Talk Story: Jamila

How did Hawai‘i come to be your home?

When I was nine years old my mom got orders. She was in the military. She was in the army and her orders were to come to Hawai‘i so she took me with her and we came here. She was in the military for two, maybe three, years when we got here and then she decided to retire here. And that’s how basically Hawai‘i became home. I don’t think I felt it was home until I was a lot older. I was ready to leave as soon as I got here. We came from El Paso, Texas and I lived there for the bulk of my life. For a military kid I moved very seldom. Hawai‘i was the third place I had been in my life. I was really attached to Texas. Then, my father didn’t come with us to Hawai‘i so it was the first time that I was actually realizing that my parents really were divorced. It was the first time that it was strictly me and my mom, it was a completely different place. I didn’t know where I fit in. I went to private school, so a lot of the people I went to school with had parents who were officers. My mom was not an officer so there were all these different things going on…and me being one of the Black kids–because there was one other Black kid who became my bestie–

We’ve got to support each other!

We did. Her family actually helped my mom out so much. They’d pick me up from school, they’d take care of me, they’d feed me dinner because my mom was a single mom trying to figure out living in Hawai‘i on her own without anyone else. They were kind of like lifesavers.

Are they still living here?

No, they actually moved right after our first two years here. And I wanted to move where they went. I was so sad I was like “Oh, this is my actual family, the people who are there for me,” and I really didn’t know many other people. I did go to school with many people who are Local so unlike a lot of military kids who are only around a lot of military kids at least I was kind of seeing some Local kids and kind of getting to know them, but really it was huge when they [the family] left.

Do you identify as Local?

I do identify as Local because Hawai‘i really is where my formative years happened. It’s the place that shaped me so I do feel like I’m Local. There was actually an instance where I was out with my high school friends and someone was looking at me like “Oh, so where are you from?” because, of course, I’m the Black girl who’s here with all these Local girls. And my friend was like “She’s Local!” She was like, “I’m coming to your rescue because I don’t like this!” So yeah, I see myself as Local but I’m always going to be as Black as Black can be. I’m always going to be a Black girl. That’s just how I was raised and I was never ashamed to be a Black girl, but definitely it was something that kind of put you apart from other people because I wasn’t Filipina, I wasn’t Hawaiian, I wasn’t all these things that everyone is very happy to be a part of and makes them feel a part of things. I always did feel like the outsider because I didn’t fit into any of those, but I also had really good friends and their families were really good so they always made me feel welcome. But, I never felt like I was going to be in a relationship because I wasn’t what beauty is here, because I was a Black girl and everyone else was Polynesian and beautiful, or skinny Filipinos, or White girls who are just loved everywhere.

I was also just laser focused on what I wanted after. I was always like “I’m gonna go away to school and there’s gonna be Black people there and I’m gonna have that and I just have to do what I need to do here.” I got good grades and I played sports so that helped me kind of transcend the fact that I was the one Black person, even though I never forgot that I was the one Black person.

Have you experienced the term pōpolo as derogatory?

I never saw it as a derogatory term, I just saw it as what Black people are called in Hawaiʻi, like they call Chinese people Pake and Portuguese Portagee. It never seemed derogatory to me. And I actually had a friend who said she couldn’t call me Black or African American because it felt wrong, but felt like pōpolo was the more respectful thing to call me. Maybe there are times when people do use it in a derogatory way. But for me, my personal interactions with the word have never been anything derogatory.

I didn’t know that pōpolo was a plant until about 6 or 7 years ago. I didn’t know there was a pōpolo berry and then I saw and then I got it. And recently I learned that it was what was used for all of the ali‘i’s kapa so it was something that was revered.  Even trying to make it a derogatory term seems counterproductive even in just Hawaiian lore because it was something that was revered.

Is there a 'Local Black', in the same way you can be 'Local Haole', 'Local Filipino'?

I don’t think so. I think it might have to do with the fact that there is no real community. Or, there is a community, but it is an unseen community… Let me back that up. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like there was a Black community in Hawai‘i. When I came back from college my mom had made all these new friends through various ways and I wondered, where did all these Black people come from? Have they been here this whole time we’ve been here? My mom was also thinking that she just met these people, she didn’t know they were here.  A lot of people she knew were from the military so they were coming and going. I just never saw any Black community. Just now, maybe right when I was graduating from law school, I was noticing that there were these Black organizations and other Black people who had been here for a long time and weren’t necessarily affiliated with the military.

When people see a Black person in Hawai‘i they automatically assume that they’re military. They don’t assume that they are of this place when there are so many people who are Black who do consider themselves of this place and would consider themselves Local. I think the only time they would get the moniker of “Local” as a Black person is within their circles of people who know them and had been around them for the years and years and years. Maybe by creating a community it would help in identifying Local Black people because then you wouldn’t automatically assume when you see a Black person that they are transient, military, not of this place. You could potentially think, “Oh, they live here because they are like every other person who just lives here.”

What would a Black community in Hawai‘i look like?

I think it would be visible, for one. It would be highly visible. I think it would be super important to have some kind of meeting place. There’s the Japanese Cultural Center, the Filipino Community Centers. For all these communities there is a place where people can come together and do things and learn about themselves, be proud of themselves. I think that having something like that would be tangible. You could have programs for kids. There are a lot of kids who are Black but they have no idea what that means because they don’t have a community. They don’t have elders.  I never asked [someone I know], where is her dad? She grew up in a Filipino family, she knows she’s Black but she never had any opportunity to connect with the Blackness within her, which she really wanted to. Having a community center is a way that these kids who might not have their Black parent around can still identify as Black and have a valid community. They can be proud of that Blackness in them.

I’ve never been to the Martin Luther King Day parade. I don’t know what’s in it, who’s in it, who makes it up. But there was a [Honolulu Festival] parade this weekend that everyone was at and I don’t even know what we were celebrating, but everyone was down there.  We have to be more visible. We have to do stuff. We have to put it out there. A lot of the reason it hasn’t been like that, without disparaging anyone, I don’t think [some Black institutions in Honolulu] have a Local Black perspective because even though [other Black oriented organizations] are led by people who have lived here for a very long time, this place didn’t form them so they still hold on to the ideals of wherever they came from on the mainland. That might be it. It’s not their fault that they don’t try to get it more out there into the community because they feel like they have their small community. They have their people so it’s there, it’s something. But having the perspective of Black kids who did actually grow up here, who are part of other communities, who have seen what they have done... I don’t think that the old guard is going to be able to bring the community to what it needs to be. I think they can be supportive, I think they can help, I think they have ideas and they have been doing things for a long time that you can always learn from but I think it’s going to be the younger people who have really seen how things work here, who have the connections to allies who will uplift this community even though this is not their community.

One of the things I have heard from the old guard is that they know people who do things, they have connections, but they don’t feel like they are a part of them. They sometimes work together but they are in separate circles. At least in Hawai‘i, the majority of people interact with and do things with people who are not part of their ethnicity. You can’t live in a silo and try to make it. You have to make sure you are welcoming enough people into the community to uplift it.  We need to realize that this is the specific community we want to serve, but understand that the way Hawai‘i works is that it takes a whole community to do things and if we want to be seen as part of the community we have to understand the larger community.

Having grown up in Hawai‘i far away from a Black community, were you nervous about going to the continent to go to school? Were there things you were surprised about in going to a place where there was an established Black community?

I think I was just excited because every school I went to, everywhere I went, I was like the one of the Black people in the school. You could count us on your hand. For me, I was thinking, “There are going to be other Black people so I won’t have to be The One” and that was something that was exciting to me. I was also a little ambivalent, just generally, like when people from the West Coast go to the East Coast, there is a different kind of culture. Being from Hawai‘i, there is a whole different sort of culture, especially going all the way to the East Coast like I did. That was my culture shock. Learning how to live on the East Coast, how people operate, that it wasn’t going to be like Hawai‘i. And then I was excited about Black people and doing Black things and being around other Black people.  But what I found at my college was that a lot of them were “bougie” Black people who were trying to act like they were not bougie Black people. They were definitely not on work study and scholarships like I was but they considered themselves more Black because they grew up in some Black community on the mainland and not from Hawai‘i.

When I went to the NAACP that was on campus I wasn’t Black enough for them. Or the Black Student Union, I wasn’t Black enough for them. I was so excited to be around my people and now I am not Black enough for my people.

How did you encounter the idea that there were 'degrees' of Blackness and in some ways you weren’t meeting someone’s criteria when in Hawai‘i there was a different set of things that made you Black?

For me, being Black is just being Black. You never needed to hit all these criteria, there was no litmus test. You want me to know things about Black culture? Of course, I know Black culture.  Instead of watching Seinfeld I was watching Martin! I think it was more that as soon as they heard I was from Hawai‘i they were like “Oh….You can’t know the ‘Black experience’.”  Maybe that is what it is. Then they hear me talk and they think “Oh, you have an accent.” The Caribbean kids were totally down for me because they thought I was Caribbean. They thought “Oh, you must be Afro Caribbean. We’re cool with you. Come hang out with us.” But the “black Black” kids, as they called themselves…One of my great friends that I made in college is the Whitest Irish girl from Boston ever, but all the Black kids loved her. Her really good friend was another Black girl who was from New York, grew up around Black kids and everything and she was like “I’m not Black enough for them.” It really wasn’t about a degree of Blackness. It was people’s idea of what it was to be Black and I think there were very few kids at my school, because it was such an affluent environment, who actually grew up in the quintessential Blackness so they were all trying to fit that, to be that. In trying to fit and be that they were trying to exclude other people who were all just Black kids. 

Why do you think your being from Hawai‘i excluded you from Blackness for those kids?

I think we have allowed people to tell us what we are instead of just being who we are. I think some of them were thinking, “This is what we see on TV, this is what people tell us Black people are. Black people are in the city. Black people live in ghettos, Black people do this. And that’s what Black people are.” When Black people are everything.  To me, my idea of Black people is country. That’s what my family is. To me, tobacco and cotton and picking the fruit, hush puppies, and killing chickens, and going out in the morning and cutting the little pig’s stuff off to have mountain oysters. That is completely Black to me. Being on a farm is what Black people do.  Maybe because I had that coloring my idea I thought, well, Black people do everything. We’re everywhere. And a lot of my family was in the military so everyone is all over the place and going places, so for me it was always that we are all these things.

I credit the Cosby Show for making me believe that I could be a doctor and a lawyer. I wanted to be both even though I never saw people in real life doing those things. I never put Black people in this box as if “this is what it is to be a Black person.”  When I was in Texas country music was all we listened to and country music is country music. My dad was pretty Afrocentric so there was a poster in our bathroom that said “Before there was history there was Black history.” So I was like “We made all this stuff. This is all ours.”  Just because they are borrowing it for now doesn’t mean that we can’t go back and do it.

I think allowing a White narrative to dictate who we are and not thinking about it a little bit more allowed some of those people who considered themselves ‘more’ Black than me to feel that way.  And it could have been a little self-hate or self-loathing because they were from affluent families who were not living in the ghetto, were living in really nice places, could afford a college that was $40 grand a year with no problem and still not have to work while they were there. There could have also been some self-loathing that they were not completely a part of the Black experience that they wanted to be a part of. They all tried to downplay how much money they had but it was readily apparent to all of us who did not have it.

You were in Brazil last year and I often hear that Brazil is similar to Hawai‘i. There are a lot of people of Brazilian and Cape Verdean ancestry in Hawai‘i who get lumped into the Portagee category. What was it like to go to Brazil? Did you feel like it was like Hawai‘i?

I went with a bunch of people from Hawai‘i and they all felt completely at home. It was like Hawai‘i for them. For me, it was like Hawai‘i but with less anti-Blackness.  Which is weird, because they have had their history of anti-Blackness. The people in the favelas are darker and the people who are doing well are lighter. But I felt like they completely accepted me because although they may have anti-Blackness in them, they understand that Black people are a part of their culture. Which is different. Maybe they see them as less than in the culture, but they still see them as part of the community. They are Brazilian. When I was there, they always spoke to me in Portuguese because they just assumed that I was Brazilian. I think it’s the one place in the world that I’ve been that I felt more free.  I wish that I spoke Portuguese because I think I would have been in heaven. 

I also went to the opening ceremony at the Olympics and it pointed out these are all the places Brazilians come from. They made it abundantly clear how Black people got to Brazil was through slavery. They had the Indigenous people, then the Portuguese came, then slaves, then Chinese and Japanese people. And they are all a part of the fabric of Brazil. That is why it was freeing to be in Brazil.  Just to be another person. Not that I am a Black person. I was just another person.  You don’t get that in the US because we don’t want to talk about that history. But the fact of the matter is that it happened in the past but we still have these tendrils that play with our present that we don’t want to talk about. Until we can have an open conversation about it it is never going to get fixed. We are always going to have these problems. 

I want to go back to Brazil so bad and I was only there for 3.5 weeks.

The people all look like people in Hawai‘i. They are all mixed with different things, so they look like a lot of the people here. It was like when I went to Macao where people are Chinese Portguese mixes. Brazil is really laid back. Rio de Janiero is a beach culture. People were really helpful, it just felt like there was that same sort of community, how it feels in Hawai‘i, like people are your aunties and uncles.  Maybe that is just a Rio thing, because it is on the beach.  I think Rio is closer to what Hawai‘i is but I don’t know about Brazil over all, because Brazil is a big country.

I’m interested in how in Hawai‘i but also in the Pacific anti-Blackness has some political efficacy around it because it is a way to displace people who are already traumatized. Anti-blackness goes before Black people and it is interesting to see who else gets trapped in it. I wonder if you have had any experiences in Hawai‘i that have made you think about Blackness beyond the Black North American experience.

I never really put two and two together. I mean, no one wanted to be Melanesian. Oh no, they’re dark.  But I never put two and two together because everything just went over my head.  I thought that racism was something that was in the past and was especially not here in Hawai‘i.

When I first came back to Hawai‘i I was a domestic violence advocate and a lot of the time a lot of the people we were helping were like “I don’t want this girl because one, she’s young, and two, she knows nothing about Hawai‘i.” But I was the most Local advocate that they had because no body else was from actually from Hawai‘i, but because they were Filipino, because they were White they were okay. I had to work with the clients, get them more comfortable, and get them to know that I am from Hawai‘i, I know what you’re saying, I get what you’re talking about.

I think when I was in law school I saw it more so.  A lot of things that happened to me in law school were because people thought I was an outsider so they treated me as such.  This wasn’t just people at the law school but from women in the legal community who decided that because I was not someone who bowed down to them that I was an outsider who didn’t understand how Hawai‘i worked and that they were going to try to ruin my career. That’s when it got real real for me. You see me as this Black person who is an outsider and you have no problem with trying to take down the outsider who doesn’t know her place.

What might a Black political consciousness look like in Hawai‘i? We have some famous Black folks from here, like Barack Obama or Janet Mock, who in their memoirs talk about how their identities as Black people didn’t really take shape until they left Hawai‘i.  I wonder what a Hawai‘i-rooted Black political identity would look like and feel like in the age of Trump and in the age of extra-judicial killings.

I really don’t know because being so far away, the distance makes it like [violence against Black bodies] is not here, it’s there [on the mainland] and you can push it away.  Generally, Black people in Hawai‘i got it when people were being murdered by the cops. They were feeling the same way, “I’m so far away. What can I do?” and I was thinking “What do I do in this situation? Who do I talk to? What are the spaces? How do we deal with this?” Because honestly, [non-Black] people in Hawai‘i are not going to care because it’s not happening here. Not until something happens here will they think about that. Then I always go to the story about my mom getting pulled over by a cop. Here in Hawai‘i. And him telling her “You were on your cell phone.” My mom, the most conscientious driver to a fault, was like “No, I wasn’t on my phone, I wouldn’t do that.” Instead of being like “Okay, ma’am,” he put his hand on his gun and then said “You’re not going to be arguing with me today.” This happened in Hawai‘i so the fact that Hawai‘i doesn’t want to recognize that there is anti-Blackness here? 

Maybe having a political consciousness here is about showing Hawai‘i that there is anti-Blackness here so that they can finally see it and understand that just because it is not happening here doesn’t mean it can’t happen here. I don’t want it to happen here but if we pretend that it can’t because this is Hawai‘i and this is a place of aloha…No, it is a place of aloha but it is a place that definitely has racist undertones, especially around Blackness. The fact that that could happen to my mom, last year when all these police shootings were happening, it made me incensed. I told her if anything ever happens like that again to roll up the window and call me. It’s not okay. And this is something that people need to know about. She didn’t tell me until months later that this happened. If I had known about that I would have been calling up news places. This investigation needs to happen.

Maybe we all need to be more proactive instead of being nice. Call it out instead of being nice or passive aggressive about it. Be aggressive about it.  When the shootings started happening I had been in this fog, head down, doing my work, being the good cog in the whole thing. When the shootings happened, I stopped being a cog. I wanted to know, why am I doing these things?  Am I just being the typical Black workhorse that you don’t reward for the good work that they’re doing? I went to my boss and was like “You guys do not appreciate everything I am doing and I am not appreciated here.” And I started having to have those conversations. I started to have to be more open with my friends, like “Look, this is something that’s on my mind.” I think a lot of the time we don’t talk about it, not because we are uncomfortable, but because we don’t want to make our friends uncomfortable and I had to be like “I don’t care if you’re uncomfortable anymore because this is what I am going through.”

Black political consciousness has to be around anti-Blackness because people don’t see it. They don’t see the microaggressions. Any time I go on a job interview I have to say “I went to high school here!” Nobody else has to do that. White people don’t have to do that here, even if they didn’t grow up here, but I really have to show that this is where I’m from. I still have to straighten my hair to go on an interview. These are things I still have to do so these are things that need to be discussed in Hawai‘i.