Another glowing commentary about Hawaii as a place where people of differing ethnicity get along especially well appeared recently in a Honolulu Star-Advertiser opinion piece under the headline: “America could use helping of Hawaii’s unique cultural stew.”

It’s similar to ideas expressed in a 2015 panel presentation on “What Can Hawaii Teach America about Race” at a Smithsonian Institution event in Honolulu. Two years later, Civil Beat convened its own storytelling forum on the topic, in which I was one of the speakers but didn’t endorse the notion.

In 2019, the New York Times published an essay touting the benign nature of island ethnic relations, “Want to be less racist? Move to Hawaii.”

Advocates of this sanguine view about Hawaii maintain not just that its people interact with aloha for each other, but that the state provides a unique model from which Americans in the continental U.S. with their divisive racial problems could learn much.

But instead of continuing to repeat and unreflectively accept this idea, which most Hawaii residents do, we need to recognize how it keeps us from addressing critical problems faced by Indigenous and ethnic minorities and how we really treat others of differing ethnicity.

Common to all of these written and verbal self-congratulatory observations about Hawaii is the notion that it constitutes what I have referred to critically as the “Hawaii multicultural model,” which began to be advanced in the 1990s by journalists and a few academics.

In short, the model represents island society as distinguished by tolerant, harmonious and egalitarian ethnic relations and as a worthy example from which other racially and ethnically divided societies could learn how to deal with their racial issues. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that we have solved our own problems related to ethnicity and race.

The idea of Hawaii as such an exemplary model for other societies was initially advanced by Lawrence Fuchs in his well-known book, “Hawaii Pono: A Social History.” It was published in 1961, while the research for it was conducted on the eve of statehood.

In the very last sentence of his 449-page tome, Fuchs effusively praised the islands and its people: “This is the promise of Hawaii, a promise for the entire nation and, indeed the world, that peoples of different races and creeds can live together, enriching each other in harmony and democracy.”

Recall that Fuchs was researching and writing his book during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement when Blacks were regularly brutally beaten by the police during protest demonstrations and some killed for challenging the racist segregation system in the South.

Small wonder that he was highly impressed with what he saw going on in Hawaii at that time, although the territory had its own history of racially motivated violence, such as the Hanapepe Massacre, in which 16 Filipinos and four police officers were shot to death during the 1924 plantation strike.

More than 60 years after the publication of “Hawaii Pono,” popular discourse about Hawaii as a model for emulation persists, although Fuchs didn’t resort to culinary symbols to make his point. The author of the recent newspaper op-ed invoked the notion of Hawaii as a “cultural stew” in which ethnic groups representing different ingredients “flavor each other and create a unique dish,” presumably multicultural Hawaii.

Another more popular food item used to symbolize how island ethnic groups interact harmoniously with one another is the mixed plate lunch. Insofar as it consists of entrees and staples from different ethnic groups — for example lau lau, kal bi, teriyaki, roast pork and rice — it is said to represent the mutual sharing and mixing of Hawaii’s people and their cultures.

But much like local identity and culture, not all ethnic groups and their traditional dishes are included in a mixed plate lunch, which is symbolic of their exclusion from full acceptance and participation in island society.

A Problem Obscured Is A Problem Unsolved

The critical issue with publicly expressed and widely disseminated views about Hawaii as a multicultural paradise is that people, here and abroad, actually believe them and assume we don’t have major problems related to ethnicity and race that need to be resolved.

We thus obscure or ignore the significant ways that we don’t treat other ethnic groups with aloha, giving them all the same opportunities for success. I emphasize ethnic groups because as individuals we regularly experience cordiality and friendliness with persons of another ethnicity, which leads us to believe mistakenly that also characterizes relations among ethnic groups.  

Can we really teach America about race if the native people of Hawaii have the highest rate of homelessness in the state, while Hawaii has one of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the nation? Native Hawaiians also are the largest group among both men and women in the state prison system.

If we live in a multicultural paradise, why are so many local residents leaving, as they have been doing for more than 30 years?

To what extent are Micronesians, who are fellow Pacific Islanders, accepted as part of the cultural mix in Hawaii? They are subject to extreme forms of systemic racism, including profiling by the police, bullying in the public schools, xenophobic discrimination and racist stereotyping through vile jokes told about them.

Another persistent problem based on ethnicity is the widening socioeconomic gap between the dominant — Japanese, Chinese and Caucasians — and subordinate ethnic groups — Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, Samoans, Puerto Ricans and others — since the 1970s.

Given the state’s continued reluctance to diversify the economy and its reliance on the fundamentally unreliable tourism industry with its creation of predominantly low-wage and low-security service and sales jobs, that gap isn’t likely to be narrowed in the near future.

However, I’m hoping the historic income tax cuts just signed into law by Gov. Josh Green will have an impact on ethnic inequality over the next decade.

More generally, if we live in a multicultural paradise, why are so many local residents leaving, as they have been doing for more than 30 years? This ongoing exodus, including Native Hawaiians, has resulted in seven consecutive years of population decline.

Instead of glorifying ourselves with fallacious beliefs about multicultural harmony, we need first to acknowledge our own ethnicity-based problems, such as racism and inequality, and commit ourselves as a society to alleviating them.

The primary election in two months provides one such opportunity for fostering ethnic equality by voting for and/or supporting candidates who advocate for equal educational opportunity in our public schools and university system.