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.

Jobs- A Short History and a New Adventure

I got my first official job when I was 15 and we lived in Hawaii.  We were poor enough that I qualified for a special summer work program. I ended up being assigned to "Waimanu Home for the Mentally Retarded".  Not PC to call it that today, but that was what it was called then.  I had the coolest boss.   His name was Clyde.  We would pile all of these intellectually handicapped adults into a van and take them on adventures.  They would take their clothes off any time, any place.  They must have gotten bulk parmesan cheese at their cafeteria, because the smell of Parmesan will always remind me of that place.  I was the only haole (white) girl who worked there.  One of my best friends worked there too- her name was Toakase Fakava.  She had a huge Afro with a comb stuck in it and was one of 16 children.  Her home had no furniture, just woven mats on the floor.  They were from Tonga, and they were awesome.  That job taught me that I never wanted to work with mentally handicapped people, that it just wasn't "me", that being around "those kind of people" was something I just "wasn't cut out for".  Hmmm.  Maybe Heavenly Father knew differently.....

That job was followed by LOTS of waitressing jobs.  North's Chuckwagon where a pot full of hot coffee exploded all over me, Mr. Steak,  two summers waitressing in what felt like a postcard in Grand Teton National Park at Signal Mountain Lodge , the graveyard shifts in Grand Junction where the yucky old Greek man stuck his tongue in my ear and all the drunks thought they were hilarious, one night as an accidental cocktail waitress (now THAT was a mistake), Utah Seafood Company where I was fired for leaving an odd spoon on the table, but really for not being a part of the hot tub/partying crowd, the Claimjumper up Provo Canyon where I spent a memorable stroke of 12:00am on New Years Eve in my car with a breast pump. The things we do to pay the bills.  I respect waiters/waitresses.  In a busy restaurant they must be incredible multi-taskers and deal with LOTS of stress.  Stress that used to make me have crazy waitressing dreams, where I was "sat" six huge tables at the same time and we were out of everything.  That's stress.

While I was a student at BYU I had a couple of very glamorous jobs.  I worked custodial from 10:00pm-2:00am Monday- Thursday nights.  I got to do exciting things like cleaning bathrooms and vacuuming.  Lots of vacuuming.  I was a favorite target of some of the guys I worked with- always good for a big old jump when they snuck up behind me when I was vacuuming all alone in the middle of the night.  I actually didn't mind that job much.  Made some good friends, and it was better than the Morris Center cafeteria where I wore the ugly nurses uniform and scraped food off lunch trays.

Since graduating I've taught just about every Social Studies subject there is to students in grades 7-12.  I've taught US History, Geography, American Government, Sociology, History of the American West, Careers, Health, Service Learning and World History.  I've also been the Social Studies specialist for my school district.  I love to teach.  The time flies for me, I get to be creative, I am my own boss, I love getting to know my students- I am a teaching nerd.  Its stressful, though, no doubt.  When I first started teaching my waitressing dreams were substituted with teaching dreams.  I've had many.  This is the typical scenario:

"Its the first day of school at an inner city school.  I am completely unprepared to teach my class full of gang members who look up at me menacingly from their chairs. I search for an exit but there isn't one."

Yeah, that one is a classic.

Tomorrow I am starting a new adventure.  I am going to be a teacher-mentor for JHAT, the Jordan History Academy for Teachers.  Its a joint project of Provo, Wasatch, Jordan and Murray districts.   Its part-time, and I basically get to set my own hours, so it should be perfect for my life and my family right now.  Its exciting, and a little scary.  Mostly its scary because for now I will also be continuing to do what I've been doing for the last 12 years (along with some time in the classroom)- teaching online for Utah's Electronic High School, and I'm hoping that I can handle it all.  My duties for EHS are changing, though, and EHS will be dead and gone (courtesy of the Utah Legislature) by the end of this summer, so I just need to last that long.

And, oh yeah, still be a good mom to my kids, and pull off a wedding in three months.

I can do this.  Breathe, Jan.  Breathe.  

But for  now, back to the sewing machine.  Bridesmaids dress number one, here we come!

A Change of Plans

So, I'm alive.  And well.  Really.  Or at least mostly.  Right now I am getting over pneumonia, which isn't fun.  But, aside from hacking up a lung on occasion and not having much energy, I am feeling better,  in lots of ways.

Garrett came home early from his LDS mission a little over two weeks ago.  It seems like longer.  Seems almost like he never left.  Its weird.  The whole time he was gone was so emotional.  Such a roller coaster.  How is he doing today?  Is it a good day?  A bad day?  Will we get "the" phone call?

And then the phone call came.  It was so dramatic, so traumatic at first.  Friends and family were amazingly great.  So supportive.  So loving of us, and of Garrett.  Our bishop went out of his way to make Garrett feel welcome at church, as did so many people.  I was proud of my ward, proud of my Church.  I was proud of Garrett.  Home less than 24 hours and right there at all three meetings at church, and then, suggesting we go to choir together.  Brave kid.  

Now, well, it feels normal.  Was that really only two weeks ago?  We scrambled, and got him right back into school.  His cousin Chase got him a job at the rec center as a building supervisor.  He and his girlfriend Ashlie are close as ever.  He is happy.   Sometimes I get sad, but less and less often.  Its a grieving process.  This isn't what I planned for him.  For us.  For my ideal family.  But its good.  His testimony is intact, stronger than ever, he says.  And I have to believe him.  I want to believe him.  He hasn't given me reason not to believe him.  So I do.  And it gives me comfort.  A lot of comfort.

His future?  Well, no decisions for a while.  And that's a good thing.  Anyway, these aren't my decisions to make, darn it.  Ah, parenting adult children.  Certainly not for wimps.

And I still love my boy.