I’ve mentioned Hawai’i a few times, and being from there, although I am not Hawaiian. This is kind of my official statement of ethnicity or lack thereof.
My birth mother wanted to be an anthropologist. My birth grandfather said no, you are a girl and they just get married, you will be a dental hygienist and that’s the education I am paying for. My birth mother said screw you, parent, I do what I want (an important tradition in our ancestral line), and moved to Honolulu where she got a job at the Kamehameha School, as a dental hygienist, to pay for her anthro degree that she was trying to get at U of HI, Manoa.
The Kamehameha School is a unique institution set up by Hawaiian royalty for educating Hawaiian people. It’s currently being sued by conservative types upset because white people can’t go there. There’s really nothing comparable on the mainland since colonization worked a lot different there. My birth mother was in a very unique situation; the school had an in-house dentist who would fix the students’ teeth and she assisted, one of a very few haoles (white people) working there.
When she got pregnant and decided to adopt it (me) out in her second trimester, assumptions were made as far as the child’s father. I didn’t learn the truth until I was over thirty – that she got knocked up having unsafe sex with my attractive womanizer of a birthdad at a romantic Waikiki party whilst drunk. And she moved in with him and tried to make it work, but somewhere in the second trimester she concluded he was a drunk womanizer and she didn’t want to raise a child with him, so I was handed off. To people who assumed that she got knocked up at work, whether or not it was consensual, because she wasn’t talking.
I grew up doing lots of weird things which were often attributed to my heathen nature. I’m a green-eyed blonde, true, but lots of Pacific people are mixed. I was given a Hawaiian middle name, which is a thing that came about when haoles were trying to eliminate the culture and the language, so all Hawaiians were required to have an English first name, and usually they gave their kids Hawaiian middle names. I have one too, Leilani, which was inspired by a Bing Crosby song and is more common among white girls than Hawaiian ones. My white parents did that just in case I turned out to be part of the diaspora, per their suspicions.
When I was in my thirties DNA testing came about, and I located the drunk womanizer. Or actually my half-siblings, since he died young (from drinking) after siring a bunch of us. He was very white, although there’s an intriguing “weeaboo gene” thing happening in that my half-siblings are all fascinated with some aspect of Asian culture.
But until it was confirmed I’m a very whitish shade of white, and most of the DNA I got is associated with the greater London area, I lived in a headspace where anyone could be my relative, so being a bigot would be pretty stupid. And since I didn’t have an ancestral culture I learned a lot about the culture where I was born – not the Scots-Irish culture of my adopted parents so much as the stories and customs of the people around me, whose ancestors were mixed just like my own were assumed to be. And the music, which sometimes gives me a Hawaiian sucker punch right in the parts of my brain associated with nostalgic homesickness.
My experience as a Schroedinger’s haole might have ended, but I’ve tried to carry those sensibilities around with me, and sometimes translate them for others, with varying degrees of success.
For one example, there was an asshole named Max Long who was a theosophist that created his own new age religion (“Huna”) based on Hawaiian vocabulary in one of the most audacious acts of cultural appropriation I’ve ever heard of. Occasionally I still run into disciples of Huna passing along memes about how the indigenous Hawaiians want you to know about their cosmic wisdom which just happens to mesh with the cosmic wisdom in all the other Blavatsky-derived new religions. And doesn’t have much in common with the religion of indigenous Hawaiians. When I see that kind of junk I usually try to link people to actual Hawaiian activists and hope they keep their feet on the path that’s about accumulating wisdom rather than power tripping others by representing oneself as a super-evolved guru.
And speaking of power trippers … I get a lot of people who immediately come up with some kind of sexual objectification whenever I mention I’m from the islands, or when I mention enjoying Asian and/or Polynesian style music. It’s usually other white women, telling me “ooh I dated an Asian guy once” or “there’s a hot Asian guy working at the sushi place.” Like the only reason I might be interested in non-white culture is because I’m chasing after sex in an objectifying sort of way.
The absolute worst was this editor I worked with once, who told me she roleplayed in Second Life as a hapa boy. Like she wanted me to applaud and go “gosh you’re so multicultural” or something other than going "eww" or asking her if she would like to beef. Which is probably what the hapa boys/men/mahu/transwomen/women/girls/etc. I grew up with would say, although I’m speculating and would no more speak for all people of an ethnic background, than I would add ketchup to my poi. Not a done thing, as the haoles say.
Speaking of people who like to beef, there are lots of mean folks in Hawai’i, and plenty of nice ones too. I was a weird kid like Lilo so I got bullied by my own people, and most of my friends were other introverted nerds of various backgrounds, all of us united by our fondness for numbers and our sensibilities derived from the local mishmosh of cultures, like cleaning up your trash when you go to the beach. I have quite a few people in my life who aren’t Polynesian at all but spent enough time living there to develop those kinds of sensibilities, so we share that bond, growing up watching anime alongside Disney and having super diverse classmates, and lots more familiarity with Asian culture than the average mainland kid.
It makes me slightly askew in a lot of cultural discussions, because no, I didn’t grow up with the same standards as people growing up in North America. Most people my age lived in a world with far more racial and cultural segregation. I grew up where the prejudices and the colonizing attitudes worked differently. Some of my classmates were actually forbidden by law from speaking the Hawaiian language, which is why the Kamehameha School was such a big deal.
But my mom wanted to be Indiana Jones, so yeah. I’m adjacent. Sometimes I try to advocate or educate, as part of the responsibility I feel for growing up there.
I’m Schroedinger-y with respect to other identities too. I still identify as asexual, which puts me in the queer section, except I’m the kind who isn’t interested in queer sex, which isn’t a big part of the queer community, which is already small. I'm adjacent to it though and have had some amazing queer friends throughout my life, and I tend to stick up for them.
I’m Schrodinger’s neurodivergent too. I went through a period of identifying as autistic, but these days I am more inclined to say I have a few autistic traits and am generally familiar with autism and other forms of neurodivergence. The only one that’s been documented is “gifted” and I see no point in paying perfectly good money to determine whether I’m officially on one side of a border that seems to fluctuate a lot. And gifted is a form of neurodivergence, and I share the experience of weird cognition with my fellow NDs, so I'm proudly adjacent there too.
I just wasn’t built for the identity politics era, personally. Too amorphous and nebulous, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be supportive and occasionally educational or entertaining.
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