The Price of Being Black of any Shade in the World

April 9, 2007
Editorial Observer
For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu — where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia — as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of — you could say hung up on — racial, ethnic and cultural differences.

People in this motley state, less a melting pot than a tossed salad, invented a host of slang terms for themselves. A pidgin English field guide would list buk-buks, pakes, buddaheads, katonks, mokes, titas, popolos, yobos, blalahs, haoles and portagees. These labels can be affectionate or angry, though they are usually used neutrally or with just mild rudeness, often in the kinds of ethnic jokes that passed out of polite favor on the mainland long ago.

Hawaii’s fixation on social taxonomy is also seen in the local habit of linking identity to diploma. The first question locals ask one another is where they went to high school. Implicit in the answer are a lot of assumptions about ethnicity and class, whether the school is Punahou (elite white and Asian), Iolani (elite Japanese), Farrington (working-class Filipino and Samoan) or whatever.

There is, in this crowded paradise, a slot for everybody.Or almost everybody.

For Mr. Obama, fitting in at Punahou could have been hard, given its reputation as a cliquish school dominated since missionary days by the rich white people who founded it. Mr. Obama, a scholarship student, wasn’t rich and didn’t look white.

Beyond that, his parents — University of Hawaii graduate students — and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it — hapa, or half — that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are.

Vexations like these, felt by growing numbers of multiracial Americans, have helped to spur a blossoming of hapa awareness on the mainland. People are trying out the idea of a hapa culture that is greater than the sum of its parts. There are hapa conferences, hapa college clubs and hapa Web sites. More and more people consider the pursuit of hapaness to be the answer to the paradox of bifurcation. Certainly, it is powerful evidence of the irrepressible yearning for identity. So is Mr. Obama’s story, his restless searching for a solace that Hawaii could not offer.

I asked him recently about that search. He described a long process of pulling together the parts of his life before finding a skin he could live in. The multitudes that he contains — Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, Harvard, Illinois — could have been arranged in infinite ways. But he settled in long ago as an African-American in Chicago, a professor turned politician in one of the most segregated cities in America.

The first thing he asked me was what high school I had gone to.