I’ve been back on O’ahu for a little over a month now. The island is a wonderful as ever, maybe even better! I just noticed that with the exception of a few conversations with friends, I have been going about life without thinking about my racial background. This is something that I was never able to do in any of the other places I have lived. With other Asian Americas, I was always conscious of being “only half” and thus somehow inauthentic. With non-Asians, I sometimes felt out of place. But here, I don’t think about being mixed or half or part anything. Here, I live a life of relative privilege due to my phenotype and skin color. Here, I don’t feel guilty of uncomfortable in my skin.
My so-called racial privilege allows me a certain amount of invisibility and the luxury of not having to defend or even discuss my race. This is how I imagine dominant society lives on the continental United States. O’ahu is one of the few places where I am continually around other mixed individuals. It is a form of comfort.
One thing that currently stands out to me is that most other mixed people have the same experience of having parents of different ethnic and racial background and thus the parents do not form some kind of cultural/ethnic alliance. Parents and kids have different experiences in the world. Some have racial privilege, some do not, some pass, some cover, some are vocal, some silent.
If anything, I feel like I am passing for local or even raceless.
Note: because the mixed race population in the islands is high compared to most other places in the country, there are many people who have parents who are also both mixed race and thus may have commonalities that those of us with parents of different races do not.
melissalou
tanookie23
