Me? Racist? The "Dumb Haole" Years

Seventh grade me with our cat Popoki (means "cat" :)

Not too long ago one of my online students accused me of being a racist bigot when I marked a bunch of her answers wrong on a Civil Rights assignment (they really were wrong).  Me?  Racist?  Really?  I come from a multiracial adoptive family (white, African American, Korean).  I have three Latino sons.  I have a gay brother.  All of this got me thinking back on my experiences and doing a little reflecting.

My experiences in the multicultural world were pretty limited until I was 12 and we moved to Hawaii where my brother in law was to serve a tour of duty for the US Navy.  We thought it would be really cool to live by the ocean, so we rented a little house in Ewa Beach and moved on in.  

The walls were so thin you could see through them.

 My first day at Ilima Intermediate school was a real eye-opener.  I was the only "haole" (white) girl in most of my classes.  I became a target for some of the "local" (Polynesian) girls who would constantly put stuff in my hair, take my things, and do basically whatever else they could think of to "get" me, and then ask me repeatedly "What?  You like beef?" They were not asking if I liked meat.  They were asking if I wanted to fight.  This became a daily occurrence.  I planned my school days to avoid needing a trip to the restroom.  I found a white friend who felt just as scared as I did, and we sat around at lunch complaining about how much we hated it there, and how much we missed our wonderful lives on the mainland.  After a while all of the complaining got really boring. It was stupid and pathetic, and I'm not proud of my seventh grade self for having done it.


After seventh grade we moved closer to Pearl Harbor, where there were more military kids.  My intermediate/high schools were more ethnically balanced. I grew to like living in Hawaii more and more.  Our congregation at church grew so large that it was divided, and my family ended up in the ward with only "local" youth.  I was the only haole once again.  At first I was worried that it would be a repeat of seventh grade.  But it wasn't. I wasn't that same scared little girl. It was awesome.  I learned all of the "dumb haole" jokes, which my local friends told around me, but then ended them with "''cept you".  I had a crush on a boy who was Hawaiian Chinese for ever.  He went to Kamehameha school, a private school that you have to be Hawaiian to go to, and his father was a fire dancer in Waikiki.  Yep, really.  They were so cool.  One time I went to this "secret" restaurant with them where everybody was "local" (no haoles) and they chanted the blessing on the food in Hawaiian.  Super cool.  I wanted to be "local" SO BAD.  

I grew to be so comfortable and familiar with the culture that a few people asked me if maybe I was Maori.  I couldn't be white.  I wanted to lie and say that I was.  After all, I had the hair (see above) and with a bit of a tan well....  I could pass....

Friends from church

 But not really.  I was still a white girl and there was no escaping it.  Even after I had lived in Hawaii for four years and then come back there for a time at BYU Hawaii I was treated as a dumb haole.  People assumed that I didn't understand what they were saying when they talked "pidgin" and used Hawaiian words.  Sometime they would stop and explain things to me, even though I didn't need an explanation.  I had lived there, surrounded by local friends for years.  I had taken Hawaiian history.  I understood the words, ate the foods, knew what they were talking about.  That didn't matter.  


One time I talked to a haole professor (who taught Hawaiian history) at BYU Hawaii about this. He had lived in the islands for decades and was married to a Hawaiian woman.  He not only was an expert on Hawaiian history, but he spoke Hawaiian.  None of this, he said, mattered.  He was still, and forever would be in the eyes of some, a "dumb haole".

I remember well one night when some friends and I were heading back to Laie from Honolulu, where we had been shopping.  There were six of us, four girls and two guys.  The guys were from New Zealand, but looked white.  We missed one of our buses, so we had to do a transfer, late at night, in a fairly remote place.   We were standing there waiting in front of a chain link fence for our bus when two cars of young local guys pulled up in front of us and started calling us names and trying to get the guys we were with to fight.  It was really scary.  The words were flying, and tempers were hot.  A couple of guys got out of their cars and grabbed one of the guys I was with and pinned him against the fence.  Finally he spoke up.  Once he did, one of the local guys recognized that he wasn't just a "dumb haole" from his accent and convinced his friends to back off and leave us alone.  It was a close call, and I was grateful for that accent, and for the guy who recognized it.  Who knows what might have happened otherwise.


When we moved back to the mainland from Hawaii I hated it at first.  It was so boring.  So whitebread.  No culture.  At my high school in Hawaii we had princes and princesses representing all of the different islands for dances.  We had huge dinners at church with the most amazing food and music from everywhere.  I was covered with leis our last Sunday as my friends sang "Aloha Oi" to our family.  Now what was there?  Cowboy culture?  

Yee Haw yuck.  


I still miss the cultural diversity of Hawaii.  I love my neighborhood, but wish it showed a few more colors of the rainbow.  I'm grateful for my years living as a dumb haole.  Pretty eye-opening.  Pretty awesome.