Fear in the United States part 2
Field note 4) Kill Haole Day
One of the more durable pieces of modern folklore among white people from the US mainland who come to stay and work in Hawai`i is the institution of “Kill Haole Day”.
Before I continue with this account, some basic vocabulary is in order. In Hawai`i, whites are often referred to as “haoles”. This term comes from the Hawaiian language (Pukui and Elbert, 1986) and has various translations(6) but is conventionally seen by locals as an ethnic designation similar to “Korean”, “Japanese”, “Chinese”, “Filipino”, “Micronesian” and “Hawaiian” (meaning Native Hawaiian(7)). The term “local” also has a long and complex history (8). By conventional usage however, “local” is usually used to designate non-white people who were born in Hawai`i. As part of the colonial legacy of Hawai`i’s relationship with the United States, local culture is seen by both haoles and locals as distinct and in some cases, oppositional to “haole culture” (Okamura 1998). Particularly for those US Mainlanders in the US military, “locals” are often regarded with suspicion, trepidation and hostility. The issue of haole identity and the experiences of haole people has been covered in some depth by (Whittaker, 1986), and I refer the interested reader to that work.
According to the urban legend, there is a particular day in the year which is selected somehow by all the local kids in a particular high school or elementary school, and on this day, all the haole students are then targeted by the local students and beaten mercilessly. From what I can gather, there was in fact a “Kill Haole” Day set for the last day of school particularly in the 1970s. However, most of my informants under age of 30 said that they’d never experienced or seen “Kill Haole” Day, so it seems to be a thing of the past as an institution.
The 1970s were a particularly polarized time in terms of racial politics in Hawai`i. There was a great deal of local resistance to mainland and local haole-led economic development. In particular, local community activists were responding to projects which resulted in mass evictions of local people and particularly Native Hawaiians from land that they had previously been living on. In this climate, it’s not surprising that “Kill Haole Day” had a great deal of force behind it. In fact, as one of my informants put it: “Every day was “Kill Haole Day” when I was in grade school.” However, this same informant also noted that as he learned competence in local culture, particularly Hawaiian pidgin (9), his persecutors stopped attacking him. My sense as an outsider and non-witness to these events is that much of the animus surrounding “Kill Haole Day,” was and is a function of how and when children chose to assert or refuse to assert a local identity.
This is not to say that racial tensions and confrontations are things of the past, particularly on high school campuses. Just recently there was a much-covered confrontation at a particular high school in the Pearl Ridge area that allegedly involved local students and African American students (see Bradford and Brennan, 2005, Viotti, 2005) (10). Incidents similar to “Kill Haole Day” especially involving verbal abuse do continue to occur, particularly in more isolated schools. These incidents illustrate the continued presence of racial tension and racialized thinking within Hawaii although the historical context and underlying social issues are notably different from those surrounding the issue of race on the mainland (Okamura, 1998).
Okamura (1998) points out that local identity is not all-inclusive, and that part of its function was as a defense against haole economic exploitation (not only on the plantations, but in more recent times as well) and as a challenge to dominant culture representations of local people as stupid, backward, and naturally inferior to whites and to mainland culture in general. That this defensive posture is experienced as aggression stems from the fact that white mainlanders who encounter locals on local turf will perhaps for the first time, become acquainted with what it feels to be a minority, and to be constantly judged negatively by the color of one’s skin. Euro-americans unused to confronting their own privilege(10) on the mainland, often react extremely negatively to these new experiences.
What is interesting to me is the way that this response to American colonialism continues to feature in mainland haole representations of Hawai`i as a place where to quote one message on a electronic bulletin board for prospective teachers:
“… the sheer magnitude of hatred by the natives, and other pacific islanders (sic) residing in Hawaii, directed at myself and other haoles,(white people), made it impossible for my family to remain in Hawaii.”. (Anonymous n.d.)
In this case, haole identity particularly for those who reject the idea of Hawai`i as “home” is structured in relationship to these narratives of persecution and what Whittaker (1986) refers to as “rituals of inequality” where haole otherness is asserted by locals in ways that reinforce the idea of haole marginality to what one might call full (local) personhood in Hawai`i. In addition to the array of actual incidents where haole marginalization is performed, many haoles but again most persistently, those who have little meaningful informal contact with local people repeat the stories of haole persecution including “Kill Haole Day” as a form of group memory which as in the case of some rumors in the African American community on the US mainland (Turner, 1994), re-state the precarious and contested nature of full personhood for a marginalized community. In both cases, I would argue that the concept of marginalized personhood must be set alongside a wider issue of personal isolation and alienation within “American” culture in general.
Discussion and Conclusion: Engaging with the American Dream
One of the key aspects of “American” culture in these four vignettes I argue is the important role played by anxiety in the ways in which Americans live their lives. One of the central factors in the culture of anxiety, I believe, is the role played by the “American” Dream as a central focus for genuine personhood(11) in “American” culture
Horatio Alger (1832-1899) is the poster child for the American Dream ideology. During his heyday he produced over 100 novels and short stories extolling the virtues of hard work, and expounding on the idea that America was a land of boundless opportunity to those with the native ability to make it so (Hoyt, 1974). Alger of course was not the originator of this idea which has its routes in the Calvinist philosophy of the Puritans (Galbraith, 1958; Kelly, 2001) but he was certainly its most well-known. Despite the fact that Alger’s stories were in fact originally intended primarily as morality tales for young children, Alger himself has become the symbol of the cultural tenet in US society that merit will overcome all obstacles.
One corollary of the American Dream ideology is that the individual is accorded stupendous powers of transformation, and thus tremendous responsibility. This emphasis on ego-centrism, both positive and negative, is a pervasive element in media culture within the US. Afternoon television shows like Judge Judy, Oprah and Dr. Phil demonstrate the power of the personal in everything from litigation to self-improvement to whatever it is that Dr. Phil is helping people overcome right now. This same ego-centrism dovetails remarkably well with other elements of political, philosophical and cultural individualism in “American” culture and also with consumer-capitalism’s emphasis on possessive individual materialism (Galbraith 1958, Jhally n.d, Schor 2004).
However, critics of the Horatio Alger myth (e.g. Dalton, 1995) have pointed to the fact that the basic tenets of the American Dream ideology are manifestly not true for many people in “American” society. An even more pointed critique emerges from Stephen Cruz, a management professional and academic who was one of Studs Terkel’s interviewees in his collection “American Dreams Lost and Found”:
“The American Dream, I see now, is governed not by education, opportunity and hard work, but by power and fear. The higher up the organization you go, the more you have to lose. The dream is not losing (emphasis in original). This is the notion pervading America today: don’t lose.” (Terkel, 1980:??)
Cruz was talking primarily about careers within the corporate structure. But as he himself points, out, this fear of imminent loss is widespread within “American” society in many different occupations and groups.
As commentators upon US class structure have noted for many decades, the emphasis on individual effort as the key to social and personal success has an interesting dark side: If success is a function of individual achievement, then failure must therefore be the result of individual shortcoming (see for example, Weiss, 1969). This cultural structure produces two important effects from the perspective of this article: First, the fear of personal failure in “American” culture weighs extremely heavily on those who are raised in the United States because failure is seen as an indicator of personal moral failure. Secondly, and much more importantly on a sociological level, because other explanations would involve questioning well-established precepts of “American” life, anxieties around personal failure are often externalized onto other agents and forces.
This second point requires some explanation. I am suggesting that the power of the American Dream as an ideology is such that it constitutes a logical trap for those that believe in it: If both failure and success are the sole responsibility of the individual, then one either accepts the truth of the American Dream, and accepts one’s own complicity in failure, or, one rejects the ideology which in turn leads one to reject the idea that the United States is in fact a land of equal opportunity, and a place where the fundamental bases of freedom include the ability to freely remake and better one’s self.
The notion of personhood is important in this discussion since personal responsibility for one’s destiny forms such a basic component of “Americans’” self-image. Since self-reliance is integral to this view of personhood, admitting that one is the sole author of one’s own failures is difficult for then one would have to acknowledge that your personal abilities were less than they should have been, and that one is therefore less of a full person than one should be.
Rejection of the entire structure might be possible for those who feel that the mainstream is already hostile to their own sense of personhood, classically, those already alienated from the mainstream by racial, gender, class or religious hierarchy (see for example, Fordham, 1996). However, for people invested in the idea of being mainstream, rejection is intensely problematic, particularly for those who self-identify as middle class. This is due to the fact that the idea of a meritocratic system is central to bourgeois values in general and to the “American” middle class values system in particular.
Externalizing the anxiety offers a more attractive way out of this predicament for those who are most comfortable thinking of themselves as mainstream and middle class. Under the logic of the American Dream model, it is easier to demonize criminals, terrorists and unnamed(11) competitors within society than it is to accept the possibility that the precariousness of our current lives are either the result of our own shortcomings (following the personal responsibility model) or acts of exploitation mediated by the very system which is supposed to guarantee open access and the promise of self-recreation.
The presence of external threats (whether low-income criminals, unspecified threats on the road or the threat of hostilities from non-whites in Hawai`i) also provides an easily visible target for socially-determined anxieties and fears. After all, “Americans” are taught to see race as a salient factor in the way they view the world, criminal sociopathy on the personal (as opposed to the corporate) level is a staple plot of mainstream entertainment and news media and being haole is a highly visible and highly vulnerable mode of personhood in a state where non-whites are and have been not only a majority but a near majority of the middle class for several generations.
What I am suggesting here is obviously not the sole explanation for the high levels of stress and anxiety in “American” society, but I contend that we will find more useful scope for useful analysis of the United States and US cultures if we pay critical attention to the ideological structure of “American” culture rather than accept those propositions as self-evident truths.
Acknowledgements:
My thanks to the many people with whom I have discussed the nature of “American” society over the years. In particular, I would like to single out Erin Ryan, Carol Tarr, Annie Burks, Sipho Bellinger, Daniel Segal, Signithia Fordham, Randy Matory, Vesna Godina, Lynette Cruz, and Deborah Masterson. Any errors of fact or argument remain of course, my own responsibility
Notes:
(1) In this paper, for the sake of convenience, I follow the common usage of referring to the residents and citizens of the United States as “Americans”. The quotation marks are to alert readers to the fact that America properly refers to the entirety of both the North and South American continents and the term Americans is therefore more appropriately analogous to the terms Asians, Africans, or Europeans. In a certain sense however, I am focusing here primarily on those people who were born or who were raised in the United States. Immigrants are a slightly different case since they generally have not internalized certain key concepts in US culture to the same degree as US born or raised individuals.
(2) Here and throughout the rest of the article, I commit the anthropological sin of over-generalizing. Readers from the US will undoubtedly feel that my analysis is too broad, that I have reified “American” culture into a caricature. I freely admit that this article was composed in haste. Had I more time, I could provide statistics, longitudinal studies and other more objective data. However, I am leading with my own impressions as an ethnographer, because that is how ethnographers begin making sense of their ethnographic experiences. For now, I beg the reader’s indulgence. If it helps, think of this as a published field note rather than a mature and reflective piece of completed analysis.
(3) Personhood in anthropological terms (see Dumont, 1980) is understood as a complex issue. In simplistic terms, personhood speaks to the ways in which an individual is understood to be fully a member of a particular group. It typically involves physical, spiritual and emotional aspects. Such an understanding usually implies a range of rights, responsibilities and attributes.
(4) Some street names have been altered to prevent people from identifying exactly which community I am discussing here.
(5) for more in-depth work on this subject please refer to the work of urban anthropologists such as Setha Low (2004), and urban planners such as Edward Blakely and Gale Snyder (1999).
(6) The term haole according to several sources means “without breath” (ha in Hawaiian means the breath of life, while `ole is the negative verb or noun suffix), referring either to the refusal of early white visitors to Hawaii to engage in the honi, a traditional Hawaiian form of greeting which involves placing one’s nose against the nose of the other person and breathing the same air, or to the attributed belief that white people had no souls. Both of these interpretations seem somewhat apocryphal: Certainly the very first Europeans to arrive in Hawai`i, the British Royal Navy crews of the third Cook expedition were familiar with many Polynesian languages and customs including the honi. The more likely translation of Haole is “foreign” and in the names of plants in particular is used to designate forms of plants that were related to or similar to native plants but that were brought to Hawai`i from other places (often Asia). However, by conventional usage, the term haole is now applied only to white people although for older generations of local people in particular, haole specifically refers to Euro-Americans, with whites from other places being designated by a national label: “German”, “Italian” and so on. As an ethnic group who also worked on the plantations, alongside the non-white inhabitants of Hawai`i, the Portuguese were also regarded as being outside the designation haole. It’s also important to note that haole is often modified to distinguish between “local haoles” - white people who were born in Hawai`i or who have lived in Hawai`i for several decades, and “mainland haoles” who come originally from the US mainland, particularly those who retain US mainland cultural markers and attitudes towards locals. The term “white” is itself open to some debate in Hawaii since people who are phenotypically “white” may still identify -and be identified by others as “local” particularly if they claim Native Hawaiian ancestry. In this article I will again follow conventional usage in Hawai`i and use the lower case for both haole and “local”.
(7) A significant number of people (e.g. Blaisdell, 1997) who identify as descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of Hawai`i at the time of European arrival prefer the term “Kanaka Maoli” which was the original designation in the Hawaiian language used to refer to the group later referred to as aboriginals or Native Hawaiians. This article will follow current conventional usage in Hawai`i, to use the later term “Native Hawaiian” with the understanding that it is not the term of preference for some in that community.
(8) “Local” identity is in fact dynamic and historically situated as Jonathon Okamura (1980; 1994; 1998) so ably points out. In the current time and place, local identity is based on (1) being born in Hawai`i, and (2) being descended from one of the immigrant groups that worked on the sugar plantations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native Hawaiians are sometimes included in the designation “local” particularly in everyday usage of the term, but as some Native Hawaiian activists have pointed out (e.g. Trask, 2000), this usage also obscures the particular roles and particular impacts of colonialism on Native Hawaiians as the indigenous people of the Hawaiian islands.
(9) Hawaiian pidgin, commonly referred to in Hawai`i as Pidgin is more accurately a creole. However, its official linguistic designation, Hawai`i Creole English (HCE), is not widely known outside linguistic circles. HCE emerged out of the same plantation cultural context that produced local culture and it is one of the chief markers of local identity. As a creole language it is actually a separate language from American English and is now being championed as such by a number of local scholars and activists (e.g. Da Pidgin Coup 1999, Tonouchi 2002).
(10) For useful discussions of the concept of privilege as an unearned and unacknowledged form of social hierarchy see McIntosh (1998) and Edwards (1996).
(11) Although perhaps, Charleton Heston was not speaking for himself alone when he asserted to Michael Moore (Moore 2002) that ethnic diversity represented a social threat that necessitated unrestricted gun ownership to preserve the lives and security of “Americans”.
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