Pōpolo is reflected everywhere in the Pacific and yet in Hawai‘i it has taken on an association with Blackness—and Black foreignness—that twines the plant's shallow roots with racial ideas brought by European settlers.  Set to flourish in an environment that saw Black communities and identities as temporary in the landscape of Hawai‘i, White supremacist ideas about Black people as unmoored from land and culture, illegitimate, and on the margins of the human play out in the everyday lives of Black folks in Hawai‘i. Another entry in Pukui and Elbert’s dictionary, nika, is an older term for Black people, borrowed from English in the 19th century: