Joseph W. Bean

This book is not “everything you ever wanted to know about” ethnicity in Hawai‘i. It rambles. It grouses. It stalls. And it gets interesting.

Few things are more disappointing to a reader than discovering that a book is not as good as expected. There’s one thing that’s worse, though: Finding out that a book simply is not what it claimed to be. If you were to pick up a book called Growing Roses in the Desert, but the whole book was really about training ivy to cover walls, how would you feel? It’s still a book about plants. It’s still a how-to guide. But it is not what the title promised. That is exactly the case with Jonathan T. Okamura’s Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i. Its content is generally in the neighborhood of the title, but only very generally.

In the introduction, the author explains one of the significant reasons for the book’s failure to deliver. “While clearly an academic work, Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i also expresses my personal advocacy and concern for a qualitatively better society in Hawai‘i where ethnicity is not a restrictive barrier to individual dreams and collective goals.” How many incompatible intentions can one book contain? Add to these Okamura’s habit of confusing himself with his own creative definitions of race, culture, ethnicity and other central terms, and you have a clumsy text that never quite gives readers either a battery of ideas or the personal “stuff” the author admits to mixing in.

So this is a bad book, right? Not necessarily. If you can forgive Okamura’s failed attempt to present himself as an academic (which, by the way, he actually is, outside this book), you get to listen to a lifetime of cocktail party conversation on the subject of the cultural, ethnic and racial differences that blend and/or conflict in Hawai‘i. As a University of Hawai‘i professor, the “speaker” is used to lecturing rather than chatting, so you have to introduce the casual atmosphere and establish your right to challenge his thinking. No problem.

If you fall into the trap of feeling you are reading an authoritative treatise by a knowledgeable writer who has his intellectual ducks in a row, Ethnicity becomes a dreary affair. If you let yourself laugh as though you’ve already downed a martini when he misuses a word (like when he confuses “compose” and “comprise”) or when he states opinion as fact or conflates unrelated ideas (like higher tuition fees equal blatant racism)… well, take a breath, shout your version of the truth at the book, and storm away for a few minutes. Soon, you’ll come back to the book just as you’d come back to an interestingly crazy guy at a cocktail party.

If you’re a grammar addict, or just happen to prefer decent English, Okamura will give you plenty to laugh about: “The intersection of ethnic identity and social structure reinforces each other….” How would a person say that in English? That depends what you guess the author meant to say. So, there’s humor aplenty, all of it unintentional, which gives you all the permission you need to also laugh at or argue with the thinking. Hey, he won’t be there to watch or hear your reactions.

Meantime, if the subjects of race, ethnicity, culture and equality interest you, you’ll probably be glad to read Okamura’s book. I am glad I read it.

I would like to tell you what the author advocates and which personal concerns he considers important to developing a better Hawai‘i. I would, but I can’t, because he never made any of that clear to me. However, what Okamura did give me is important. He gave me reason to think about my own feelings, assumptions and hopes concerning our melting pot (or not) society here in the islands. That’s worth something to be sure.

Besides, I love laughing at other people’s errors of logic, grammar and word usage. So, this was fun. (Don’t tell Okamura you laughed. He even finds local, ethnic-jumble humor offensive.)

Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i