The weirdest thing to me about that quote is that it ends "American" and not "Kamaʻāina."

This seems terribly obvious to me, and I don't know that it helps much with thinking about the situation, but I think Americans get confused thinking about a lot of racial issues because white American specifically anti-Black racism is so uniformly ugly. You look at a situation that has more complexity to it than police murdering Black men and women, and it's hard to see it as racism at all.

Plenty don't see that even.

2. I was speaking recently to someone who teaches at the university campus mentioned in the article. She told me that the BLM movement was to some extent recharacterized there as "Micronesian Lives Matter."

What a weird, tendentious, strawman-filled piece. Post-racial utopia for decades? Who ever suggested that? Who ever suggested that plantation agriculture was anything but brutal and dehumanizing? That's why the planters had to keep circling the Pacific to find new pools of people who were desperate enough to do it. And above all else, how do you write about race in Hawaii without ever mentioning the post-WWII political realignment driven by 100th Bn/442nd RCT Japanese Americans?

My not-at-all tendentious view: of course Hawaii has racism. We have people here. Our cops are no better than cops elsewhere. Our politics and economy do a lousy job of taking care of working people. But for all that we still have work to do, we're ahead of most places, and it makes me sad to see us moving in the wrong direction. I'm pretty pessimistic about the future of this place at the moment. I hope that will change.

A thing about 4 is that Micronesians are 1% of Hawaii, which is lower than the number of Black people in almost every state. (Only Idaho and Montana come close. Even Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming are around 2%, and famously white Iowa is over 5%.)

5.last: What's going in the wrong direction at the moment? I'm way out of date on any Hawaii news, is this COVID-related or something else?

Sorry those were me.

7: Part of it is a generation of political pygmies squabbling over the corpse of Dan Inouye's power, and part of it is too much political energy going into the (IMO non-viable) effort to restore Hawaiian sovereignty independent of the US government rather than building coalitions that might actually get some things done to make life better for ordinary people. And we talk a good game about reducing dependence on tourism, but we don't execute worth a damn.

What a weird, tendentious, strawman-filled piece. Post-racial utopia for decades? Who ever suggested that?

I feel like that's the image nonverbally presented, but yeah, no one suggested it in serious discourse.

10: Maybe what annoys me about it is the sense that it's homogenizing Hawaii's racial and historical issues with those of the continental US. There are elements in common but also huge differences, and I think we get further with closer attention to how this particular place got to where it is and what we need to do about it. That said, police reform, absolutely needed. Investment in underserved Micronesian, Filipino, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, absolutely needed.

And for all our problems, we really are ahead of most places at getting along with each other, and that's something to celebrate and build on rather than "well actually"-ing.

All analogies are bad, but Hawaii and the lower-48 seems particularly unsuitable for this topic. I feel like you'd learn more by comparing with other islands like Fiji, Trinidad, or Reunion. (Though Reunion is the only one of those three with a substantial white population.)

Fiji is its own special mess. I don't know much about it (and haven't kept up for years), but from what I do know the situation seems plausibly intractable. Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians are each roughly half the population, with different and highly incompatible relationships to, e.g., landownership.

Right, Fiji is undoubtedly in worse shape than Hawaii, but I feel like you'd learn more by understanding how and why things are different in Fiji between Indo-Fijians and Indigenous Fijians, as compared to Japanese in Hawaii and Native Hawaiians, rather than trying to map things onto white/black differences on the mainland.

"Romanzo Colfax Adams" is the most corporate-law-firm name I have ever seen on a human being. I have no other insights.

I didn't get past the paywall, but it was pretty startling to learn that the cost of housing is much like the Bay but with minimum wages significantly lower.

14: I'm skeptical, but I don't know enough about Fiji to compare intelligently.

They have water, but not in a way we can understand without $5.

We can beat that. There are a couple of pipes near the Kona airport that pull up deep ocean water from just offshore where it gets deep fast. They were originally built to generate renewable energy from the temperature differential but soon repurposed for whatever else might make a buck, including desalinating the water and peddling it as especially pure.

Too deep for fish to have fornicated in it.

post-WWII political realignment driven by 100th Bn/442nd RCT
Elaborate?

21: Basically guys from Hawaii who were the core of those units came back after the war, said "this is bullshit," and over the next couple of decades took over running the state.

22: Specifically people of Japanese descent in Hawaii (which at the time was the plurality ethnicity at around 40%, now at 13% slightly behind Filipinos, I think both of those are including Okinawans but I'm not sure).

Ah, finally found the right census data table: http://www.ohadatabook.com/T01-03-11u.pdf

There probably is some interesting US-wide comparisons around the Army and returning veterans demanding more racial justice, though how successful that has been has certainly varied (see Tulsa). But it seems to be a common element of the periods after all the large wars.

Wow - according to that table, Japanese were already 40% of the population (vs. 24% native Hawaiians, 19% white, 17% Chinese) in 1900 and only lost their plurality to whites sometime in the early 1960's?

Ex recto, I'm thinking Malaysia, Singapore, Guyana, Suriname, might be better comparisons.
FWIW, I did have vague image of HI being, not paradisical, but way ahead of the CONUS, if only in virtue of Japanese-Hawaiian prominence.

Exactly. This was sort of the point of my comparison to somewhere like Fiji, where again you have a large population of oppressed laborers who are ethnically distinct from both the indigenous people and the colonists.

This was sort of the point of my comparison to somewhere like Fiji, where again you have a large population of oppressed laborers who are ethnically distinct from both the indigenous people and the colonists.

Well, I mean, this does actually describe the Continental US as well.

I think 27.last is basically accurate. People have been intermarrying here for a very long time and there's a strong, multi-ethnic local culture that is more deeply integrated than any other place in the US that I know of. But there are still lots of people left out, particularly in communities with lots of more recent immigrants and parts of the Native Hawaiian community, and the economy and housing market are tough enough for almost everyone.

29: Well yes, of course, but there aren't a lot of places in the US with large Native populations and large Black populations. It's like the south but without the trail of tears or the great migration.

28: Does Fiji have anything like the level of intermarriage that Hawaii does? And really not seeing 31.last as a particularly useful analogue. Without the trail of tears or the great migration, with the white newcomers marrying into the Native elite, and with Chinese, Japanese, Okinawans, and Portugese occupying a role somewhere between that of African slaves and Scottish and Irish immigrants/refugees in the South?

Delurking: The thing about Hawai'i is not that there isn't any racism, but that the racial configuration there is more or less impossible to match with that of the continental 49 states, since the island is majority nonwhite and there are about 10 significant national/racial groups, and blacks aren't really one of them (or weren't until recently). But nothing about this prevents racism.

I have Hawaiian Portuguese inlaws, and there's an embattled question about whether Portuguese are part of the white minority or the non-white majority. They came as indentured servants just like the Filipinos, et al.

Thay also have their own language, which is initially unintelligible for mainlanders.

I mean analogies are banned for a reason, I wasn't trying to make an analogy just saying that I'd rather enroll in a course covering Hawaii, Fiji, and Reunion than one about the US that spent 20% of the time on Hawaii.

In what I've read, the normal bitter class differences are most important, as elsewhere, and the mainlander / local difference comes next. I once knew a white local-Hawaiian thug whose youthful hobby had been beating up GIs, of whatever race.

"They also have their own language, which is initially unintelligible for mainlanders. "

"They" = Hawaiian locals, not Hawaiian Portuguese.

It's a good thing I use preview sometimes.

33.last: Obligatory

34: I'd probably take both of those, but understood.

Interesting, I didn't know anything about Hawaiian Portuguese, but correctly guessed it was ex-whalers from Azores/Madeira/Cape Verde.

Sine we're here, how was the Clooney film The Descendants received in HI.

40: Don't know about how it played broadly. It apparently did a good job of reviving a bunch of Punahou gossip around the author's family and some of the episodes on which it was supposedly based in part. It was being filmed partly in my neighborhood when we were moving in, but never ran across Clooney, possibly because the one outdoor sequence I remember had the geography all wrong and George must have spent a lot of time lost. I enjoyed the movie when I saw it, but realized after that Clooney's charisma was making up for a lot of otherwise sloppy product. One thing I did notice in the scene with extended family was that it was way too white. That's not what extended family gatherings look like here.

We have kona ice, and it does cost $5.

Well yes, of course, but there aren't a lot of places in the US with large Native populations and large Black populations. It's like the south but without the trail of tears or the great migration.

Yeah, I think the really significant difference is not the presence of an ethnically distinct population of oppressed laborers but the continuing presence of a substantial indigenous population as well. That's very uncommon throughout the Americas. The main examples I can think of are the Guianas and the British-settled parts of Central America (i.e., Belize, the Miskito Coast, and nearby islands like Roatan).

Shailene Woodley was so good in that film. Which reminds me of a fun somewhat tangential conversation topic, which is what are the best examples of celebrity couples of roughly comparable fame? And who is more famous Shailene Woodley or Aaron Rodgers?

Emerson!

I have read that the Azores Portuguese were so eager to leave their tropical paradise that they signed on to American ships without expecting pay.

Mark Twain and Herman Melville both wrote about the South Pacific islands, tastefully noting the bare-breasted maidens. Even Washington Irving. Hawaii was part of American consciousness before substantial parts of the Midwest and most of the Mountain West.

43: Right, but none of those has a substantial white population as far as I know. Maybe Roatan 50 years in the future?

I kinda want to go to Madeira, I love the wine, I like obscure islands, and they have Monk Seals.

46.last: Creating fun facts like Obama's high school having been founded 50 years before the institution at which he taught law.

Hawaii was part of American consciousness before substantial parts of the Midwest and most of the Mountain West.

Indeed, Hawaiians were involved in a lot of the early exploration and settlement especially of the interior Northwest and left behind placenames and so forth.

"Miami was a university before Florida was a state" is another one people from Ohio sometimes say.

47: Yeah, fair. Having a substantial settler population as well is even rarer.

52: This is why I'm hung up on Reunion, which I know literally nothing about, but is 35%/25%/25% African, Indian, European.

Though none of those are technically indigenous.

50: I've always wondered about the story behind Kanaka Bar, BC, well up the Fraser Gorge.

Crosby's Ecological Imperialism mentions Queensland and Costa Rica as tropical settler colonies that are exceptions to his general thesis, but he should have also included Hawaii (and apparently Reunion).

Why was such a big island uninhabited for so long after its discovery?

57 to 53.

Socotra is the obscure island to go to, and has the added spice of danger, since it's in the middle of various battle zones. It has a 2000-year+ history which is rather lacking in details.

https://www.travelawaits.com/2563547/socotra-island-yemen/

57: Indian Ocean not Pacific, remember that Madagascar was settled from Borneo not Africa. There wasn't Polynesian ocean-going technology in the Atlantic or Indian. Unless your island is near the Vikings, Inuit, or Polynesians you probably don't get settled until the Portuguese start showing up.

Imagine the let down.

Still, it seems like traveling from Borneo to Madagascar would put you near Reunion.

New Caledonia. Though without a big ex-unfree population AFAIK.

New Caledonia also has a substantial white population (~25%), but it doesn't seem to have a similarly large population descended from imported workers. There has been a fair amount of recent voluntary immigration from Wallis and Futuna but that seems a little different.

62: If it happened more than once, which it seems like it may not have.

56: Read?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/444077/new-caledonia-to-once-again-vote-on-independence-from-france

I wonder if there's some kind of evolutionary effect on direction-finding ability from having a population selected for being really lost.

Well that was an unexpected pwn.

Read?

But really, my cows.

Not refreshing before posting this relevant news in the hopes that it will also have been implausibly pwned.

Can't think of an exception to 60, extending Polynesians to include other Austronesians, if we only count oceanic islands whose coasts have always been beyond the horizon. Socotra, mentioned above? Probably mentioned in the Periplus.

Clearly we need to have a meetup on a small, hard to get to island with interesting culture. This time next year in Mauritius?

Nicobars, Maldives, Lakshadweep. Not sure if the latter meets beyond-the-horizon criterion. Seychelles apparently known but not settled.

Seriously, though, EI is pretty interesting and an easy read, so I would recommend it. The analysis isn't all that deep and there are some odd omissions (in addition to the ones mentioned above, there's no discussion of South Africa, which seems to meet at least some of the criteria he lays out for a "mini-Europe"), but overall I think it's worth the time.

It depends on how far out we're counting. Most of the Caribbean and the Canaries had pre-Columbian populations (from Venezuela and North Africa, respectively), but they're just not that far out.

Clearly we need to have a meetup on a small, hard to get to island with interesting culture. This time next year in Mauritius?

Little Diomede!

72: ah, yes, even during lower sea levels they would've been far from shore (except maybe Lakshadweep). Especially the Nicobars. And we should include the Caribbean, although that's probably more straightforward than other areas with a few exceptions like Barbados (which IIRC was only temporarily settled before the Spanish came).

Shetland and St. Kilda both had Neolithic populations.

For the prior list, the Andamans, though without Europeans. Similarly I would guess some small islands in Indonesia and the Philippines I don't know about. Maybe some peripheral Australian islands, Torres Strait.

Ah, but both of those are within view (St. Kilda from the right places in the Uists, and Shetland in two steps from Orkney to Fair Isle to Shetland).

I think all the stuff in 78 was much easier due to the low sea levels at the time, at any rate all of those were found during the initial big migration with much less technology.

Socotra is the obscure island to go to

Been there. It is very pretty.

80: 78 is for the ethno-political list, not navigation.

Most of those Indonesian islands and I think especially the Torres Strait islands would've been much easier to see and access when sea levels were lower. Australia was settled early; I think boats were needed but it wasn't far. Even if the original populations didn't last it's a lot easier to know about an island if there's already been people there.

75: you have a bit of an unfair head start, and I hesitate to suggest anywhere so small we could change the demographics, but, hey, let's make it happen.

83 before seeing 82. Also, all good ideas for meetup locations.

Little Diomede is the one that birders are obsessed with, right?

you have a bit of an unfair head start

It'll all be evened out by the second or third day of being stuck in Nome due to weather. (That's if we're lucky enough to get weathered out before rather than after landing in Diomede.)

Perhaps also the original Italian plantations in the Mediterraean -- Chios etc. Though presumably subsumed in the intervening time.

I was on Thera once. Hard journey to get there because I saved $20 by booking deck passage and it turned out spring is really cold in the Aegean.

And the dusty-Minoan museum was closed for a strike.

Socotra, mentioned above? Probably mentioned in the Periplus.

It is indeed, also in Ptolemy's Geographia.

Legend says that in Ohio, the locals wash so rarely that keys stick to their skin.

+ OT:

The ancient Ohioans could have gotten vaccinated and used their natural magnetism and giant bowls to form a crude compass and find uncharted islands.

Their inability to navigate is why they had to put a giant column on South Bass Island. We may never understand their ways.

David Abulafia's THE BOUNDLESS SEA: A HUMAN HISTORY OF THE OCEANS probably has the answers you're after. Very good on Polynesia, not quite as good on the Indian Ocean, excellent on the Atlantic.

You can put a credit card in your phone case, stick a key to your head and travel the city with nothing in your pocket.

Will make my Arnold Rimmer cosplay easier, if nothing else.

What I really want to know is, should I feel bad about wearing Hawaiian shirts? I don't fetishize the culture in any other ways (a neighbor of mine has some questionable decorations), it's just a summery style with buttons and a collar.

I heard it means doctor from Maine who was drafted for the Korean War.

When I was a privileged college student in Honolulu, a lot of my friends were concerned about getting beat up by locals and it never, ever happened.

98: i have an excellent shirt i bought from a super nice guy who has a tiny shop in waikiki selling vintage & new-inspired-by-vintage, his things are gorgeous, & got lovely positive reactions from old guys who were clearly locals while e.g. waiting in line at the grocery store lol.

Although I did almost once get my ass kicked by a drunken Marine....

98: I think Hawaiian shirts are starting to be a right-wing nut job signal unfortunately.

WRT Aaron and Shailene, The Who Weekly podcast which is generally dedicated to Who-s, made an exception for these two Them-s and called Aaron the more famous. They were also paling around with Miles Teller and his wife in Hawaii so I can sneak that fact in.

I am unhappy with my pluralization.

I wouldn't worry about the Hawaiian shirt signaling right wing thing. It's not associated with general vague racism, it's only associated with a specific bunch of loonies who think a second civil war is coming. For most people out there, there's just no risk that wearing a Hawaiian shirt is going to make people think you're a Boogaloo/Big Luau Boy or a sympathizer.

104 Yeah, don't let the bastards appropriate it.

The right appropriating things is an example of the Bitch-Slap Theory of Politics. They know that if they announce something is a right-wing symbol that we'll just take it. They did it with the OK handsign, pretty much as trolling.

i wear mine neatly buttoned up to the top & tucked into nipped waist wide leg imogen n willie retro 40s vibe trousers, it's all very early ginger rogers before *she* became a far right nut case, haven't had any cases of mistaken ideological identity yet!

on other sartorial fromts the youngsters in the hipster coffee joint near where i stay while in b*v*rly h*lls on bizness pronounced my after hours no heels mufti outfit "sick" the other day hahahaha.

Guayabera >> Hawaiian

They're called aloha shirts, not Hawaiian shirts.

107: Sounds lovely. I want wide-legged pants. And to look good in them (and paper bag waists). Sad about Rogers.

108: I am so old now. I look at modern fashions and think 'That looks absolutely horrible. That's why we stopped wearing it when it was stylish before'. But young people. They always just like buy fashionable stuff. I mean I guess they have to because they don't have a t-shirt in the perfect shade of blue from 2010 sitting in their closet and have to buy all the fashionable pastels. Poor things.

Here's a truly bonkers story out of Hawaii, a state senator has a gotten the state budget to include a provision firing one particular professor at UH (the head of the Cancer Center, so it's not exactly the usual political nonsense).

At face value it seems to just be about trying to eliminate research as such from UH Manoa in an attempt to lower costs, but when it's literally one person you have to wonder if there's some personal vendetta going on.

Since it is not making him a criminal I guess it is not prohibited as a Bill of Attainder?

When it's that senator, it's always personal. She's truly a piece of work. Small correction: he was director of the Cancer Center 10+ years ago, not currently. There was a lot of drama there for a long time, and it wouldn't shock me if he has been retired in place, but still unsanitary as hell.

Yeah, I did some googling after that and found tons of controversy around that cancer center, but it was pretty impossible for me to work out what the sides were or what the point of controversy was. (There was some stuff that made it seem like maybe it was a University vs. Hospital fight?)

It looks like her original proposal was to fire everyone who was on sabbatical.

We had a similar situation a few years back where some legislators tried to fire a particular employee at the Department of Labor by eliminating his position through the budget process. It was unsuccessful, in part because people pointed out that the department could easily just move him to a different position; the legislature has budgetary control over positions but can't usurp the executive branch's authority over specific personnel decisions. He later left the job on his own, ran for the legislature, and won. Awkward!

There were a couple of different but entangled pieces. One was controversy around their new building, which was in the works for several years with a developer as a public-private partnership when Carl was director and actually built under his successor as a university project, amid much conflict with the former developer and at least one other developer who was pissed at the university about a different project. The other was that a significant chunk of the faculty really, really hated Carl's successor, who is very colorful and not exactly a gifted manager. The hospitals mostly just wanted the drama over, which took yet another director to achieve (and he, alas, is now gone too, probably in part because of the unending and brutal politics).

98, 106: heh, thanks for the reassurance, but I wasn't thinking about the "boogaloo boys", I just thought it might have been the bad kind of cultural appropriation. I've seem the clickbait kind of article about them recently and didn't read it but I assumed it was going for something like that.

120: completely standard business attire in HI, fwiw.

110: the old guys at the grocery just called it my shirt lol "that's a nice shirt young lady".

111: the kids in the coffee shop are adorable! am heading to airport now and reacquainting with the horrendous exhaustion from these trips. shhhh don't tell the client but i replaced a perfume from a bad blood competitor after my last meeting. hopefully no one saw me slip into their store on my way back to the hotel to pick up my bag .... 😬