Where Am I?

I’m tired. This isn’t going to be a put together post because I honestly don’t have the energy to write anything cohesive. I’m just so tired and disheartened, and more tired and more disheartened. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning more about myself as a person of color and how other people of color, specifically women, are treated in our society. While in college I had the privilege of being surrounded by people of color, to be immersed in my culture, but now that I’m back home in my white suburban hometown, I’m so removed from my people that it’s stifling. I went from being in a class with a powerful, intelligent Native Hawaiian woman, having her explain the complexities of my culture, of my people, of my history, to being here, where people equate cheap grass skirts and tiki print as “Hawaiian” when it could not be any further from it.

So I look for inspiration, to creators, women who are independent and strong and hardworking and what do I find? Nothing but pale skin and privilege. Turn on the radio, white, look up artwork, white, watching TV, white, they’re everywhere! I scroll through tumblr and see page after page of white creators. I see people white-washing and silencing Frida Kahlo. I see buttons and pins with phrases like “Not Your Babe” and pictures from shows like Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, The Virgin Suicides, American Beauty, the list goes on. All these white people (mostly women from what I have personally seen), finding such inspiration in these phrases and shows and you know what I see, NOTHING. You know why? I’m not in these shows. Where am I?

When I was younger I was so excited when Lilo and Stitch came out. People used to call me Lilo because I looked just like her. I had the long black-brown hair, the brown skin, the big belly. I remember being so happy to find someone who looked just like me, someone who was strong and independent and around my age. So imagine my dismay when I discovered that Lilo was voiced by a little white girl. That the Lilo I grew up idolizing wasn’t voiced by a young girl from Hawai’i but a young white girl from Las Vegas. White Hollywood wouldn’t even let a brown animated character be voiced by an actual brown person.

And itʻs never gotten any easier. It’s 2015 and a film called Aloha just came out and who’s cast as a part-Hawaiian, part-Chinese woman? Emma Stone, a white woman. And what’s worse the film, which evokes a word very dear to the Hawaiian people, chronicles the lives of military men and woman. What a slap in the face of the Hawaiian people! A people whose land was illegally taken and occupied by the United States military and continues to be occupied till this day. How fucking dare they do that to us!

Well shit, I’m getting off topic now. I’m just so tired of struggling to find someone that looks like me. Why can’t the fucking media just stop whitewashing everything? I know the answer, they have to establish their domain over people of color. They have to make sure we’re self-hating and willing to dance on command. They need to make sure women of color are submissive and docile, and men of color are incarcerated. And most of all they have to make sure our experiences, our stories, our cultures, never see the light of day. God forbid we learn about our cultures in history class, that would make us far too dangerous for the status quo.

I just want to leave you with this. Last year I was sitting in my Hawaiian Mythology class at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, listening to Lilikala Kameʻeleihiwa lecture and as Iʻm taking notes she says “Hawaiian are known for our intelligence.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I dropped my pen and looked up to the front of the class. I could feel tears welling in my eyes as I realized that in the 21 years I had been alive, no one had ever told me that my people were intelligent. When I called my mom to tell her what I learned in class she reacted the same way. I could hear her smiling over the phone. To her, a woman who was FORBIDDEN from speaking Hawaiian in school, FORBIDDEN from learning about her people, she finally heard someone tell her that she is intelligent, that her people are intelligent, that weʻre so much more than shitty whitewashed luaus and plastic leis.