His was the darkest face, but not the only non-Caucasian:Growing up in Hawaii gave Barack Obama a special outlook on life.

Here in Hawaii, we claim Barack Obama as our own. Being born in the Islands and spending many of his formative years in Honolulu surely helped make him the man he is. Like the rest of us, he was surrounded by a society formed by the unique history of Hawaii.

Of course, his other international experiences, such as living in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, must also have had a big effect. Obama knows from his playground days that even those who speak another language and follow another faith are just folks like the rest of us.

And, even in Hawaii, he did have to grapple with his own identity. There are not a lot of African-Americans in the Islands, and the culture that a half-black child would experience anywhere on the U.S. Mainland barely exists here.

Besides that, of course, Obama's father was from Africa, so he didn't have the black American extended family who might have given him that sense of identity to balance what he experienced with his white grandparents. He had to seek out connections with the black American community. And it's said he did experience racial taunts here; but then, so does just about every other child who grows up in the Islands. Sometimes the taunts are only teasing, while other times they can become serious and scary. Hawaii is not a racial (or any other kind of) paradise!

But Hawaii does have its own take on racial issues. Hawaii Public Radio commentator Tony Oliver pointed out that, in Hawaii, "Our new president is a member of a minority, just like the rest of us. His self-confidence comes not from being a minority, but from being one of many minorities."

Oliver ended his commentary with this sentence: "Barack Obama is our first hapa president."

(To hear Oliver's commentary, go to this page. Listen to the November 17, 2008, post.)

If you are not from Hawaii, the word "hapa" probably means nothing to you. In Hawaii, it means a lot. Many Islanders are "hapa." The word is Hawaiian for "half."

Early on, Caucasian sailors married Hawaiian women, creating the first hapa children. Later, plantation owners brought in Chinese immigrants to work in the sugar cane fields, and soon there were Hawaiian-Chinese children. Intermarriage has been going on ever since, as various ethnic groups arrived to work on the plantations.

Now, it is not uncommon for someone to tell you his genealogy includes Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, French, Danish, Korean and Puerto Rican--or any other combination. Thousands of people call themselves "chop suey," or an old-fashioned word from the multicultural May Day festivals of my youth: Cosmopolitan.

Our Island lifestyle and values are grounded in the Hawaiian host culture, which invented the concept of "aloha" and demonstrated it by welcoming people from all over the world. Many of us are related by marriage to someone of another race; it's hard to really hate another ethnic group when your favorite aunt happens to belong to that group.

We share our food, our holiday customs, and the "local" style of talk and dress, and because we live on isolated islands, we have to rely on each other for survival.

Years ago, I appeared on a panel with two young black men who were representing the Black Power movement. We spent some time together afterward, and I asked them to suggest a book I could read, because I just didn't get it. I had spent much of my life living where the lines between races were blurred, more gray (or perhaps rainbow colored) than black and white. They suggested I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I did, and then I understood better where they were coming from.

Mainlanders, accustomed to the sharp lines drawn between racial groups, probably have the same kind of bewilderment about race in Hawaii. One of the best things to come out of the Obama presidency would be to make the rest of the world more aware of how race relations work in Hawaii and how we manage to get along here.

We Islanders hope our new president comes home often. We will welcome him, but we will also try to give him enough space to enjoy the simple beauties of Hawaii. We have a custom of leaving celebrity visitors alone to relax; take note, national press, and back off as President Obama gets together with his high school basketball buddies, goes body surfing and stops to smell the plumerias.

In Hawaii, Obama can re-charge with the special energy that fed his soul in his growing-up years. This is the place that gave him the openness and the confidence to begin to heal those hard-edged divisions that plague our nation and our planet. May he visit often, and may the world watch and learn that Hawaii is more than just another pretty place.

Stumble It!

If you'd like to learn more about the history of Hawaii and its culture and community life, take a look at the other pages on this website, and consider purchasing Island Life 101: A Newcomer's Guide to Hawaii.