Panethnic boundaries and the making of white-collar minority identity in Hawai’i

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on ethnoracial identity formation documents the growth of panethnic and regionalised identities in the United States, which individuals express in response to both external racialisation processes as well as meta-group identity assertions by multiple ethnic groups. Yet how are panethnic identities shaped by organisational contexts, and how might the way individuals enact these group identities contribute to exclusionary processes? Examining the case of Local identity in Hawai’i, this study explores how third and fourth-generation Japanese and Chinese workers articulate a panethnic identity within a white-collar office. They do so by drawing racialized boundaries against Haoles (whites) as well as internal group hierarchies informed by ethnicity and class. The panethnic boundaries that workers enact ultimately reinforce the dominant position of Japanese and Chinese workers within the workplace, and within this region more broadly. I close by elaborating on how panethnic boundary-making reconfigure symbolic ethnoracial hierarchies within institutional settings while simultaneously serving as exclusionary criteria towards panethnic subgroups.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnoracial identity
• panethnicity
• boundary-making
• Hawai’i
• work

Notes

1 I follow Jimenez and Horowitz (2013) in using the term ‘ethnoracial,’ while also doing so in order to emphasise the ways that people and institutions evoke group boundaries involving both ethnic and racial characteristics.

2 By ‘mainstream’ I refer to common settings that may be occupied by a range of people with regards to their social characteristics and not explicitly associated by one group.

3 I write Local with a capital ‘L’ and without brackets, following Labrador (2004) and mirroring the treatment of other racial and ethnic categories (e.g., Blacks).

4 In recent decades, scholars and activists alike have noted that Local culture is an imported ‘settler’ identity, less commonly adopted by Hawai’i’s indigenous population of Native Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians do not share the same social histories (e.g., labour migration) as other common ethnic groups in Hawai’i.

5 I follow convention in Hawai’i by referring to ethnoracial groups as ‘Asian,’ ‘Japanese’, and ‘Filipino’ instead of ‘Asian American’, ‘Japanese American’ and ‘Filipino American’ (see Okamura 1994). Also of note: in Hawai’i, Portuguese, because of their history as plantation labourers in the islands, are not considered Haole despite their European heritage (Geschwender, Carroll-Seguin, and Brill 1988).

6 It is important to note that racial and panethnic terms such as Asian/Asian American tend to focus on East Asian groups, rendering other groups within the Asian American category invisible. With respect to this critique, I specify a worker’s ethnic group affiliation when possible unless referencing a direct quote or specifically addressing a meta-group phenomena.

7 An in-depth exploration of the historical background of Local is beyond the scope of this study.

8 This likely originates from the Japanese expression deru kugi wa utareru, which roughly translates as, the nail that stands out gets hammered down.