Crawford's Reinforcement of the Racial Divide Between Haoles and Native Hawiians

As is evident in many readings from Pacific Passages, there is an underlying racial divide between the first two predominant political/cultural dynamics in Hawaii, the Haoles and the Native Hawaiians.   In missionary/traveler writings from the 18^th and 19^th century, this divide is often glaringly obvious, as they reduce the Native Hawaiians to “amphibious beings” or simply refer to them as “heathens” (87, 117).  Unfortunately, this racial subjugation of Native Hawaiians bleeds into into texts from the 20^th century, as in the excerpt from M. Leola Crawford’s Seven Weeks in Hawaii.  While the racial undertone in Crawford’s text is slight, one cannot ignore is presence.

Crawford’s begins her description of Duke Kahanamoku in a completely laudatory way: not only did “he [carry] the honors at the Olympic Games in Stockholm…[but] he is a splendid looking fellow” (151).  However, she closes her portrayal of her “champion swimmer…guide” with an adjective that reinforces a harmful stereotype from Americas past: that the Duke is “dark as an Indian” (151).  To the untrained eye, this seemingly harmless simile merely allows the reader to understand the the color of Duke’s skin via a reference that most early 20^th century readers would recognize and understand.  However, the average modern reader can comprehend that this does much more than express the color of his skin: it equates the Duke, and thus Native Hawaiians, with his mainland relative, the Native American, who for centuries had been referred to as savages of a lower species.

Crawford includes another detail in her depiction of the Duke again reveals a minor, yet discernable, racial undertone within her text: at the end of the next paragraph the Duke laughs and shows his “pearly white teeth” (152).  This image of a dark skinned person with “pearly white teeth” is eerily reminiscent of the Uncle Tom caricature that was used to reinforce the divide between white Americans and African Americans on the mainland (see examples here).

Now, this is not to say that Crawford is an outright racist.  Her praises of the Duke in the beginning of the text along with the fact that she interacts with him throughout her day of surfing reveals that she doesn’t necessarily think that Duke is a lower class of human.  However, this excerpt from M. Leola Crawford’s Seven Weeks in Hawaii reveals that the racial subjugation of the Native Hawaiians continues into the beginning of the 20^th century.