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Unionized workers at the Ilikai Hotel recently won a one-day strike after working for almost six years without a contract. This situation had left them earning $8 less an hour on average than other Waikiki hotel employees, according to their union, Unite Here Local 5.

As I watched televised news media coverage of striking workers on their picket line at the hotel, I admit feeling uncomfortable because most of them appeared to be Filipino, and I knew that the brief 20 seconds of their images would reinforce a prevalent stereotype of Filipinos, especially immigrants, as hotel workers.

The news media and other popular media outlets have played a huge role in disseminating and maintaining demeaning stereotypes about Filipinos historically to the present in Hawaii. As a form of racism, stereotyping has been a major factor in keeping Filipinos and other ethnic minorities in a subordinate status, which is why in the interest of fairness and equality we should seek to lessen its occurrence.

No doubt many Filipinos are employed in hotels, including as housekeepers, food service workers and maintenance workers. They are a majority of the more than 10,000 members of Local 5, which represents hotel and restaurant workers, and many other Filipino hotel employees don’t belong to a union.

Given the large number of Filipinos who do work in hotels, why should I be concerned about their being stereotyped regarding the jobs they hold?

One reason is that I believe they are being channeled into hotel and other service occupations, such as maintenance work, because employers don’t view them as capable of performing jobs requiring higher-level skills and educational qualifications, despite many of them having those abilities and accomplishments.

Another reason for my concern is because many more Filipinos than hotel workers are employed in many other kinds of occupations in Hawaii — construction workers, clerical workers, nurses, business managers and professionals. The news media doesn’t often feature them in their stories, except for nurses during their recent strike at Kapiolani Medical Center.

Before proceeding to a discussion about stereotyping of Filipinos, it needs to be understood that stereotypes are essentially lies told or written about a group of people insofar as they don’t apply to most of its members. If they did, then they would be an actual characteristic or attribute of a group rather than a stereotype.

Herein lies the power and danger of stereotypes; despite being fabrications or misrepresentations, we still believe them and act upon our false beliefs.

When I was growing up on Maui in the 1950s, the dominant stereotype of Filipino men was that they were lowly employed and lowly educated plantation workers.

While attending Kaunoa Grade School — a former English standard school — which was ironically in the plantation town of Spreckelsville, I knew of only one Filipino student at our school. The plantation kids, including Filipinos, Japanese and Portuguese, went to the nearby Spreckelsville School.

This Filipino student, who was born in Hawaii, nonetheless, was unlike most local students at Kaunoa, at least the boys, because he didn’t speak pidgin and wore shoes every day to school. While I certainly had shoes, like my male peers, I didn’t wear them regularly until I went to high school where they were mandatory.

Much later when I began to think about issues concerning racism and ethnicity in Hawaii more seriously, I realized why this Filipino student’s parents had sent him to Kaunoa and why he behaved the way he did, which later was referred to as “acting haole,” although Filipinos were hardly the only ones accused of such.

I think it was because his parents didn’t want their son to be harshly stereotyped and treated as a plantation Filipino, which his father, despite being an accountant, may have frequently experienced.

A generation earlier, racist stereotyping of Filipinos was especially rampant in Hawaii and depicted particularly young men as criminally inclined, prone to violence, and highly emotional. The newspapers played a particularly significant role in spreading these stereotypes by regularly reporting that a person was Filipino when they were arrested, convicted or executed for a crime.

As I have written elsewhere, this racism by the news media contributed to the decided tendency and willingness of juries to convict Filipinos of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence. This readiness to send Filipinos to the gallows was evident in some juries deliberating for very short periods of time, as little as two, three or seven minutes, before returning a guilty verdict.

The newspapers announced the convictions and hangings of Filipinos for murder in banner headlines and the titles of their articles, such as “Filipino Youth Is Hanged for Girl’s Murder” on the front page of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on July 28, 1932. This practice of highlighting the ethnicity of the executed person was not followed with other ethnic groups, although their ethnicity might be mentioned in the news story.

Consequently, Filipinos, all men, were greatly overrepresented among those hanged in territorial Hawaii — 24 of the 42 people — while constituting at most just one-sixth of the population in 1930, until capital punishment was abolished in 1957. Due to their racist stereotyping as especially violent and cruel criminals, Filipino men were demonized to death.

We as individuals can change our minds about how we think about people from other ethnic groups than our own, which is a lot easier than changing the overall structure of inequality in society.

In the contemporary situation, stereotyping of Filipinos persists, especially through jokes, or so-called “ethnic humor,” told about them. Joke telling about different island ethnic groups is based on well-known stereotypes about them, which is why people in Hawaii find them funny, while those in Kansas wouldn’t have a clue about why they should be laughing.

Despite most Filipinos in Hawaii being born here, jokes about them represent Filipinos as immigrants, particularly males, who speak English with a heavy accent and are lowly employed in service work jobs. They thus contribute to and reinforce prevalent stereotypes about Filipinos, including what they eat, what color they prefer, and what they don’t know.

More recently, Micronesians have replaced Filipinos as the butt of ethnic jokes but in especially racist terms that represent them as less than human. Stereotypes about Micronesians, or COFA citizens, have clearly kept them subjugated in the Aloha State.

What then can we do to lessen the dissemination of ethnic stereotypes? With regard to ethnic jokes, I used to tell my students not to pass on a joke they were told or had received by email and, if they knew the person who sent it to them, ask them not to transmit the joke to others.

Another means we can undertake for the betterment of Hawaii, including to reduce racism and ethnic inequality, are acts of aloha, as advocated by Naka Nathaniel in his recent column.

But even without taking any such actions, we as individuals can change our minds about how we think about people from other ethnic groups than our own, which is a lot easier than changing the overall structure of inequality in society.

Instead of thinking about Filipinos and other subordinate minorities, such as Micronesians and Samoans, in terms of derogatory stereotypes, we should try to see them in more positive ways that most members of those groups exemplify.

This simple measure is an initial step that we can each do ourselves without having to work with anyone else to challenge racism, discrimination and inequality in Hawaii.