2010

Group projects were the bane of my existence.

I somehow always got stuck with partners who had zero interest in getting graded above sixty percent while I tried my best to bring back a digestible report card so my parents wouldn't suspect I hated my existence at this school. (Hatred for general existence was a different monster.) It wasn't like I enjoyed doing all of this work myself so I understood the annoyance of it, but I also understood we had zero recourse as far as teenage obligations were concerned.

The only thing my partners seemed to be good at was debating the talking points during our brainstorming sessions. I was the only one taking notes so we could use any of this during the actual writing process. But maybe I was just, as my gym teacher so eloquently called me in the most unprompted manner, a nerd.

God, I hated this place.

"What's the issue in us writing about how Hawai'i is a multicultural state?" One of the guys asked.

It wasn't that I believed boys were incapable of critical thinking, but I wasn't surprised to see the only other girl in my group was the one who offered up another point of view anytime we tried to figure out what to write our paper on. "I didn't say it was a bad idea. I said that labeling Hawai'i as a multicultural paradise can be problematic if not conveyed properly."

He rolled his eyes. "And how is that? Hawaiian culture is just a bunch of influences from settlers."

"Hawai'i culture and Hawaiian culture are two different things, loser." The teacher, who had been staring down at their grading book this entire time while working on scoring pop quizzes from last week, clicked their tongue in a warning. "I mean Reggie. But the fact that you're conflating the two means you probably shouldn't be writing about it."

"That seems like a cop-out." He leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms. "Hawai'i isn't what it is without all of these cultures. It wouldn't even be standing today without them."

Well, that's where I stopped being quiet.

"Hawai'i is still standing because her people, the actual Native Hawaiians, have fought to preserve her history. And yes, painting Hawai'i as a multicultural paradise without acknowledging the harmful side effects is problematic. Using those kinds of terms ignores the way the native population is disproportionately affected by things like houselessness, incarceration, and targeted harassment by officials and those in power, often at the hands of and to the benefit of non-native communities. One of the reasons why Hawai'i is so beautiful is because it is a mixing pot of cultures. But that landscape does not excuse or take away from the harm it can also cause. You can write about the positive influences of other cultures while still acknowledging settler colonialism."

"And who are you to decide that?"

"I'm Native Hawaiian. Who are you to say otherwise?"

He nudged one of our other group members with his elbow, laughing like a bad comedian who didn't realize nobody cared about his jokes. The other guy looked uninterested in his comments either way. "This is just like the other week when she said people using the word hapa was cultural appropriation."

If we were at war, battle lines were drawn right there. The girl next to me was seeing red now on my behalf. She wasn't Hawaiian, as far as I was aware, but she was a woman of color so being talked down to by a white guy in our group was less than appealing.

"That's not what she said."

"It kind of is."

"Uh no," she mocked, "it kind of isn't. She said Asian Americans, particularly those who have zero connection to Hawai'i, taking the word and changing the definition to say it means someone who's half Asian is cultural appropriation. Dumbass."

"Hey."

"What?" She didn't apologize to the teacher this time. "He's being a dumbass."

"If you keep it up, I'm going to have to send you to the principal's office," they scolded.

"Thanks, Teach—"

"Just keep it to yourself."

"Hey." This time it was Reggie.

"I can't stop her from thinking it."

She looked smug. Good for her.

Reggie turned back. "Who cares if they use one silly word to describe themselves?"

"One silly word?" I laughed. "Native Hawaiians were literally banned from speaking their own language at one point in time and you're saying it's wrong for them to take issue with their language being appropriated by a group of people who routinely displace Native Hawaiians on their land or, better yet, people within that group who couldn't tell me the first thing about Hawai'i or Hawaiian culture?"

"It's not even your language!" The other girl exclaimed. "How are you to tell her she can't be mad?"

"Does she even speak Hawaiian?"

I narrowed my eyes. "Do you even have a brain—"

"Hokulani."

Flashing the teacher a pained glance, I held up my hands.

"It's not like Hawaiians are perfect either," he continued. By now, a few stragglers from other groups who weren't paying attention to their own were listening in now. It didn't help that this boy had no sense of spatial awareness as far as his voice was concerned. The entire class could probably hear him. I elected to ignore that the teacher seemed willing to moderate curse words used in class but not how white students perpetuated harmful rhetoric regarding Native Hawaiians. Who was I to say otherwise, after all? Just a silly little Hawaiian girl.

"Pray tell what wonderful insight you have on Hawaiians," the girl beside me deadpanned.

"Hawaiians are super racist toward white people."

The girl and I shared a look before bursting out laughing.

"You did not just say that." She wiped tears from her eyes while I held a hand to my stomach.

I wasn't sure if the red flush rising to his cheeks was on account of him being embarrassed or angry that we were laughing at him, and drawing attention to our group at that. Quite frankly, I didn't care.

"Reverse racism is real," he verbally stomped along like a petulant child. I almost half expected him to literally stand up and storm out of the room. "Being white in Hawai'i I'd a struggle."

"Yeah, and Santa Claus is real too, right?" she sarcastically replied.

"You realize by calling it reverse racism that you're acknowledging racism is a tool of white supremacy, right?"

He glared at me. "That's not what I'm saying."

"I don't even know what you're saying at this point. Except that you want us all to fail this project."

The fifth and final student in our group looked around at us with a blank stare in his eyes. Now that I got a better look, they had a slight tinge of pink, so he might have been stoned. "I don't even know what the project is supposed to be anymore."

Honestly? Admirable to admit.

"Who even said Hawaiians are perfect?" I said. "I've written about how many Native Hawaiians and other groups of color often discriminate against Micronesians and Melanesians in Hawai'i. The teacher read part of it out loud in class at the beginning of the year, but I'm sure you were too busy struggling as a white person in Hawai'i to notice. What does that have to do with literally any of your other points?"

"It means you should be grateful for—"

Finally, the teacher decided to step in then, though the damage was already done. I could kiss a passing grade on this group project goodbye because even if we had come up with something to write about, I had zero interest in working with Reggie on it.

"Nice of you to finally do something," I muttered under my breath with no intention of letting the teacher hear.

Of course, that was exactly why they did.

"What was that?"

Reggie smiled at me.

"Eat shit, you fucking prick."

"Principal's office. Now."

...

"Dad. He tried to say reverse racism was real. How was I supposed to not tell him to shut up?"

My father rarely had to sit me down at the dining table for getting in trouble, but that was mostly because I hardly got myself into these kinds of situations. (Not that I got myself into this one.) (I was just minding my Hawaiian business when the white guy cried reverse racism.) That was the reason why this whole ordeal felt uncomfortable. And, as a result, I was irritable. Since my dad had to pick me up from school, so was he.

He rested his arm against the table, tapping his fingers up and down in a steady rhythm like I imagined some villain in a cheesy straight-to-DVD movie would, except Dad could never be the real villain in my eyes. Sometimes I got irritated by the things he did or said, but he was always the scapegoat I directed my frustrations at when the real villain was something intangible like life. Sometimes I was my own villain. Sometimes I was the antihero in a world where there was no villain.

"Hokulani, I don't care what some punk ass haole said—"

"How can you not care?"

"—all I care about is you not getting sent to the principal's office so I have to leave work early to pick you up. Teach 'em buggahs a lesson outside of class."

I scoffed. "Sorry to be such a pain in the ass about having to pick me up."

"Hokulani," he warned.

"I didn't do anything wrong!" I threw my hands up, and after realizing I had no other outlet to release this pent-up energy, I got out of my seat to start pacing the kitchen. "Some fucking loser tries to tell me about what makes Hawai'i what it is, says we're racist towards white people, a damn joke, and I am somehow the one who gets sent to the principal's office? It's bullshit and you know it."

"You can say whatever is on your mind, but in my house, you don't swear at me. I'm not tellin' you twice."

I stopped in my tracks with my back facing toward my father and my gaze trained at the window where the perfect view of the ocean sat in front of me. Sometimes it was so beautiful it looked fake enough that I had to walk outside just to make sure it wasn't.

"I hate that people like him can just do whatever they want without any recourse," I said, my voice shakier than I wanted it to be. I didn't want to be so bothered by the words of somebody who would never understand. And, yet, there I was, on the edge of a cliff, waiting to topple over. At the time, I had felt so brave. Now, I felt small. A small girl on a small island with small dreams and a small chance of becoming anything bigger.

"I know," my dad replied. Still, I didn't turn around.

"Then why are you telling me to be quiet?"

A beat passed in which I knew my dad was shaking his head, even without having to turn around. "That's not what I said."

"That's what it feels like you're doing."

"Hokulani?" He waited until I looked at him. "Sit down, please."

This time, I listened. For someone who spent most of her life listening instead of speaking, I wasn't always the best at it as far as my parents were concerned. That was something I needed to work on.

Dad looked the same every single time he sat in that chair, so much so that I was convinced whenever I sat in it too, I could feel the shape of him beneath me. His legs were spread wide—not obnoxiously so like some guys did, but as much as you expected any dad would—and his back straight. He was never rigid but somehow still looked commanding. If he was anyone else, I might have been intimidated. Sometimes I wondered if I secretly was.

"I'm not saying you need to be quiet," he repeated. "I'm saying that one day, you'll realize there are times when you're better off saving your breath for a moment that matters."

"Isn't it always a good time to stand up to people who do wrong against you?"

He shrugged. "Sure. Maybe. Maybe the way I've approached this my entire life is wrong. I can accept that. But I truly believe that some moments are better than others. Especially when you take your own mental health into consideration. Sure, you got to call him a name, but who do you think is the one who was hurt most by the exchange?" That wasn't a question either of us needed to answer. "If standing up to someone who likely won't change their mind and might even just dig his heels in further means that you'll be the one in pain, it's okay to not waste your breath. You should never feel silenced. But you should never feel obligated to put yourself into a situation like that if you don't want to. Okay? You're not a superhero. You're a young girl. Let yourself be a young girl. You do not need to hold the weight of the world on your shoulders. That's what I'm here for, okay?"