Ayase Leilani's Blog

A number of months ago, I had a conversation with someone who could not wrap her head around why people were picking apart pop culture and attempting to understand themes of institutionalised bigotry therein.  She made it very clear that this was just how things were and that we should just stop worrying so much and enjoy media without picking it apart.

Yes, you read that correctly.  I didn’t have this conversation decades ago.  I had it a few months ago.  And I had it with someone who lives on Oahu, Hawaii.

This may sound familiar to some readers who were alive during American Jim Crow or South African Apartheid, when standing up for oneself and one’s race was seen as a fast track to doom and destruction; the focus was on being well-behaved and towing the white man’s line.  In short, being “good minorities.”

How many of you are horrified that a mentality like this still exists in the world today?  If you’re as horrified as I am, then I assure all of you that you’re not alone.

This mentality is still massively prevalent on the Hawaiian Islands.

This dates back to the years when sugarcane plantations ruled the islands and their combined economy.  Like with a great many commercial enterprises of the past in places like the Hawaiian Islands, plantations were managed by white men and the people who worked them were all indigenous people.  And this wasn’t really all that long ago.

While the first sugarcane plantation was started by an unidentified Chinese man in 1802 on Lanaʻi, the first major plantation was established on Kauaʻi by Ladd & Co. in 1835.  By 1840, the whole process really began to explode, with missionary families full of white men beginning to see plantations as an excellent economic opportunity for themselves.  A series of laws and treaties established trade with America, displaced native Hawaiians from their homelands and drove almost all of the land into foreign ownership by 1890.  The people behind a majority of the operations were known as “The Big Five:”  C. Brewer & Co., Theo H. Davies & Co., Amfac, Castle & Cooke and Alexander & Baldwin.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It absolutely should, since it echoes almost exactly the same process that happened within America during its own slavery challenges.  But as you can all see, there is one primary difference:  it didn’t stop in the 1860s and there was no civil war.  The process was unopposed and those with power (all white men, many descended from missionary groups who came to the islands in the era before) were able to do as they pleased, owning almost all of the land, which was farmed by native Hawaiians displaced from their homes.  In 1893, the Kingdom of Hawaii was annexed by America, with Queen Liliʻuokalani being forced to abdicate under duress, breaking multiple international treaties in the process.  And the people who enabled this illegal overthrow to happen just so happened to be tied to the missionary families who established these plantations in the first place.

It wasn’t until 1920 that the first strike against plantation owners happened.  Imagine that:  none of the workers rebelled until 1920.  At this point, the plantation owners had opened up the plantations to Chinese, Filipino and other Pacific Islander immigrants and the plantations were worked by multi-racial families.  By 1930, Cuba began to handle more and more of the sugarcane farming due to various alliances and treaties, so the decline of Hawaiian plantations was inevitable.  Over the next several decades, production would slow on the Hawaiian Islands due to cheaper labour being found and subsequently exploited in South America and the Caribbean.  The very last plantation–on Maui–would close its doors for good in 2016 after completing its final shipment of sugarcane.

Yes, you read that correctly.  The whole run of plantations lasted from 1802 to 2016.  The plantations were a part of the Hawaiian economy for 214 years.  And the final year was only two years ago.

Are any of you sick to your stomachs yet?

From the forced abdication of Queen Liliʻuokalani forward, many things happened.  Hawaii became an American military base, with Honolulu and other parts of Oahu becoming a mainstay in American military efforts (and of course, Pearl Harbour needs no explanation).  Hawaii was successfully integrated as an American State in 1959, which was around the same time that the plantations began to decline.  In all of this, Hawaii began to bill itself as a prime tourist destination for Americans and Japanese and looked to make itself more palatable for all.  The reliance on “Aloha Culture” and the multi-racial elements of the Hawaiian Islands became increasingly important, combined with how people towed the line of the white man for so many years.

Put it all together and you find that a unique cultural problem has cropped up in Hawaii:  “The Melting Pot of the Pacific.”  It’s a diversity-blind ideology that claims that all the people who make up Hawaii have created a world where nothing else matters aside from people being united and not worrying about individual cultural needs.  This is a direct ideological descendant of “towing the line” for the white man during the plantation era and is done to appease both white tourists and white people who still live on the islands, controlling the tourist industry.

If you’re not vomiting bile by now, you have no heart.

Do I really need to lay out any more of this for you?  We exist in a day and age where vast swaths of the developed world are debating and pushing for intersectional activism and diversity awareness.  And yet, on a collection of islands in the middle of the Pacific, people are still kowtowing to the white man, being “good minorities” and accpeting everything at face value without any thought or care for their own needs.  And it’s an almost unstoppable force, as everyone has taken drinks from the Melting Pot Kool-Aid and thus, complacency runs rampant.  They are all infected with “The White Virus:”  everyone plays along and everyone does everything to better the islands for the white people.

That is why the conversation I spoke of at the beginning happened in the first place.  And countless more like it happen each and every day.  Truly, Hawaii is in peril.  And if we’re going to ever change anything, someone has to come out and say something.  And more of us have to join the conversation.  If we do not, then Hawaiians run the risk of losing everything that truly matters.