Introduction
Hawai‘iFootnote 1 stands apart from all other American states because of the emergence there of a multiracial mainstream society, where some non-White groups—Chinese and Japanese, in particular—share the apex of the ethnoracial hierarchy with Whites. This development sharply contrasts with the White dominance historically characteristic of the continental United States and is evident in Hawai‘i in numerous ways in the polity and the economy. For example, the contemporary Hawai‘i political elite, as reflected in Congressional representation and governorships, has been largely constituted by members of these groups, with individuals of Japanese origin especially prominent. The economic elite—the persons of great wealth and the corporate leadership—is similar, but with a stronger representation of Whites. An exception to this East Asian-White dominance, however, occurs in the cultural domain: The everyday interaction culture of “locals” is marked by a privileged position for native Hawaiians and denigrates “haoles” (non-local Whites), who are seen as the contemporary embodiment of the illegitimate colonizers of the Hawai‘i Islands (Okamura Reference Okamura2008).
This multiracial mainstream has emerged from a seemingly unpromising history of settler colonialismFootnote 2 and racial capitalism.Footnote 3 The initial contacts with Whites, starting with Captain Cook’s landing in Hawai‘i in 1778, ignited a precipitous demographic decline in the indigenous population due to the introduction of new diseases, such as measles, smallpox, and syphilis. The large-scale arrival of Whites that began in the early nineteenth century with American Protestant missionaries initiated the process of settler colonialism, as their descendants acquired land at the expense of Native Hawaiians and developed a plantation economy based especially on sugar (Fuchs Reference Fuchs1961). Because of the demographic decline of the Native Hawaiians and their success in resisting plantation labor, plantation owners turned for a labor supply to the immigration of contract workers, mainly from Asia, starting with China and Japan. The economic and political interests of the White plantation owners and businessmen eventually forced an end to the traditional political order and independence, as they overthrew the monarchy in 1893 and brought about U.S. annexation in 1898.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Hawai‘i was a racially stratified plantation society, evincing the hallmarks of White supremacy. A transformation to a multiracial mainstream nevertheless took place in the second half of the century, with World War II marking the caesura. By “mainstream,” we refer to a part of a society where the social and economic significance of ethnoracial distinctions has attenuated and, in particular, individuals located within it have access to socially valued statuses provided that they possess other requirements, such as necessary educational credentials (Alba and Duyvendak, Reference Alba and Duyvendak2019). The empirical proof of this concept is the multiethnic, religiously diverse White mainstream that emerged in the continental United States, also during the second half of the twentieth century, out of the Anglo-Protestant dominance that had existed since the colonial period (Alba and Nee, Reference Alba and Nee2003).
The primary mechanism that drove the transformation in Hawai‘i was the same as that operating on the mainland and lay in broadly similar economic developments after World War II. In particular, beginning with the decline of agricultural employment, the occupational structure shifted toward middle-class and professional and managerial occupations, stoked in Hawai‘i by the surging tourism industry. And higher education, especially in the public, or state-financed, sector, expanded to produce the necessary workforce. The result can be described as a “non-zero-sum mobility” situation: that is, because there were not enough qualified members of the then-dominant group to fill all the new positions, socioeconomic spaces were available for members of other groups to ascend (Alba Reference Alba2020). On the mainland, the so-called White ethnics, such as Irish, Italians, and eastern European Jews, benefitted from the massive non-zero-sum mobility of this period. However, the demographic situation in the archipelago was very different. Instead of Whites, the beneficiaries on Hawai‘i were mainly East Asian ethnic groups.
The establishment of a multiracial mainstream in Hawai‘i has not meant an end to ethnoracial stratification, however. Jonathan Okamura (Reference Okamura2008) revealed pronounced socioeconomic inequalities at the beginning of the twenty-first century between Chinese, Japanese, and Whites, on the one hand, and Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and Samoans, on the other. Recent American Community Survey data (2015–2019) show that this stratification remains sharply etched. For example, among adults twenty-five and older, the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites are well ahead in terms of the educational qualifications for well-paying jobs, with nearly half of each group possessing at least the baccalaureate degree (Table 1). At the other end of the spectrum, less than a quarter of Filipinos have this level of educational attainment, as do just 15% of unmixed Native Hawaiians.
Table 1. Characteristics (in Percentages) of Ethnoracial Groups in Hawai‘i
Note: * indicates group sample too small.
Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey (Ruggles et al., Reference Ruggles, Sarah, Matthew, Daniel, Grace, Julia A, Richards, Renae, Jonathan and Kari2025).
Nevertheless, the emergence of a multiracial mainstream deserves our attention at a moment when the resilience of White domination in the larger society is the focus of so much sociological theorizing and empirical research (Feagin Reference Feagin2000; Jung Reference Jung2009; Kendi Reference Kendi2019), and the twenty-first-century truth of Du Bois’s (Reference Du Bois1903) famous aphorism about the twentieth-century color line is assumed. Moreover, this development in Hawai‘i has been accompanied by far more racial mixing than can be found on the mainland. In the following exposition, we trace the emergence of the Hawaiian mainstream and demonstrate its multiracial character. In our conclusion, we examine the clues that the societal transformation in Hawai‘i might offer for the socio-demographic future of the continental United States itself, where the twenty-first-century demographic context also means that Whites are no longer the main beneficiaries of present-day non-zero-sum mobility (Alba Reference Alba2020).
A History of Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism
The arrival of Whites in the early 1800’s set in motion a process of colonial settlement that would transform Hawaiian society by the end of the nineteenth century. The demographic decline of the native population began immediately upon the first documented contact with Whites—the 1778 landfall in Hawai‘i of British Captain James Cook—due primarily to the introduction of Western diseases to which the indigenous population lacked immunity. David Swanson (Reference Swanson2019) estimates that the native population had been reduced to half its pre-contact number by 1800 and continued to decline through the nineteenth century. In 1900, the first U.S. Census after annexation found just under 40,000 Native Hawaiians in the archipelago (Office of Hawaiian Affairs 2017).
During the second half of the nineteenth century, as settler colonialism (Nakano Glenn Reference Nakano Glenn2015) would anticipate, most native Hawaiians lost their land, much of which was purchased or leased by Whites, who established sugar plantations and cattle ranches. The key event was the so-called Great Mahele in the middle of the century. In the prior Hawaiian system, land could not be owned individually—hence, bought or sold—but use rights could be acquired from controlling chiefs. Under pressure from haoles who wanted to make the land more profitable, the kingdom introduced the Great Mahele, which divided the land among the crown, the chiefs, and commoners and allowed ownership (“secure title”) and alienation (or sale) (Banner Reference Banner2005; Linnekin Reference Linnekin1987). Commoners could apply for title to the land they occupied and used, but apparently few did. Meanwhile, the Alien Land Ownership Act of 1850 allowed foreigners (which White Americans then were) to own land for the first time. After the Mahele, Linnekin (Reference Linnekin1987) observes, “the long-term effect was dispossession for most of the Hawaiian people” (p. 26), since less than 30,000 acres (out of approximately 4 million in total on the islands) were awarded to native Hawaiian commoners. For the more elite native possessors of land, sale was a way of acquiring cash, and a land market arose very quickly after the Mahele.
Finding that native Hawaiians were unsuited to the labor regime they had in mind (and, in any event, were declining in numbers), the planters began early to import contract workers, mainly from Asian countries, who were expected to work for a period of years and then return home. The first to arrive in large numbers came from China, starting in the 1850s, and totaled about 50,000 within a few decades. Immigration from China was throttled, however, by the prospect of American annexation because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 would then apply. An Asian source not initially limited by law was Japan, which supplied the largest group of workers, nearly 200,000 strong, until the U.S. restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s cut off their inflow. Filipinos were still eligible to immigrate after this legislation because, as a result of the acquisition of the Philippines by the United States after the Spanish-American War, they were non-citizen American nationals. By the early twentieth century, Filipinos formed the largest ethnoracial group on the plantations (Toth Fox Reference Toth Fox2017). Other groups added to the plantation workforce included Koreans, Portuguese (mainly from Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Ricans.
In its early twentieth-century heyday, the plantation society in Hawai‘i was rigidly structured along ethnoracial lines, seemingly an epitome of racial capitalism. At the pinnacle was the White owner family, usually of American or British ancestry, and not infrequently descended from the early nineteenth-century missionaries. At the base of the plantation pyramid were immigrant workers, whose lives were ruled by harsh work regimens and thoroughgoing segregation and stratification according to national origin. Workers were paid at rates that differed by national origin, and housing on the plantation often was separated according to ethnic origin. Still, the inhabitants could prepare and eat the foods to which they were accustomed and often could celebrate their own religions and holidays. Set above them were supervisors (lunas in Hawaiian parlance), who were usually of European (especially Portuguese) descent and watched over them in the fields (Takaki Reference Takaki1983).
The ethnically divided plantation was an organizational means of control over workers. The divisions among distinct national communities impeded the ability of workers to mobilize for better wages and working conditions (Jung Reference Jung2003). The early trade unions of plantation field hands were ethnically exclusive, formed separately by the Japanese and Filipinos. In 1909, the Japanese workers went on strike, but they were not joined by the Filipinos or others. The plantations held out, and after several months, the strike was called off, with no immediate gain (although the plantations did raise the wages of Japanese workers later that year). The first multiracial action took place in 1920, when the Japanese and Filipino unions cooperated and went on strike, joined by some of the other workers. Moon-kie Jung (Reference Jung2003) dates the achievement of full multiracial working-class solidarity in Hawai‘i to the labor organizing of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the late 1930s, which included workers on the plantations, and its successful strike against the sugar plantations in 1946.
Although Hawai‘i remained an independent kingdom until late in the nineteenth century, elite Whites became ever more powerful actors in its political life during the period. They were chiefly Hawai‘i-born descendants of early settlers or U.S.-born migrants who had become wealthy through their family and business connections to the plantations. In 1887, a group headed by such figures as Sanford Dole of the Dole family and backed by an American-led militia called the Hawaiian Rifles forced the King to sign the so-called Bayonet Constitution, reducing his power and increasing theirs. Then, in 1893, many of the same players staged a coup d’état to overthrow the monarchy, prevailing on the American minister in Hawai‘i to land a contingent of U.S. Marines in their support. The successful coup was followed by the establishment of the Republic of Hawai‘i, with Sanford Dole as President and other elite Whites occupying the major offices of government. This group achieved its ultimate goal in 1898 when they brought about the annexation of Hawai‘i by the United States, with Dole as the first governor. A major motive for annexation was the group’s economic interests, since incorporation into the United States ensured the tariff-free entry into the mainland of Hawai‘i’s sugar.
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, the economic and political structures associated with elite Whites at the end of the previous century remained supreme. The economy depended on exports to the mainland, especially of sugar and pineapples, produced by the plantation system, which in turn was largely controlled by the “Big Five,” interlocking companies that controlled the agricultural industries in the archipelago. The political system was that of a territory, not a state, with a governor, possessing unusual powers of appointment, and territorial courts appointed by the U.S. President (with the consent of the Senate). The governors of the territory were invariably Anglo Whites (Fuchs Reference Fuchs1961).
The 1900 act of the U.S. Congress that extended territorial status to Hawai‘i also created a bicameral legislature, and this was the sole exception to the unqualified hegemony of elite Whites. The 1900 act did not comply with their aspirations because it extended suffrage to male citizens “able to speak, read and write the English or Hawaiian Language” (Williams Reference Williams2015), and thereby to the mass of native Hawaiian men, who became in fact the majority of the electorate.Footnote 4 (Immigrant Asians could not become American citizens under U.S. law in this period.) The very first elections, in 1900, delivered a wake-up call to the planter elite because of the success of the anti-haole Home Rule party, both in legislative seats and for the crucial position of delegate to the U.S. Congress.
The electoral strength of the Native Hawaiians forced elite Whites to accept them as junior partners in an alliance to maintain political control.Footnote 5 To this end, the Republican Party, which represented the planters’ interests, recruited a member of the Hawaiian royal family to run for the position of Congressional delegate and to help them bring many local chiefs into their fold. In addition, numerous lower-level patronage positions, such as those in law enforcement, were filled by the Native Hawaiians. These tactics allowed the Republican Party to remain in power throughout the remainder of the pre-World War II period (Fuchs Reference Fuchs1961).
Whites sought to reinforce their superior position also through the school system. Elite Whites could send their children to private schools, the best known of which was the Punahou school, founded by missionaries in 1841. In the early part of the twentieth century, English-speaking parents, insisting that their children could not make adequate educational progress in public schools attended by immigrant students, brought about the creation of English Standard Schools as part of the public system.Footnote 6 Admission to these schools was based on a language test, oral and, for older children, written. The result was a segregated school system. A 1947 study showed that the majority of White children (other than the Portuguese) attended English Standard or private schools, whereas the large majorities of most non-White groups were in the other part of the public system: 86% of Filipino and Japanese children, and 71% of Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian children. Other studies revealed that the academic skills of graduates of the English Standard Schools were clearly superior to those from other public schools (Hughes Reference Hughes1993).
The Post-plantation Era in Hawai‘i
World War II would act as a bridge from the Hawai‘i of the plantation economy to the modern Hawai‘i of military employment; tourism; and service, retail, and managerial work. Much as Puerto Rico had been a defensive bulwark in the South Atlantic, Hawai‘i was a strategic defensive outpost in the South Pacific that made it a valuable target for a Japanese attack in late 1941. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, a U.S. naval base in Honolulu, ineluctably drew the United States into the war for domination of the Pacific basin, much of which Japan had been trying to subjugate since its conquest of Korea thirty years earlier. In the aftermath of the anti-Japanese movement on the Pacific Coast and sharp immigration restrictions in the early twentieth century, the attack on Pearl Harbor heightened anti-Japanese feeling and fears of a “fifth column” inside of American territory. These anxieties resulted in a decision to incarcerate (“intern”) some 120,000 Japanese-descended inhabitants of the West Coast, more than two-thirds of them native-born U.S. citizens (Daniels Reference Daniels2004), and to move them away from the coast. Internment was possible because the population of Japanese-descended people on the West Coast was comparatively small, making the removal process less visible to the rest of the country.
For demographic, political, and economic reasons, the war played out very differently for the numerous Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i. Internment was not feasible because the Japanese were a much larger part of the population and economy than on the mainland and could not simply be withdrawn from the labor force. Instead, Hawaiian authorities imposed a blanket martial law on the islands immediately after December 7. At least in the eyes of one historian, the martial law—which had been developed by the U.S. military years earlier in anticipation of a possible war with Japan—was directed chiefly at the Japanese (Okihiro Reference Okihiro1991, quoted in Okamura Reference Okamura2014). Meanwhile, the growth of the Japanese second generation, Hawai‘i-born citizens of the United States (even if often dual nationals; see Okamura Reference Okamura2014), and their fierce desire to be accepted as Americans led many of them to enlist in the military to defend the United States. Famously, many joined the segregated 442nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in Europe and become the most-decorated combat unit in U.S. military history. Having demonstrated their loyalty through combat service, participation in the military later gave these former soldiers access to the GI Bill, which offered American men access to opportunities for education and upward mobility after the war. The relatively large numbers of Japanese and their tight-knit relationships would soon help them gain a strong position in the economy and, as a result, in the politics of Hawai‘i as well.
The war also brought with it an important change in the status of the Chinese population in the United States. Chinese laborers had been barred by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act from entry into the United States, and those already present could not become U.S. citizens because of the racial restrictions in naturalization law. The immigration barrier was strengthened by the 1920s laws that sharply reversed the previous four decades of mass immigration. But whereas the United States was at war with Japan, it was fighting now in alliance with one of Japan’s main targets, the Chinese. This enemy-of-my-enemy relationship led to the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943, which mildly relaxed the previous restrictions on Chinese immigration and allowed for the naturalization of Chinese immigrants living in the United States. The sixty years of Chinese exclusion had severely limited the numbers of Chinese coming into the United States, but at least more could now enter and those already present could enjoy the privileges of citizenship.
The twilight of exclusively White domination over Hawai‘i was signaled by the interracially organized sugar strike of 1946, which presented a major challenge to the hegemony of the “Big Five,” and by the “Democratic (Party) revolution” of 1954, which was spearheaded by second-generation (and hence U.S.-citizen) Japanese such as 442nd veteran and later Senator Daniel Inouye (Okamura Reference Okamura2014). When the territory was adopted in 1959 as the fiftieth state in the union, the stronger ties of statehood to the American mainland added potent fuel to an ongoing economic transformation. Along with the rise of both commercial aviation and a burgeoning middle class, Hawai‘i began to attract growing numbers of tourists from the continental United States who were seduced by the archipelago’s beauty, its “aloha spirit,” and its opportunities for outdoor recreation.
With the accelerating shift toward a post-plantation economy of tourism, services, and military employment, the stage was set: After decades of exclusion, exploitation, and mistreatment in the plantation economy, two of Hawai‘i’s largest non-White racial groups, the Japanese and the Chinese, were poised to dramatically improve their position in Hawai‘i society. The economic transformation of the archipelago, which paralleled changes on the mainland, provided the opportunities for them to do so. The transformation involved a rapid decline in the jobs at the lower end of the occupational structure, which had been mostly associated with the plantation economy. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of jobs in agriculture (and fishing, also of consequence in the islands) plummeted by nearly half, even though the total number of employed was growing. By contrast, other jobs were proliferating, especially in business and financial sectors, the professions, and public administration (Lind Reference Lind1955). These developments encapsulate the development of large-scale non-zero-sum mobility similar to that on the mainland, which enabled the socioeconomic uplift of the White ethnics (Alba Reference Alba2020).
By the 1970s, a new Hawaiian economy had fully emerged. According to Andrew Lind (Reference Lind1980), the percentage of the male workforce in professional and technical occupations more than doubled between 1950 and 1977, from 7.3% to 15.3%. Of course, the workforce was also growing in this period, so the number of professional and technical jobs added in the period was even larger: the 8800 jobs in 1950 had become 30,900 in 1977, a more than threefold increase. The number of employed men in managerial occupations was also soaring, from 12,600 in 1940 to 37,900 in 1977 (or 10.6% of the male workforce in 1940 vs. 18.8% in 1977). Both categories encompass numerous specific kinds of jobs (e.g., computer programmers, physicians, accountants, company executives) for which education beyond the high school diploma is expected; and, as on the mainland, higher education on the archipelago had expanded robustly in the post-war period.
In particular, the University of Hawai‘i, founded in 1907, developed into a full-fledged university, especially after statehood in 1959, and trained many Hawaiian residents for these new positions. In the late 1940s, the main campus at Manoa on Oahu was still quite inauspicious, with buildings assembled in part from left-over structures built for the war and providing education to about 3000 students, a third of them veterans. Growth proceeded slowly at first; by 1955 Manoa enrollment had just surpassed 5000. Then the acquisition of statehood produced federal funding that sparked a more robust expansion. New campuses, schools, and programs proliferated, such as the East-West Center in 1960, a Department of Hotel Management and Tourism in 1961 (which became a School of Travel Industry Management in 1966), and a host of new PhD programs by the early 1960s (Kamins et al., Reference Kamins and Potter1998). The campuses, including community colleges, were joined together in a single statewide system in 1965.
By 1963, the enrollment at Manoa had climbed to 10,000, more than three times what it had been just fifteen years before. A study of the student body in the early 1960s shows that the largest ethnoracial groups at the university were Japanese, White, and Chinese (in that order). The Japanese, more than half of all the students, and the Chinese, at about a seventh of them, were overrepresented relative to their population shares. Whites, who were a bit more than a quarter of the Manoa students, were underrepresented; but many undoubtedly had other options for higher education on the mainland. Native Hawaiians and Filipinos were more severely underrepresented, with the native group a scant 1% of University of Hawai‘i students compared to a sixth of the state’s population at the time (Kamins et al., Reference Kamins and Potter1998). At the high point of this period of uncommon mobility, these groups were not advancing at the same rate as the Chinese and Japanese. The university, in other words, was a broad avenue of social ascent only for a part of the previously marginalized non-White groups.
Interracial marriage began to climb in this period as the socioeconomic order underwent rearrangement. To be sure, interracial mixing had already become a signature feature of Hawai‘i society, a propensity widely seen as part of the aloha spirit. As was the case in other settler colonial contexts, where the initial waves of settlers were dominated by males, early mixing had involved White men pairing with Native women. In addition, the migration of the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century had been male dominated, and many of these migrants also found partners in the Native Hawaiian population. The mixing was so extensive that the early twentieth century demographic data provided a “part Hawaiian” category (Office of Hawaiian Affairs 2017). According to Margaret Lam (Reference Lam1936), membership in the category was dominated by individuals who combined Hawaiian ancestry with either Chinese or White (American or European).
The Japanese, the largest ethnoracial group in Hawai‘i at mid-century, were the acid test of the spread of intermarriage because of their high rate of endogamy to that point. Unlike the Chinese, they were able to offset the skewed sex ratio of the immigrant workers by importing so-called picture brides, married in Japan to absent immigrants represented by pictures, before the United States closed the gate on immigration from Asia in the 1920s. By the 1930s, their outmarriage rate was still only 5%, well below that for any other group (Lind Reference Lind1955). Japanese endogamy no doubt created an impression of insularity, adding to White suspicions about their loyalty after Pearl Harbor. But by the 1970s, the Japanese outmarriage rate had reached about 35% (32% for men, 39% for women). And that of the Chinese had soared to over 60% (61% for men, 66% for women). Whites were then the laggards, as their intermarriage rate had climbed slowly to just under a quarter (26% for men, 21% for women).
By the 1970s, almost 30% of births involved parents from two different major ethnoracial groups (counting all the Asian groups as part of a single panethnic category, to parallel mixed-race accounting on the mainland). This degree of mixing had reached a level well above that observed on the mainland in the early twenty-first century (Alba Reference Alba2020), and was another indication that Hawai‘i had moved far beyond the rigidly segregated plantation society of the early twentieth century.
During the second half of the twentieth century, in sum, the Japanese and Chinese were both sizable segments of the islands’ population and disproportionately well-educated. They thus soon began to distance themselves from the non-White and predominantly working-class groups in Hawai‘i society, such as the Native Hawaiians, Filipinos, Samoans, Puerto Ricans, Portuguese, and others, and to challenge White dominance (Okamura Reference Okamura2008). Indeed, the Japanese, in particular, had become so prosperous and powerful that “the anti-Japanese movement [among whites during the first half of the twentieth century] had been transformed into the anti-Japanese backlash” coming from other ethnic groups who believed that Japanese Americans “had far more than their fair share of power” (Okamura Reference Okamura2014, p. 105).
Hawai‘i Today
The Hawai‘i of today has emerged from the transformation that began in the postwar period. The economy has shifted toward the “post-industrial” variety foreseen fifty years ago by Daniel Bell (Reference Bell1973), though without much in the way of the technological innovation that Bell had envisioned. Instead, Hawai‘i has been transformed into a combination of laid-back tourist destination and far-offshore military outpost. There is little industrial manufacturing and instead an extensive dependence on tourism; service work, generally low-paid and dead-end, constitutes the largest segment of employment for men and the second largest for women (Okamura Reference Okamura2008). The military, meanwhile, constitutes a major source of employment. As of mid-2022, there were some 90,000 active-duty military personnel and their dependents resident in the islands.Footnote 7 In the same year, federal military expenditures accounted for approximately 6% of Hawai‘i’s total gross domestic product.Footnote 8
In what follows, we lay out the evidence for our conclusion that a multiracial mainstream has emerged in the archipelago. We view a “mainstream” as an outgrowth of “assimilation,” as defined by Richard Alba and Victor Nee (Reference Alba and Nee2003): “the decline of an ethnic distinction” (p. 11; see also Drouhot Reference Drouhot2024). The mainstream is equated with “that part of the society within which ethnic and racial origins have at most minor impacts on life chances or opportunities” (Alba and Nee, Reference Alba and Nee2003, p. 12)—both in terms of the position within economic and power hierarchies and also social relations with other inhabitants of the mainstream (see also Alba and Duyvendak, Reference Alba and Duyvendak2019). Thus, denizens of the mainstream have opportunities to achieve valuable social statuses, even elite ones, similar to those of members of an historically dominant group, and their social interactions within mainstream settings are not strongly colored by their ethnoracial category memberships. However, unlike previous conceptions of assimilation (e.g., Gordon 1964), we do not assume that assimilation into the mainstream requires that individuals take on the identity of the dominant group—i.e., that they become White (they may do so, of course, but it is not essential)—only that their origins recede into the background. A multiracial mainstream contrasts sharply with the White supremacy that characterized Hawai‘i during the first half of the twentieth century. In such a system, Whites see themselves—and are often seen by others—as having the highest social status; they have privileged access to such opportunities as education at the best schools; they often segregate themselves, at a minimum in their family lives, from others in order to maintain their superior status; and they occupy the positions of institutional control, especially in the economy and the polity.
Nevertheless, the emergence of a multiracial mainstream does not mean inherently the waning of all ethnoracial distinctions and their associated inequalities. The postwar economic transformation generated opportunities that were not uniformly spread among non-Whites. Even with untrammeled White supremacy at an end, the Hawai‘i economy displays a great deal of inequality along ethnoracial lines, and this stratification order appears to have been stable for several decades. Based on the American Community Survey from 2015–2019, Table 1 depicts key socioeconomic differences among the major ethnoracial groups in Hawai‘i. The differences are very similar to those observed by Jonathan Okamura (Reference Okamura, Fojas, Guevarra and Sharma2018) using data from a decade earlier, indicating the stability of the ethnoracial hierarchy. The table shows that the average educational attainments of the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites are similar and quite high compared to other groups: about 45% in each case have at least a baccalaureate degree. In contrast, the educational attainments of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders are low: only 10-15% have a baccalaureate. The Filipino and Hispanic groups have a somewhat better educational record, but their baccalaureate rate still is only half that of the dominant groups.
The educational differences translate, if imperfectly, into occupational status inequalities, as reflected in group percentages in managerial and financial, scientific and technical, educational, arts, and high-status health-care occupations (Table 1). In terms of group concentration in these occupational groups, the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites still lead the way, with overall percentages in the mid-40s. The concentration in high-status occupations is weakest for the Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders. Okamura (Reference Okamura, Fojas, Guevarra and Sharma2018) concludes his review of socioeconomic inequality in early twenty-first-century Hawai‘i by declaring: “If the three socioeconomic indicators—occupational status, income level, and educational attainment—for the 2006 to 2010 period are considered together, they demonstrate that Japanese Americans, Whites, and Chinese Americans continue to be the preeminent groups, as they have been since 1990” (p. 103). A decade later, nothing fundamental has changed.
The economic dominance of the three groups appears also at the elite level of business. A wide-angle picture can be obtained from the Equal Employment Opportunity data collected annually from all firms with one hundred or more employees, although it is one lacking detail about Asian groups. Table 2 shows the ethnoracial origins of individuals at the elite, or c-suite, level of firms (reported in the category, “Executive/Senior-Level Officials and Managers”) in Hawai’i in 2021, the latest year of data available. It is obvious that this level is dominated by Asians and Whites in numerical terms, as the two combine to account for three-quarters of the executives and top managers. If we add in the mixed-race group (undoubtedly undercounted in these data), many of whom are part Asian and/or part White, we arrive at almost 90% of the elite level.
Table 2. Hawaiian EEO-1 data, 2021
Source: https://www.eeoc.gov/data/eeo-1-employer-information-report-statistics (accessed August 27, 2024).
At a population-based rate of representation at the elite level of 3%, Whites have the highest likelihood of climbing to this pinnacle, followed at some distance by the mixed-race group. The relatively low rate for Asians, 1.3% (still higher than the rates of all the remaining groups), may seem to hint at some unidentified disadvantage. But the Asian category is multiethnic, and its largest component in the work force, Filipinos, is not well represented in high-status occupations (Table 1). To identify which Asian groups appear at the elite level in firms, we turn now to an examination of the executive teams of the top ten firms in Hawai’i in 2024.
Table 3 shows the breakdown by firm and confirms that the Asian groups most represented in the business elite are Japanese and Chinese, in that order. (The five men classified as “mixed race” are part Asian and part White and, if their specific Asian origins were known, would add to their totals.) However, the picture from this table, the “elite” of the business elite, is different from that in the preceding table in one important respect: in the largest firms in Hawai’i, Whites are the predominant group, with a majority of the executives, while the two mainstream Asian groups account for the bulk of the remaining groups. Pointedly, Native Hawaiians also make up a significant presence in this remainder, at roughly their population percentage. Given their educational and occupational disadvantages (Table 1), this presence suggests that some of the firms are making efforts to secure the representation in their leadership of the native population of the archipelago. Other non-White minorities have scarce representation.
Table 3. Ethnoracial Backgrounds of the Executive Teams of the Largest Public and Private Companies in Hawai’i, 2024
Note: The top ten companies were identified in the 2022 State of Hawai’I Data Book, Table 15.25 and confirmed in the rankings produced by Hawaii Business Magazine for 2023. The firms in question supply information about their executive leadership on their websites, generally with photos for each person. The ethnoracial identities of the members of the executive groups were determined using the names, photographs, and other online information regarding the person(s) in question. Where the ethnoracial identity of an executive was not clear from the information provided by corporate websites, we used LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and other available online sources to identify such traits as organizational memberships and languages spoken. The “two or more races” category contains several men whose photos showed their Asian ancestry but whose surnames were European.
Overall, then, despite the reversal in the position of Whites between Table 2, which includes many relatively small firms, and Table 3, the data confirm Okamura’s conclusion. In the leadership of the very top firms, the numerical ordering of the three groups corresponds roughly to their relative sizes in Table 1.
Their dominance of the Hawaiian economy is paralleled in the archipelago’s political life. This political position is channeled mainly through the Democratic party, which continues to dominate the state-level political scene as it has since Hawai‘i became a state in 1959. As of March 2024, the fifty-one seats in the state House of Representatives were overwhelmingly (45-6) held by Democrats and had been so since 1959.Footnote 9 Similarly, the State Senate has been overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats since 1962.Footnote 10 The powerful Democrats have come to be seen no longer as radicals seeking racial justice for an exploited multiethnic population of farm laborers, as had been the case at the time of the Democratic “revolution” of the early 1950s. Instead, more critical observers and activists advocating for the interests of Native Hawaiians and other subordinate groups have come to embrace an anti-settler colonial stance targeting the political hegemony not only of Whites but of their Japanese and Chinese counterparts as well.
The ethnoracial backgrounds of the state’s U.S. Senate and House delegations and the governorship demonstrate the concentration of political power in the hands of members of the three dominant groups, along with some Native Hawaiians. Table 4 shows the incumbents of major elected positions since statehood. In the U.S. Senate, there have been relatively few incumbents due to the six-year length of Senate terms and the ability of those incumbents to win re-election. In total, three of the seven holders of Senate seats since statehood have been of Japanese origin, one was Chinese, one was mixed-race Hawaiian and Chinese, and the other two were Whites.Footnote 11
Table 4. Hawai‘i’s Prominent Elected Politicians and Their Ethnoracial Backgrounds, by Year of Election
Note: The ethnoracial backgrounds in Table 2 are compiled from the Wikipedia articles about the politicians. In general, we have privileged family ancestry over personal identity because ancestry better captures the social and cultural environment in which an individual grew up.
Among those who have served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1959, there have been eight of Japanese descent, four haoles, one Native Hawaiian, one Chinese, and two from mixed backgrounds, including former U.S. presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who is of mixed European-American-Samoan descent. All but one Japanese and the lone Chinese representative (Charles Djou) have been Democrats. The Japanese contingent included the first Asian-American woman elected to the House, Rep. Patsy Mink (neé Takemoto), who held the office for a total of twenty-four years over two separate stretches of time. In both houses of Congress, Japanese have been overrepresented among those who have been elected.Footnote 12
The history of the governor’s office has been somewhat different from the pattern of Japanese, White, and Chinese dominance in other high government offices. Instead, the office of governor reflects more broadly the multiracial mainstream that makes Hawai‘i unique among American states. After fifteen years of haole governors following statehood, the governor’s office has been filled by a parade of “firsts”: first Asian governor of a U.S. state, first governor of Native Hawaiian descent, first Filipino governor, first Jewish governor, and first Okinawan governor. The governor’s office is currently held by a haole doctor named Josh Green, a Swarthmore graduate who is the second Jewish governor of the islands. Suffice it to say that it would be impossible to replicate this line-up of state chief executives in any other U.S. state; the distinctive multiracial mainstream of Hawai‘i life could hardly be more evident than in this account of the gubernatorial office.Footnote 13
Notwithstanding the overrepresentation of Japanese-origin politicians elected to Congress, the main base of Japanese political dominance in Hawai‘i politics has been the state legislature. Okamura (Reference Okamura2014) reports that, after the 2012 elections, Japanese constituted some 40% of the lawmakers in the two houses of Hawai‘i’s legislature, nearly twice their proportion of the population (23%). This overrepresentation is, according to Okamura (Reference Okamura2014), “a major factor in the perception that they dominate and control” Hawai‘i politics and government (p. 140).
The underside of the shared dominance of Hawaiian politics by East Asians and Whites is the underrepresentation in high office of other groups. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the rise in Hawai‘i as well as on the American mainland of new political forces calling attention to the suffering and dispossession of “indigenous” groups – those that had inhabited the Western hemisphere and the islands before the arrival of Europeans and who survived that process.Footnote 14 This history is the background to the spread of the notion of “settler colonialism” with which we began our account of the plantation era in Hawai‘i. The idea has come more sharply into focus in the interim as a target of critical sensibilities and political mobilization. Thus, as White supremacy in the pre-1945 period gave way to the mixed tripartite rule of Japanese, White, and Chinese elites, critics of Hawai‘i’s economic and political order coined the term “Asian settler colonialism” (Fujikane, quoted in Okamura Reference Okamura2014, p. 179) to include these East Asian-origin groups in their understanding of what they regard as illegitimate domination in Hawai‘i. The interracial cooperation in the sugar strike of 1946 turns out to have marked the peak of cross-class collaboration against the economic powerhouses of the Big Five.
There remains the complicated matter of “Whiteness” and “haoleness.” Okamura (Reference Okamura2014) insists that the key category in understanding everyday life and politics in Hawai‘i is about being “local.” Although Whites are overrepresented among the dominant socioeconomic groups in Hawai‘i society and, as such, can be targets for the opprobrium of local Hawaiians, all Whites are not the same. There are said to be “military haoles” (Whites in the islands for military service), “mainland haoles” (Whites who have come to the islands as “immigrants” from the continental United States and who are unfamiliar with pidgin English and other features of island culture), and, finally, “local haoles” (Whites who have grown up in the islands and know and embrace Hawai‘i’s culture and the struggles of the islanders against settler colonialism and other malevolent outside forces). Despite their economic and political predominance in Hawai‘i society, Whites thus may be “perceived, targeted, and often harassed [by locals] as the racial and cultural Other in Hawai‘i” (Okamura Reference Okamura, Fojas, Guevarra and Sharma2018, p. 107). Indeed, Whites may experience “antihaole racism” because in Hawai‘i, according to Okamura, the “local has decentered Whiteness, especially White supremacy,” as “locals consider themselves and their culture and identity as constituting the social and cultural norm in Hawai‘i” (Okamura Reference Okamura, Fojas, Guevarra and Sharma2018, p. 108). Although they form one side of the triangle of ethnoracial domination in contemporary Hawai‘i society, in other words, Whites tend to be disdained by locals, whose outlook forms the standard for acceptability in Hawai‘i’s everyday life.
The Continued Spread of Ethnoracial Mixing
The historical experience of mainstream expansion in the United States—and especially the mass assimilation of the White ethnics on the mainland during the post-World War II period—demonstrates that the social processes involved include a shrinking of the social distances among older and newer mainstream groups, which fosters relationships among them involving some degree of social intimacy, such as friendship and intermarriage (Alba and Nee, Reference Alba and Nee2003; Alba Reference Alba2020). To be sure, mixing across ethnoracial lines within families has been a signature feature of Hawai‘i for more than a century (Lind Reference Lind1980). The questions we address here are how extensive it is today and whether it can modify the inequalities observed in the last section.
We focus on the extent of ethnoracially mixed origins in the population because individuals who have grown up in mixed families form in general an increasingly important group in American society and often possess unusual social traits, such as composite and fluid ethnoracial identities (Alba Reference Alba2020). We then turn to recent marriage patterns as a way to glimpse the formation of present and near-future ethnoracial mixing. Our analysis is based on 2015–2019 American Community Survey data, and we expand the basic ethnoracial coding from the race and Hispanic-origin responses to include the ancestry data, which can reveal additional strands of descent and is consistent with the coding of race in the 2020 Census (Marks and Rios-Vargas, Reference Marks and Rios-Vargas2021).
As shown in Table 5, we find that just over a quarter (26.7%) of Hawai‘i‘s population has a family background involving two or more of the major ethnoracial categories (Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and White, where the racial categories are limited to non-Hispanics). As noted earlier, Hawai‘i has a level of mixing far greater than that on the mainland. Further, the level of mixing is substantially higher in the child population (42.6%), reflecting an increasing rate of mixing in family formation. (This level is almost four times higher than that in the U.S. child population as a whole: 11.8% (Alba Reference Alba2024b).) Also distinctive is the complexity of the mixtures, which partly results from the relatively long history of mixing (Velasquez-Manoff Reference Velasquez-Manoff2019). Almost half (46%) of the mixes involve three or more of the major categories.
Table 5. Ethnoracially Mixed Origins in Hawai‘i’s Population and its Children, 2015–2019 ACS
Source: 2015–2019 American Community Survey (Ruggles et al., Reference Ruggles, Sarah, Matthew, Daniel, Grace, Julia A, Richards, Renae, Jonathan and Kari2025).
The groups that we have identified most closely with the mainstream—Chinese, Japanese, and White—are found in many mixes, as is the Native Hawaiian group. But the extent of mixing reflects each group’s history in the archipelago. The mixing of Native Hawaiians with outsiders began soon after the latter started to arrive. Today, 80.0% of those who claim descent from Native Hawaiians have ancestry from another major group as well. The Chinese were the earliest of the Asian groups to arrive and, since their immigration was male dominated, their pairing with Native Hawaiian women was common (Lam Reference Lam1936). Nearly half (47.1%) of Hawai‘i’s residents with Chinese ancestry are mixed in the sense defined above (in other words, they also have descent from a non-Asian group). Whites, close behind, are also extensively mixed, with 44.1% having White ancestry in combination with one or more other groups. Finally, the Japanese, who did not begin to intermarry in significant numbers until just before World War II, show a relatively low level of mixing: 26.9%. We include Filipinos in this accounting to provide a comparison to the mainstream Asian groups. In overall level of mixing, they are similar to the Japanese—26.1% of those with Filipino ancestry are mixed.
However, the patterns of mixing among children show that it is becoming increasingly common, especially for the mainstream ethnoracial groups and Native Hawaiians. Majorities of all mainstream ethnoracial groups are mixed, though this is not the case for the Filipinos: This is true for almost two-thirds (64.7%) of children with any Chinese ancestry, 59.5% of those of Japanese descent, and two-thirds (66.7%) of those with White American or European ancestry. Mixing is exceptionally high—almost nine-tenths (87.4%)—among children with a Native Hawaiian parent or ancestor. By comparison, it is relatively low (42.6%) for Filipinos; and in fact the rate of mixing may be inflated because the largest mixed group, according to our counting rules, involves Hispanic descent, a pairing that may be due largely to unmixed Filipinos who identify with a Spanish origin because of the prolonged Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines (Ocampo Reference Ocampo2016).
The specific mixture combinations among children are indicative of the evolution of ethnoracial affiliations given the multiracial character of the mainstream. For the Japanese, the group with whom they are most likely to be mixed in a two-group combination is White, and they are often found in the more complex mixtures that include Native Hawaiians and Whites. These combinations account for almost 60% of all mixtures involving Japanese. This pattern is not as extensive among the Chinese or the Filipinos. For both groups, the largest two-group combination is with Hispanics; only after that mix do combinations with Whites and Native Hawaiians appear in the rankings.
Recent intermarriage patterns, which for space reasons we merely summarize, point in the direction of further increase in mixing, not just in its overall magnitude but also in its complexity—that is, in the number of major categories involved. (The summaries are of data about the marriage choices of U.S.-born men and women under the age of forty.) However, the marriages of younger Hawai‘i residents also reveals some limitations on mixing, in the form of robust endogamy rates of those of unmixed backgrounds (see also Fu and Heaton, Reference Fu and Heaton1997) and a tendency for intermarriages to occur between partners who share a common ancestry (such as marriages between persons of unmixed Japanese heritage and those with Japanese and White ancestry).
Nevertheless, only a minority of the marriages (44-45%) are endogamous in the sense that they unite partners of the same single ethnoracial group. Or, to put matters another way, the majority of marriages involve mixed family networks because the partners belong to different major ethnoracial categories or are themselves mixed. Moreover, marriage patterns reveal increasing ethnoracial complexity in family networks. This is quite evident for mixed individuals descended from two major ethnoracial categories. Consider for instance the partners of women who are part Asian (of any group) and part White: nearly half have partners whose ancestry includes something other than Asian or White. For similar men, this is true of more than 40% of them.
For unmixed individuals, however, endogamy is still common. For instance, the rate of marriage by younger Whites to other Whites is also clearly higher than would be the case if there were not a tendency to endogamy: the rate, 65% for men and 70.7% for women, is more than twice the White percentages in the marriage pool (30.9% of wives and 32.4% of husbands). The endogamy rates of other unmixed categories generally are close to those for Whites.
In short, even in a situation where a very high level of mixing in marriage and ancestry prevails, there is strong evidence of ethnoracial proximity in partnership choice. But that should not blind us to the overall importance of mixing in Hawai‘i, where the mainstream has expanded to take in two Asian groups. Mixing in the ancestral origins of Hawai‘i’s residents of all backgrounds has reached levels far above that on the mainland. And it continues to increase.
Patterns of ethnoracial mixing in Hawai‘i thus foretell a population of growing ancestral complexity, where in other words most residents are bound by kinship to people with ethnoracial ancestries not identical to their own. Does this imply an expanding mainstream, ethnoracially speaking? On the mainland, the mixed population is predominantly of combined White and minority descent. As children, they do not resemble socially children from the same unmixed minority background because of their relative advantages. For example, their parents have more education on average and higher incomes; and the parents are more likely to be married. Minority-White children typically grow up outside of segregated enclaves. Generally speaking, they acquire more education than minority-only peers, and their probability of entering the higher tiers of the occupational hierarchy, where Whites have been dominant historically, is substantially greater (Alba Reference Alba2020; Alba and Maggio, Reference Alba and Maggio2022). In other words, ethnoracial mixing on the mainland is expanding the mainstream.
The data in Table 6 do not support the idea that a similar process is operating on a large scale in Hawai‘i. The table sheds light on how the educational levels of those with indigenous descent, a group that is extensively mixed, are affected by growing up in families where one parent is a member of one or more of the mainstream groups. Individuals who are part Native Hawaiian and part Chinese, Japanese, or White do have rates of baccalaureate attainment that are higher than those who are unmixed Native Hawaiian, but the improvements are small. The same is true when their ancestry includes two of the mainstream groups. In short, individuals with mixed indigenous and mainstream ancestry resemble more the Native Hawaiian group in educational terms than they do the mainstream ones.
Table 6. BA attainment of Native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, and Whites, Unmixed and in Mixtures, 2015–2019 ACS
Note: The percentages for the unmixed groups here may not precisely match those in Table 1 because of the procedures used to identify the ethnoracially mixed (see text).
Discussion and Conclusion
During the first half of the twentieth century, Hawai‘i seemed a perfect fit to the “racialized modernity” that José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown (Reference Itzigsohn and Brown2020) identify as the hallmark of Du Bois’s sociological thought. Settler colonialism and racial capitalism had created a society dominated by Whites, with a demographically depleted indigenous group and non-White immigrant groups chained to subordinate positions by the color line. But the post-World War II transformation of Hawai‘i’s economy, which required an educated workforce able to fill positions that called for more technical skill, autonomy, and decision-making, opened spaces for the social and economic ascent of the Chinese and Japanese, bringing them into the mainstream, which they share with Whites. By the end of the twentieth century, White dominance was overshadowed by this multiracial mainstream, but Hawai‘i was a society still visibly marked by ethnoracial stratification.
Hawai‘i should change our understanding of America’s racial history. From the perspective of critical race theory, the post-war period of large-scale assimilation is understood as exclusively restricted to Whites: the sociological platitude is that the Irish, Italians, Jews and other White ethnics could assimilate into the mainstream society only because they were of European descent and hence ultimately acceptable as Whites (e.g., Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995; Jung Reference Jung2009; Roediger Reference Roediger2005). But the experience of Hawai‘i shows that this was not strictly true, that given the need for more educated workers to take non-industrial jobs in a place where qualified Whites were scarce, non-Whites like the Chinese and Japanese could rise into the mainstream, even when, like the Japanese, they had just suffered from ferocious wartime prejudices held by Whites about their membership in an alien, threatening race. Moreover, contradicting a common present-day sociological understanding of assimilation, they did not become Whites (or “honorary” Whites [Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2004]) in the process; the mainstream became more visibly diverse (Kasinitz and Waters, Reference Kasinitz and Waters2024). The same happened during this period on the mainland in the sense that, in assimilating to what had been an Anglo-Protestant mainstream until mid-century, Catholic and Jewish ethnics did not convert to Protestant denominations, nor extinguish their ethnic identities.
It could be argued that Hawai‘i is an exceptional sociological environment, making it unlike the mainland society. But some of the features that make it different raise other questions about our current understanding of our racial history. Unlike the mainland, Hawai‘i did not have a system of plantation-based slavery that created a group like African Americans, socially defined even after its emancipation as a permanent bottom caste (Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2020). The historical and sociological account of White-ethnic assimilation understands the process in part as a struggle by groups like the Irish and the Italians to separate themselves from African Americans by establishing a marked social distance from them (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev1995; Roediger 1995). It is often taken to imply that a permanently bottom-dwelling group is essential for assimilation to work. But the Native Hawaiian group was and is not comparable to African Americans on the mainland, as their centrality to the extensive ethnoracial mixing in families we have observed indicates.
Because of demographic transformation, American society is currently in the middle of social changes that resemble those in post-World War II Hawai‘i, and a logical question is what hints and possibilities its experience may offer. In posing this question, we do not imagine that developments in the twenty-first-century United States will replicate precisely those of the past. Nevertheless, as the adage often attributed (falsely, apparently) to Mark Twain has it, “history doesn‘t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Since the particularities of time and place inevitably stamp many features of the manifestations of large-scale social processes like assimilation or racialization, it is in these “rhymes,” or resemblances, that their basic mechanisms reveal themselves. (This point has been made many times about racialization, recently and convincingly, by Michelle Alexander (Reference Alexander2010).)
Like mid-twentieth century Hawai‘i, non-Whites in the early twenty-first century United States are benefitting from a period of non-zero-sum mobility unleashed by demographic change (Alba Reference Alba2020). That is, the huge, well-situated, and largely White post-war baby boom is aging out of the labor market and positions of leadership, and there are not enough qualified young Whites to replace them, much less fill new spots created by economic growth. This dynamic generates mobility into the higher tiers of the occupational structure by young non-Whites, especially Asians, U.S.-born Latinos, and persons from ethnoracially mixed backgrounds (Alba and Maggio, Reference Alba and Maggio2022). This mobility, however, is more selective than was that of the White ethnics after World War II because the non-zero-sum mobility created by the twenty-first century demographic transformation is not as expansive as that in the middle of the twentieth century, which was fueled by a period of great post-war prosperity and low overall economic inequality.
Hawai‘i would seem to offer some insight into how these social changes might play out. The mainstream expansion there was also selective: the Chinese and Japanese became recognized as belonging to it, but another major Asian immigrant-origin group, the Filipinos, did not. This selectivity seems understandable in terms of the distinction between colonized and immigrant groups (Blauner Reference Blauner1972). Historically in the United States, assimilation into the mainstream has been most available to immigrant groups and much less to other minorities, African Americans, above all (Abramitzky and Boustan, Reference Abramitzky and Boustan2022; Alba and Maggio, Reference Alba and Maggio2022). In contrast to the Chinese and Japanese, the Filipinos immigrating to Hawai‘i were coming from a homeland that had been colonized for centuries, first by Spain and then by the United States. (In contrast, China had a limited experience of European colonization while Japan was chiefly a hegemon and colonizer itself in the modern period.) In effect, in migrating, the Filipinos were exchanging one context dominated by American Whites for another. In other words, while the Chinese and Japanese came to Hawai’i from independent states—and in the case of Japan, a very powerful one—the Filipinos came from an archipelago long under the heel of others.
Nonetheless, the data on racial mixing in Hawai‘i appear to indicate a very general reduction in the role of ethnoracial origins for the construction of everyday social boundaries associated with the entry of non-Whites into the mainstream, without a parallel reduction in the socioeconomic inequalities among groups. To put it differently, people in Hawai‘i can find commonality with individuals of quite varied ethnoracial backgrounds, but these relationship patterns do not seem to result in a decrease of socioeconomic inequalities (i.e., a greater levelling in the way that ethnoracial origins are mapped into locations in the socioeconomic hierarchy).
The pattern of selective expansion prevalent in Hawai‘i is a likely harbinger of the future in the mainland United States. Certainly, some Asian groups, such as the Chinese and Asian Indians, seem to be pressing hard against the boundaries of the mainstream (Tran Reference Tran2024). Not only do they rate highly in terms of standard socioeconomic indicators, such as education, occupation, and median family income, but Asian Indians have already achieved an unusual degree of success for non-Whites in American politics, even at the national level (Chakravorty et al., Reference Chakravorty, Kapur and Singh2016). But we caution against a quick conclusion that the new American mainstream will therefore mirror the Asian-White one in Hawai‘i. The mobility of many U.S.-born Latinos and ethnoracially mixed Americans into higher socioeconomic tiers combined with the high rates at which they marry Whites indicate that, even though their groups of origin may not be associated with the mainstream in the near future, the mainstream barriers against individuals with these origins are not high. As individuals, African Americans are also finding mainstream acceptance to a degree that breaks with historic patterns of exclusion. There is an ongoing diversification in the varied forms of American popular culture, including movies, television, and novels; and African Americans are in the vanguard of these changes (Alba Reference Alba2024a; Foner Reference Foner2022). The emerging American mainstream looks ready to break with its long-standing White supremacy.
Yet, as is also true in Hawai‘i, the current mainstream expansion in the United States does not seem to dent very much the overall levels of inequality among ethnoracial groups. There is, to be sure, a high level of overall income and wealth inequality in the United States today, and much research indicates that it is inhibiting social mobility (Chetty et al., Reference Chetty, Grusky, Hell, Hendren, Robert and Narang2017). This especially affects individuals and families in the bottom tier of the economic distribution, which include many minorities of color, especially African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans on reservations. Thus, an overall ethnoracial hierarchy in terms of life chances and socioeconomic position seems likely to endure. At the same time, the stability of inequality when measured in terms of relative group averages may mask a growing inequality of social position within the major ethnoracial categories. The ethnoracial hierarchies that have long dominated mainland U.S. life will not disappear with increased racial mixing, but mainstream expansion will likely absorb new groups while the hold of White domination slackens. The United States will continue for the foreseeable future to be an ethnoracially unequal society, but there will be more groups sharing the apex of its hierarchy with Whites. In this respect, Hawai‘i provides a template.
A closing note on the political moment: Some observers fear that the full-on assault by the Trump administration on DEI programs and affirmative-action policies will undo racial progress (e.g., Serwer Reference Serwer2025). We acknowledge that it can stall some of the processes we have described here for a time and perhaps drive them backwards in some areas, given Trump’s apparent control over all arms of government and intimidation of the leadership of many other societal institutions. But the demographic motor of change cannot be blunted entirely or for long. There are simply not enough qualified Whites to replace all of those leaving high-level positions in the labor market and civil society or to fill the new ones created by the gradual expansion of the economy. Moreover, the on-the-ground attitudinal changes and reductions in social distance among young people that have produced more and more ethnoracially mixed families cannot be undone by fiat. Mainstream expansion may slow temporarily, but the dynamics behind it are too powerful and deeply entrenched to halt it for good.
Acknowledgment
We are grateful for the advice of Nancy Foner, Phil Kasinitz, Jonathan Okamura, Michael Omi, and David Takeuchi on an earlier version.
