Exercise in ethnographic writing

In Hawaii the sun sets differently; it colors the whole sky in a circle around the island, as if entrenching everyone there in a halo. And perhaps the beauty manifests itself in this way because the people on the islands are not afraid to love the islands back. I see it in the way they wake, the words they choose to describe their home, the care they take for the ocean as it washes back and forth to the shore. 

I visited two Hawaiian islands over two weeks. Over these two weeks, I felt for the first time the experience of disappearing in a friendly, melting way into the earth around me. My skin, my hair, my eyes, they weren't the question anymore, instead, the question was how comfortable could I get with the ocean, how much spam musubi could I eat, did I have a loyalty card for the gas station. Everyone there thought I was a local, and had I stayed long enough, I think I would have begun believing the same thing. It felt like a physical manifestation of belonging, to exchange glances with people as brown as me and to receive acceptance as a member of their unspoken tribe. 

It's a strange thing, to exist, briefly, in a place where the understanding of belonging, at least on racial terms, feels flipped on its head. In the middle of the ocean, the land is the god of the people, and those who are perceived not to have respected this god have been attacked, viciously. In Hawaii, your ancestors speak for you. You are judged for the way the humans before you combined to formulate your features, and yet, the difference between this judgment as it operates on the mainland is that in Hawaii, the more you look like a white European colonizer, the less places you can go without fear of danger, without retaliation for the ways white European colonizers have hurt Mother Nature, without perceived secularization and separation of land and spirit. In other words, the more obviously white you are, the more consequential your whiteness feels, the more uncomfortable you feel for your whiteness, the more you wish to claim anything other than this whiteness, in order to protect your own safety. On the Hawaiian islands, whiteness means being socially unaccepted. 

For someone who has grown up on the mainland, asked constantly and without remorse from people blissfully ignorant of the social constructions of identity what racial lineage has caused me to look the way that I do, Hawaii was jarring, in all the right ways. The darker my skin got, the more the locals seemed to trust me, the more my eyes blended with the trees and the sand, the more I was perceived to have been borne from that land. Being ethnically ambiguous, for the first time in my life, didn't spark questions, but rather provided answers, negating the necessity for questions at all. I floated around and between and among spaces whiter-looking people born and raised for generations on islands I had never seen could not do. I lived for the way I felt naturally occurring, for the first time in 24 years of living. 

Not until I began critically observing identity did I realize the ways in which falling through the cracks of stereotypes can help call attention to the limits of these socially constructed concepts. Not until I called into question the necessity of limiting myself to one side of my racial identity because of the breadth of experiences I have on both sides did I realize the inherent human experience of changing oneself in order to obtain membership in a social group. Not until I began getting upset about the constant barrage of questions about my physical appearance did I understand that most identities manifest themselves through physical proof of belonging to a group; through features that force others to perceive you as a certain race, through clothing worn in solidarity, through changing one's body in order to conform to heteronormative stereotypes. 

Members of many different racial groups throughout the history of the United States have touted the dangers of creating children with mixed-race parental heritage. Allegedly these children will have no identity group to belong to, will have difficulty understanding their place in the world, will never make sense to a society so polarized by the limits of racial grouping. Alternatively, these children have been encouraged in the pursuit of a perceived utopia, have been sexualized, objectified, worshipped as the epitome of beauty in racial terms. Both of these claims are misconceptions. Racial ambiguity is so fascinating and so difficult to formulate solidified understandings of because it calls the entire narrative of race into question--a system of entirely socially constructed hierarchies that over generations have resulted in material consequences and unified solidarity and policed identities. Race is a construct, the way that other societal norms are a construct, but to ignore the way that race has visibly affected human lives is to miss the forest for the trees. 

I've lived my whole life being questioned, and it took me 24 years to become comfortable in the fact that I will never live comfortably in one social grouping because of my physical appearance. But it also took 24 years to become comfortable with the idea that no one will ever fit perfectly comfortable in on identity because to be complicated and defined by multiple things at once is to be human.