 Vice President and Director of Research at the East West Center and host of East West Center Insights. The Center is a cutting-edge research and capacity building institution and we're based right here in Hawaii and our mission is to forge a deeper understanding and connection between the East and the West. So every two weeks here on this show, which on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. in Hawaii, I'll have a conversation with an East West Center expert or one of our guests from our global network about critical issues facing the age of specific region. So do check us out on a eastwestcenter.org slash insights. I'm super excited about our guest today. We have Dr. Akemi Glenn who is the founder and executive director of the Pueblo project which is a Hawaii based non-profit organization which is redefining what it means to be black in Hawaii and in the world through cultivating reconnection with the self, the community and sisters in the land. She's also co-founder of Hawaii Strategy Lab which is an initiative seeking to democratize data and research. Dr. Glenn is a linguist whose research focuses on Pacific languages in particular Tokilao which is quite random and I'm really keen to dig into that and today we're going to be talking about blackness, blackness in the Pacific, culture, race and racism. Dr. Glenn thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Aloha. Hey and before we get into it I just wanted to remind those who are joining us live if you have a question for Dr. Glenn, please submit your questions via email to shows at thinktechhawaii.com that's shows at thinktechhawaii.com and I have to articulate it like that because of my kiwi accent. So thanks for making the time today. I know that you've been super busy over the last couple of weeks doing all kinds of activities and I wanted to dump straight in because the name of the show is called Blackness in the Pacific and what is blackness? It's a wonderful question and not surprisingly one that we get asked quite often at the Popolo project. When we talk about blackness we're talking about a way of categorizing people that does come from Europe. It's a way that relies on ideas about the phenotypes of people to make larger statements about their value in the world and their position in the world and while blackness is historically something that has been used to subjugate people and to make them available for various kinds of extraction whether the actual extraction of their bodies from their land their homeland or the extraction of resources from that land to be kind of circulated in the global markets. There are also really interesting pieces of blackness that also foster solidarity across great distance. So whether we're talking about the African diaspora and the concept of blackness uniting us there because of that shared experience of extraction and movement or we're talking about the connections between Africa and the Pacific under the kind of blanket of blackness there's a lot of interesting kind of solidarity and learning that happens across those those really vast spaces. Right so you don't have to be African to be black in the particular construct is that what you're saying? That's right. So how is then blackness talked about in the Pacific? Well you know in a lot of places in the Pacific the concept of blackness came with Europeans entering into the region so Europeans had lots of experience interacting with black people and people that they kind of categorized as black in the African world and in sub-Saharan Africa eventually in the Americas and the Caribbean and by the time they came to the Pacific they had already kind of calcified a lot of ideas about what it meant to be black. So of course the phenotype that we're looking for is dark skin and curly hair and in truth that's the majority of humans on the planet fall somewhere within the range of blackness. One of the reasons that that was really attractive for folks as colonization was spreading around the globe was that it also identified more people who could be available for this kind of extraction that I mentioned. So you know we have history here in the Pacific of people who were enslaved and there were people who were identified primarily for that kind of extraction from their own home based on their phenotype. So in here in the in the Pacific a lot of the ideas about blackness were actually developed by Europeans in their interactions with African people and when they encountered people on the other side of the world who had curly hair and dark skin they applied those same notions about them that they had kind of constructed in those previous centuries of interaction. Of course that's why we have places like New Guinea called New Guinea by Europeans because they recognize the connections in the phenotype at least and in some cultural aspects between the inhabitants there the native people there and people in Guinea in West Africa as well. I just was thinking about how Pacific people may identify within this construct I mean in your research did you find that people who fit that you know who have those immutable personal characteristics Melanesians for example did they identify within this construct and if so then what do they call it because as a as a data of the Pacific at least the term is relatively new to me and I and I think of it purely in an American context so your insights there. Sure well you know I think it is important to continually connect this back to Europe's construction of the world. This is not an indigenous specific concept just as it was not an indigenous African concept this idea of blackness this kind of you know this consuming category that gets rid of a lot of our differences our ethnic and cultural differences our particular histories and really boils our value as humans and our potential as humans down to our phenotypes and then what those phenotypes say about our particular possible histories. So this idea of blackness in the Pacific I think you're quite right that it's new in some ways in the in the sense of people here actually subscribing to it themselves. So certainly Europeans imposed this as they talked about people in in the western part of the Pacific that we call Melanesia people in Fiji they use these ideas of their encounters with African people and people of African descent on the other side of the world to inform their interactions with folks in the Pacific. But when we really see people embracing this concept of blackness was part of it was as part of the decolonization movements that we saw in the 20th century. So you have people starting to understand that as they're interfacing with colonial regimes like the French for example in the Pacific that they have something in common both in terms of the way that France or the metropolitan power is looking at them in similar ways to people in the Caribbean or in Africa who are who are raised as black and who are of African descent they see some solidarity there and so there was a lot of intentional work that was done kind of politically especially in the 20th century through the middle 20th century into this very moment where people are thinking about small island states in the Caribbean having things in common with small island states here in the Pacific and thinking about how part of the work of encountering blackness in a political realm is reasserting that humanity that it's been kind of extracted in a way by the imposition of this category on people who are quite diverse even if we're talking about people of African descent the continent is huge the diaspora is enormous but we still have this overarching concept of who these people are and how they behave and understanding that that the pacific is also painted in some of those brushstrokes I think is what has drawn people into seeing a solidarity of blackness and being able to talk about the specific ways that that racial identities have been constructed in the pacific that are not separate they're different but connected to some of these ideas that have been developed in Europe and the Atlantic world yeah I mean that really resonates with me but I remember the first when I first began working in the Caribbean uh as a as a pacific woman I I wasn't really sure what to expect and because uh we were all you know for some reason or rather invested in this in this idea of solidarity except that what we found was a lot of differences historical differences um at which uh we're not sort of construed in any kind of a negative way it was more just you know an opportunity to learn about each other and that was that was really um unifying in a sense um but then to direct to to current events um and um sort of the the um the American but also sort of the global and protests um trying to highlight and advocate um for um try to highlight systemic and justice um there's been a lot of pacific peoples showing up in either american cities or where they live in new zealand and australia and then sub-countries other sub-countries aligning themselves to the black lives matters movement and why do you think that is well I think honestly first and foremost it's a movement for the recognition of the humanity of black people um and whether you're identifying as black or not I think there's something very compelling about people who just want some control over their their lives and livelihoods so I think that that is something that I I think is very apparent is resonating with people of all sorts in all different backgrounds I think that's a a huge part of what's drawing people out um and another part of it of course is that um though we might have very different histories we do have some similar experiences in the experience of colonization and even though New Zealand for example has a its own particular history as being formally part of the the british empire a lot of those european ideas about blackness and indigeneity and often those things together informed the ways that policies and security apparatuses were constructed and so the reality is that many of us though not necessarily having the same perhaps level of violence directed at us or the the same kind of frequency of violence directed at our own bodies understand the ways that people who have been colonized are um kind of consumed by the apparatuses that have been built around the colonization of the places where we live and even in a place where there wasn't say settler colonialism where there wasn't a whole population who came in and displaced native people there's still ongoing relationships that have to do with the extraction of resources the way that tourism comes in and reorders the society and it's often the case especially because of these deep-seated ideas about race and who belongs where and who has the right to kind of assert their own economic interests as well that we see people who are darker skinned and who fit closer to this this phenotype ideal that i've been talking about those are the folks on the bottom and those are the folks who most likely are going to have to deal with violence within those systems whether it's at the hands of policing or the military or some other some other force so i think when folks are coming out it's not only because of their own particular self-interest but also acknowledging the kind of larger questions of humanity but informed by their own experience in the various places that they've been for the last several centuries yeah it's super interesting and explain um i like what you said there about um communities that didn't have a massive influx of settlers because i was thinking um when i asked a big question about the sort of hashtag kongans for like lives matter assign that i saw and i was like trying to work out you know will they live in Tonga um and yet they feel um really motivated to align themselves and um here in Hawaii uh obviously uh oh so how long have you been here in Hawaii been here about 17 years here in Hawaii yeah would that make you a local i don't know you have to ask locals about that one i know that i'm not a local that's so so for follow the name of your project that is the Hawaiian word for black yeah is that right well to follow itself as a plant and it's a plant that lived across the entirety of the pacific in new zealand it's called poro poro um it's it has this name a very similar name across all of the pacific it was a convenient um it was brought here by pacific voyagers to hawaii and established itself but it's also a plant that has roots all around the world it lives in tropical and temperate zones and it's a night shade that produces little blackberries so um the the association of this plant with black people we believe probably has been around for some time but was kind of a slang kind of euphemistic reference um we see more of it coming after world war two and there was more sustained presence by people of african descent and larger numbers during the war the the war um and uh depending on who you talk to it's it's either a word that people embrace or it's something pejorative but the reason that my organization has decided to use this and lean into it is because of its long-standing history in the pacific and the fact that not only was this plant something that was valuable enough that voyagers took it with them um when it was established it was a plant that was used for medicine it has antibacterial properties supposedly and and was used traditionally to help with breathing any kind of breathing complaints and so we are interested in thinking about the medicine in popolo and thinking about the relationship between um a native hawaii and a pacific word and the the way that it points to blackness and the way that it points to the contributions of black people and um the fact that though this is a plant from elsewhere it has a home here and it has a valuable home and valuable contribution to make thanks akimi i love that there's something really spiritual and lyrical about all of that and we are about to go to a break and then when we come back i'm going to ask you about um being black and white and what that's like hello ha i'm lillian kimi coast of lillian's vegan world the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in honolulu hawaii i'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and i have lots of uh information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is so do tune in every second thursday from one p.m aloha back to east west inner insights i'm here today talking to dr akimi glenn about blackness in the pacific and uh just before the break i give her a warning but i'm gonna ask her about being black in hawaii so akimi what's that like well it's a big question of course i'm like with one of very many um our community here is a small one um we're between two and three and a half or four percent of the total population here in hawaii which means about 20 000 people give or take across the entirety of the state most of us are here on oahu um the most populous island of course but there's been kind of a growth in our community in the last several years i'm really curious to see the the current census ongoing what what our numbers are going to look like i think there's been an influx of people moving here especially from north america in recent years um you know frankly being black in hawaii is very different um being black anywhere is is a specific experience so um certainly in my experience i was lucky and have been lucky to live and travel across the pacific and and as a younger person lived around the world and moved to hawaii from new york city so certainly being black in honolulu is very different from being black in new york city where there is a very vibrant and rich and diverse kind of representation of african diaspora culture for sure i think one of the challenges and one of the interesting things about being black here is because of our small numbers a lot of folks encounter us mostly through the media and through entertainment and um their ideas about black people and what we do and what we're into and our culture come through those kinds of mass media representations and so part of our work in the popolo project is also to give our larger community some alternative visions of what our lives are like and who we are who we're connected to and the work that we do yeah i um i also moved to hawaii from new york city uh and um i'm not black uh and uh i don't even really identify as a person of color because that is a that's more of an american framing um i would identify as a woman as i'm on new zealander but um my team looked up the stats and apparently hawaii is about roughly three-quarter seventy five percent uh made up with people made up of people who identify as some kind of as a person of color um and i was interested in um you know the experience of the black community relative to um to to that community um and then also your views on the state of race relations here in the state of hawaii and i'm asking that because um hawaii is often held up as this um paradise and there was a recent new york times article that said if you want to be less racist move to hawaii and i would welcome your your views and comments on all of that yeah um i think hawaii is certainly represented as a as a racial utopia and a melting pot and i think there are some wonderfully beautiful pieces of the local culture that have been about you know intercultural interactions and the creation of a new culture that we even call local um but all of that of course has been done in the context of the particular history of hawaii um hawaii only recently becoming part of the united states the overthrow of the the government here by business interests in the 1890s all of that is not only part of hawaii's history but part of american history and certainly the overthrow itself was was very much influenced and fertilized and and encouraged by white supremacist interests just yesterday or a couple days ago there was a a conversation on twitter with some black pacific scholars and folks were talking about um the fact that there was a kukaks clan chapter in fiji in you know not too long ago and a lot of people don't know that there was likewise a kukaks clan chapter here in honolulu um so these are pieces of hawaii's kind of hidden history that are just under the surface and have shaped our our current race relations and i think one of things that's really important in understanding how people conceptualize hawaii as a as a kind of racial melting pot it's in dark and stark contrast to the united states um so that idea of what you being this kind of peaceful utopia with all these different kinds of people living happily together is a foil to what has been happening in the united states for its entire history but certainly we see these these these opportunities to point to hawaii as an exemplar really pop up when there is undeniable racial unrest we've seen it in the last couple of weeks with people kind of saying well you know we don't have these problems in hawaii we do um they just look a little bit different because we have a kind of different community composition here um there are certainly there certainly is violence um there's certainly police involved deaths here but it's not the same the same uh communities that are directly impacted so that new york times article last year um i was one of the people that was interviewed for that discussion and got to talk with the writer of the article who was very interested not so much in the experience of us our community on the day to day but looking at some research that was coming out of u h ma noa looking at perceptions by white people of people of color to use that category here in hawaii and what they found was because of the composition of the community here some of the racialized ideas that people have in north america didn't have a clear analog when folks showed up in hawaii so it's mostly looking at transplants and their attitudes and this new york time science writer was really curious about that and wondering coming from new york himself and in a place that is certainly very racialized and has a history of segregation and violence and all of those things connected to race he was interested in looking for a place that um that doesn't have that his conclusion of course was that having mixed race people uh be almost 25 percent of the community here uh his idea was that mixed race people were actually solving the problem of race in hawaii and it was this idea of having people who had diverse genealogies in one place that kind of interrupted the ideas that white people would have about racializing or categorizing people in certain racialized ways that would inform policy and structures of society um but you know where i take where i took and still take some issue with that conclusion is that um the united states is also a history of mixed race people and diverse genealogies and communities and in my own family which which he did mention in that article my ancestors are from from africa certainly but also from the uk um from southern china and also indigenous american people but both of my parents were considered black because of the way that the racialization works in north america it just simply doesn't work the same way in hawaii or in the pacific even though we do this category of blackness the ways that people get assigned to it are different yeah uh no that i that explains a lot because i'm like i don't ascribe to to any of those um terms and i and i'm the mixed race but i am i'm still just trying to get over the fact that you uh told us about kkk alcove here and in pvm i'm pretty shocked by that but um but perhaps more interested in um uh your point about hawaii being used as a foil we compared to the us and then sort of you know and then its description of the utopia utopia relative to other places where the where racial relations aren't quite as harmonious but that doesn't detract us i think from the from the issues that are here um and uh when i first arrived um just a few years ago now um uh i i mean i've never really experienced any overt racism in the summer person but i was told a lot anecdotally uh that there is overt racism against the micronesian community here and i was interested in your view on that certainly um that's something that's impossible to look away from and i think for for someone like myself coming from a experience of being racialized as black in north america and under kind of an american understanding of what race means and the consequences um there are a lot of things that are happening in the micronesian community and to the micronesian community that are in parallel to the ways that black people have been racialized um ideas around criminality over policing um violence at the hands of police even vigilante violence uh one of the stories that i often try to bring up and remind people up here in hawaii is just recently a 16 year old boy named starski willey was killed by a neighbor in kulehi valley suspected of being um involved in a burglary and that story and the way that it was covered in our local news media was almost i mean it was out of the kind of black lives matter of playbook because it drew it drew on these ideas of this teen just kind of by virtue of the kind of boy he was the fact that he was truquis the fact that he was living in public housing all of those things pointed to the possibility of his criminality even though there was no evidence that this this young child was involved in any criminal behavior even the way that his his photos were represented in the news media there were some photos where his skin had been darkened um or where the contrast had been played with a bit or he was he was um shown in a hoodie or he was shown looking very defiant these are all kinds of visual representations of blackness and especially the association between blackness and criminality that get applied to um to micronesian people there's a wonderful news not news but a legal article written in the hawaii law review several years ago by um professor charles lorenz was not retired from richardson school of law where he talks about local kind implicit bias and he makes direct parallels between the ways that micronesian people are talked about in popular culture here in hawaii and especially in the law including ways that people have been given harsher sentences than others who've committed similar crimes and at sentencing the judge has mentioned i'm giving you this extra penalty because your micronesian and the rest of your community needs to be taught a lesson so we do have evidence of that and often when people um talk about some of the outrages that the micronesian community has been subjected to in these ways they say well they're the newest immigrants here and every new immigrant group has to kind of you know take their lumps until they get integrated into the society but the reality is um that's not the case necessarily and when we look at other small immigrant groups micronesians are about two percent of the population as well they're a very small group of people in terms of numbers um we have the same kinds of patterns that you see with black people on the continent and in other places um the levels of incarceration over policing but also just general attitudes about their worth um their contribution to society um even so far that that there are some people in certain public spaces who hide their micronesian identity so that they are able to be afforded more respect for care in dealing with co-workers or other people in the community so there there are a lot of parallels both culturally and structurally in the ways that those folks have been treated at the same time a lot of people who are here because of the compacts free association have come here for education for health care services for a better life just like everyone else and those stories are often not shared what we most likely hear in the in the public kind of discourse about micronesians here is that exact kind of racialization where it's focused on the criminality the strangeness of their culture their foreignness and their their kind of the ways that they're at odds with what we think of as local and what we think belongs here in Hawaii. Thank you for giving me extremely important points um intrinsically valuable in all themselves but also on the on the cusp of the um the negotiation of the compacts again between the U.S. and then Palau and the Federal States of my community and from our islands uh I have run over time and um I'm gonna have to get you on again because I didn't get to ask you about Tokulao so I'm gonna have to definitely do this again thank you so much for your time today and uh for showing your your views so freely with us and um and then if you're watching and you have any questions please follow up and we'll get Dr. Glynn on the show you've been watching East West Center Insights thank you very much for spending your afternoon with us Aloha