Want to Be Less Racist? Move to HawaiiPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2019-07-28 23:14Z by Steven |
Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii
The New York Times
2019-06-28
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Contributing Opinion Writer
Photographs by Damon Winter
 We asked people on Oahu to give their ethnicity. Many had long answers. Photographs by Damon Winter/The New York Times; Illustration by Katie Scott |
The “aloha spirit” may hold a deep lesson for all of us.
HONOLULU — Kristin Pauker still remembers her uncle’s warning about Dartmouth. “It’s a white institution,” he said. “You’re going to feel out of place.”
Dr. Pauker, who is now a psychology professor, is of mixed ancestry, her mother of Japanese descent and her father white from an Italian-Irish background. Applying to colleges, she was keen to leave Hawaii for the East Coast, eager to see something new and different. But almost immediately after she arrived on campus in 1998, she understood what her uncle had meant.
She encountered a barrage of questions from fellow students. What was her ethnicity? Where was she from? Was she Native Hawaiian? The questions seemed innocent on the surface, but she sensed that the students were really asking what box to put her in. And that categorization would determine how they treated her. “It opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone sees race the same way,” she told me…
Read the entire article here.