Dr. Nitasha Tamar Sharma (Associate Professor of African American Studies & Chair of Asian American Studies, Northwestern University) presented on her decade of ethnographic research on Black residents in the militarized Hawaiian islands. She investigates the evolving elements of agency and occupation related to Black identity while taking into account various environmental factors. Within the context of US military occupation, there are complex racial dynamics where centering the Island’s Black residents interrupts Asian-Hawaiian-haole (White) framings of settler colonialism. Her findings presented at the talk come in anticipation of her forthcoming book, Hawai’i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke University Press).
Dr. Sharma began her presentation introducing the Black military success story that explains how joining this government organization is a response to historical and current structural racism. For instance, the success story is evident in how African Americans in Hawaii have the highest per capita income of black people in any state. There is also more opportunity in attaining governmental leadership positions and within higher education. Joining the military is an avenue of advancement that offers economic security and the chance to escape environmental stressors deriving from slavery. However, this United States institution displaces Indigenous pacific islanders. Residents are stripped of their agency over their land which is used, for instance, as military training grounds. She then posed the question: can Black people be settlers? Some scholars have argued they cannot due to the amount of agency they actually hold in choice matters and because they do not hold the privilege of having their worldview imposed upon lands or bodies on the islands.
In investigating Asian settler colonialism, inequalities are different in Hawaii than in the black and white dichotomy that has dictated the larger body of the US nation. As native Hawaiians suffer a state of high homelessness, elite Asians in the island claim localness for belonging. Sharma points to settler colonialism where this privileged group benefits at the expense of native Hawaiians. There is also a question of settler allyship as Asian complicity has been found where the government has planned the construction of a giant telescope on the sacred native mountain Mauna Kea. Essentially, native Hawaiians want to protect their land from desecration and could use more support from this group.
Speaking to the racial and settler identities, there is an otherness role in the militarization of the island that collapses the black and white binary. Locals conceive Black people to be in the military where there are misconceptions, also held toward white people, that they sleep with and impregnate their women. The way this has affected the Black community manifests in how Black locals differentiate themselves by wearing their hair in dreadlocks since the military doesn’t allow its members to. Another identification marker consists of the way Black locals dress, furthering an appearance to avoid militarism. In many ways, Black residents share the same plights as the native Hawaiians regarding group exploitation. Both populations try to coexist with other privileged groups who hold a higher economic standing.
Dr. Sharma investigates the limits of binary framework in relevant and connected issues where island identities must navigate their different positionalities. She points to the potential of these demographics, finding a shared interest in overcoming oppression without erasing the experience of another community. Such would promote the responsibility of Black people to support the natives and would decenter whiteness. Moreover, her work questions how we should inhabit our positionalities and pushes us to use our decisions to disrupt systems of domination. Although she does not identify as a Black or indigenous Hawaiian, she approaches her research with knowledge, respect, and listening in order to be informed about the alliances and tensions among people of color. While many of the societal problems she notes are centered by white racism, Dr. Sharma suggests we are accountable to all people in engaging in solidarity.
International Comparative Studies