I thought over the weekend about how racism helped define Hawaiʻi, and what a more tolerant world means for our future.
After World War II, Japanese Americans in the Islands faced discrimination. Nisei veterans had served with distinction, yet they were not fully accepted in business or politics.
This discrimination was wrong, yet it bore fruit. Japanese Americans veterans built parallel businesses like Central Pacific Bank, so they would not be at the mercy of racist lenders. And the Democratic Revolution of 1954 is in part the story of how they organized to take political power. Grievance over their treatment drove them. So did fervent belief in the American civic religion.
We project their eventual success back into the 1940s and assume Japanese Americans have always been ascendant in business and politics. This is not so.
This story has been told and retold. But turning it over, I realized that the exclusion itself was one source of the dynamism in the years just before and after statehood.
Society is like a Plinko board. Each person drops in at the top and bounces around until they settle into a career. Discrimination blocks off certain slots. The highest reaches of social life, business, and politics are closed.
Much then depends on mass. If a minority is too small, it cannot build a parallel set of institutions. This matters most for the particular chips that are themselves dynamos. Intelligence and conscientiousness are not evenly distributed, nor is ambition. The ambitious want to climb. If mainstream avenues are open, they take them. If parallel institutions exist, they climb those. If neither is available, they leave, or their ambition curdles into something worse.
After the war, Hawaiʻi’s ambitious minorities were funneled into certain spheres, government foremost among them. Why government? Patronage. The price of admission to elected office was hard work and an ethnic base. A politician could rally that ethnic base, win, and then use government to hand out jobs to it. Civil service jobs were supposed to be awarded without prejudice, too, though this was more aspiration than practice.
Hawaiʻi had the perfect blend of exclusion and opportunity. One group was shut out yet large enough to swing elections, and the young government needed staff as it grew.
Hawaiʻi was not uniquely racist in the mid-20th century. Japanese arguably faced worse on the Mainland. American culture went full jingoist during the war, and the wartime cartoons of Theodor Geisel, later Dr. Seuss, capture the animus well, depicting America's Japanese enemy as bucktoothed and bespectacled caricatures. Suspicion led to mass incarceration on the West Coast. Hawaiʻi’s Japanese were treated more leniently because of their numbers, their prominence, and advocates like John Burns.
Postwar media was not much better. Blockbuster movies still featured yellowface. Prejudice was not confined to pockets; it was mass culture. Consider Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in 1961.
Racism on the Mainland, then, may have helped keep Japanese in Hawaiʻi, where at least a parallel ladder existed. It was not the only reason. Some stayed for proximity to Asia. Commercial air travel was young, and for anyone hoping to visit Japan, the West Coast was a leap further. Others stayed to do business.
Japanese succeeded in part because they were bonded together. Talent pooled in a niche instead of spreading thin across the wider economy. Even a smaller population like the Okinawans reached a critical mass that built an empire, in their case of restaurants. Their story parallels the Gujarati Patels, people from one region of India who now own a large share of America’s motels.
Joseph told the brothers who sold him into Egypt, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Providence does not excuse sin; it redeems it.
Why does this history matter for Hawaiʻi now? Because the world has changed and the market for talent is global.
Discrimination still exists, but talented minorities have far more doors open than they did seventy years ago. Startups care about performance, not skin color. And many big companies now recruit the very groups their old policies kept out.
The gap in tolerance between Hawaiʻi and the Mainland is far smaller than it was in 1954, and moving is less intimidating. Flights are fast. FaceTime keeps families close. One can order Asian staple foods online.
Hawaiʻi still has plenty of talent, and plenty of draws for it. What it lacks is a monopsony on talent. This is most obvious in state government, no longer the attractive career it once was, in part because other options exist. But it applies more broadly.
An end to racism means people settle on their own merits, no longer blocked from certain chutes.
The chips continue to bounce around on the Plinko board. But the chips now have many more places to land, and Hawaiʻi itself must compete on the merits. That means the unglamorous work: building housing a nurse can afford, clearing permits in months rather than years, offering schools a young family would choose on purpose.
Complacency and entitlement will not make those changes. Hawaiʻi needs talent more than talent needs Hawaiʻi.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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