Mestiza, Hapa Haole, And Oceanic Borderspaces: Genealogical Rearticulations of Whiteness in Hawai'i (Essay‪)‬

We in the United States are living in a time of heightened racial awareness, tension, and conflict. Barack Obama's election is heralded as the beginning of a 'post-racial' society at the same time the organizing of white supremacist hate-groups is on the rise, along with popular discourses of white victimhood. Fears about immigration, rhetorics of 'terrorism,' impacts of the economic crisis, criminalization of communities of color, and the 'browning' of the population are all contributing factors. Understanding this current climate is critical and requires work on many different levels. One area of research focuses on developing a more sophisticated understanding of whiteness, white identities, white privilege, and white supremacy in the United States. [1] Particularly useful in this quest are those specific locations where whiteness has been embattled and/or non-normative for some time, either because of colonial histories, immigration, and/or racial segregation. Hawai'i is one such place. This essay is part of a larger project in which I analyze haole (whiteness and white people in Hawai'i) as a neocolonial American form of situated whiteness. To show how haole is produced requires attention to a complex assemblage of subjectivity, ideology, culture, historical hegemony, and performance. Haole was forged and reforged in over two centuries of American colonization, and needs to be understood through that history.