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“I look like you, you look like me”

So said now-former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann one week ago while courting the endorsement of the Hawaii Carpenters’ Union along with his rival in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, former Congressman Neil Abercrombie.

While he didn’t say so explicitly, Hannemann was no doubt trying to portray himself as the “local boy” in the race, one whose Samoan-European ancestry and upbringing in Hawaii contrasts with Abercrombie’s Caucasian, mainland roots. While Hannemann later backpedaled in the same speech (perhaps realizing the uncouthness of what he said) and paid homage to his European ancestors, he clearly attempted to portray Abercrombie as the most despised of our island archetypes: the mainland haole in Hawaii.

I’m writing today because I, though not dexterous enough to be a carpenter, am from a working class Oahu family (the target demographic of Hannemann’s appeal). I’m someone who might be taken to “look like” him.

Our respective childhood homes were outside the elite bubble of East Honolulu, his in Kalihi and mine in Wahiawa, and yet we both found ourselves attending two of the most prominent private schools in state, he at Iolani and I at Punahou. After finding success despite humble upbringings, we both went out east to the Ivy League, he to Harvard and I to Yale.

Yet despite these similarities, I found his remarks unsettling. Hannemann’s impressive personal story makes him an inspiration to many across the islands — myself included. And that’s precisely why I found myself especially put off by his playing the “local” card given Hawaii’s complex whirlpool of race relations.

Who is Local?

Based on my experience, it seems that there are two key tests for “localness.” Both are a byproduct of Hawaii’s colonial past: (1) race and (2) geographic points of origin. Our history of economic and political domination by white mainlanders engendered tremendous prejudice against them and hence a desire to exclude them (the word “haole” means foreigner) that persists to this day, several generations later.

By this system, if you are of any mix of Asian-Pacific Islander and were born (or at least raised) here, you pass. Hannemann and I, having come of age on Oahu and sporting healthy tans, fall into this familiar category and “pass” as locals.

Abercrombie, on the other hand, as a white man originally from upstate New York, “fails” on account of both race and geographic origin. As Hannemann so unsubtly implies, Abercrombie is not local, not one of us.

Never mind that Abercrombie has given his entire adult life (five decades and counting) to our state and zealously advocated for Hawaii for the past 20 years in Washington. The absurdity of this situation speaks for itself about a worldview entrenched in nostalgic bias.

I should add that like all attempts to sort people by race, determinations of Hawaiian localness fail at the edges, as people of mixed ancestry, the African diaspora, and South Asians (to name a few) generally confound our system. These cases usually receive ad hoc treatment and are symptomatic of the hollowness of racial categorization in general.

Another interesting case to consider are APIs from the mainland, some of whom we describe as “katonks,” as Hannemann called his wife (she is an American of Japanese Ancestry or an AJA from the mainland). That we have a special word (born out of rivalry between mainland Asians and Hawaii-born Asians serving together in the U.S. Army during World War II) for mainlanders who resemble Hawaii’s API majority speaks to our desire to continue to separate and categorize each other.

The final configuration of our two-pronged test are the Hawaii-born and raised “haole,” who are perhaps the greatest victims of this racial scheme. Perpetual outsiders in their homeland, they will constantly be stared at and asked where they are really from and what brought them here. As someone who has faced minority status on the mainland and abroad, I can attest to the alienating effect it has on one’s soul. I will always remember my first day on Yale’s gothic campus when, during orientation activities, a fellow freshman (a white woman from the Midwest) asked if I “spoke English.”

Local whites can enjoy laulau as much as the next guy and reflexively take off their shoes before entering a house, but to no avail. Unlike Caucasians who have come from far and away, though, local whites have no other “home,” no refuge from our entrenched prejudices.

A Critical View of the Local Paradigm

Given how weak our definition of localness is, it behooves us to seek out a critical view of the local system. University of Hawaii Professors and provide just that. They compiled and edited a 2008 book entitled . Their thesis is that our willingness to demonize whites is but a front for our desire to mask the indigenous-immigrant divide. In other words, the fact is that people like me — Asian “settlers” — are, in the eyes of the book’s authors and editors, as much strangers here as the white tourist from Oklahoma.

By including Native Hawaiians into our definition of “local” and then singling out whites (especially the mainland type) as different and foreign, we “Asian settlers” can keep the spotlight off our allegedly colonialist presence in our home. According to Fujikane and Okamura’s work (which includes other contributors too numerous to list here), the great Hawaii narrative that I learned from grandparents (as did many others) is anything from incomplete to disingenuous.

According to the traditional narrative, white mainlanders came to plunder Hawaii and lorded over our forefathers, who performed back-breaking labor for peanuts before they rose up with union support to create an egalitarian racial democracy that continues to this day. Asian Settler Colonialism indicts this moving story as a whitewashing of history: it overlooks the fact that non-white immigrants have, in the authors’ mind, just as little right to be here as the much-maligned “haoles.”

I certainly understand the good intentions behind this alternate theory to “localness,” as it is almost universally agreed that Native Hawaiians have endured much. At the same time, however, the racial categorization here is no less than divisive than a theory of localness that excludes whites.

Instead of working to better our hard-won (yet still imperfect) multi-ethnic harmony by bringing down racial and ethnic prejudices, Fujikane and Okamura present us with a rearrangement of an already flawed system. Pitting Native Hawaiians against everyone else does not present us with much of an improvement over the Asian/Pacific Islander versus haole mentality that currently prevails. In fact, it actually increases the size of the despised class, from just whites to encompass Asians and non-Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders as well.

Hope for the Future?

When I was in college, I became interested in Judaism and the Middle East and after graduation set out to spend a year in Israel, which quickly expanded to almost four. I was struck by a lesson from a land seemingly worlds away. First, Israel has absorbed and integrated immigrants from around the world, from European Holocaust refugees to Ethiopian and even looking to return home (not to mention one globe-trotting young man from Wahiawa).

This openness to accepting new blood has helped turn Israel into a , democratic oasis in a region rife with tyranny and social regression. Sadly and in direct contrast to Israel’s openness, profound ethnic and historical prejudice against the small but tough state by its neighbors place its accomplishments at constant risk for a violent undoing by Palestinian terrorism or an Iranian missile strike.

In other words, breaking down ethnic walls creates a more fertile environment for prosperity while ethnic division, when left untreated, is a negative force to all but those who would seek to exploit it.

With these lessons in mind, I think we need to revisit our current mindset and move beyond a language of “localness” that excludes, whether it be casting whites as the outsider (as Hannemann did) or stretching that ostracization to include all those without Native Hawaiian heritage (the vast majority of Hawaii’s population).

As such, I offer a closing thought that may be ahead of its time: let us sweep away the broken syntax of exclusion and create a new one rooted in egalitarianism. All connected to these islands, by birth or choice, who believe in building a better future on them should welcome and recognize each other as Hawaiians (the term Native Hawaiian would still be reserved for the Kanaka Maoli).

We, as one Hawaiian people of many colors and creeds, can work together to overcome our old prejudices and create a place where it does not matter whether one’s ancestors came to the islands a thousand years ago or never set foot on them.

Instead of scrutinizing and stigmatizing our neighbors for any hint of difference, we could build a place where the skill in a person’s hands and the good in their heart determine the esteem accorded them; a place were crimes are few and job plenty; a place where the country is a quiet green and the cities scintillate with activity.

This is a dream that all Hawaiians, Abercrombie and Hannemann included, can and should unite behind.