dialect, my father and mother lack something that’s integral to connecting with people of different backgrounds. Can it be attributed to shyness, something that plagues my family like the empty towns of the North Dakota flatlands they grew up on? Or is it something more insidious and frightening than that?

I expect to return to this topic as I mull it over, pull memories out unpacking my boxes of third-grade journals. This is the first time I've put my vague feelings about the issue into words, so I also expect some revision and addition to this post. More on race in general to come in discussion of the election and colonialism, a couple of my favorite subjects.