How his Hawaiian upbringing shapes the way Barack Obama governs—and what it means for the U.S. and the world.
Obama, Hawaiian style.
The scene comes near the beginning of U.S. President Barack Obama’s bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father. He recalls playing on a beach in Hawaii as a toddler in the 1960s, his copper skin inured to the heat of the Pacific sun.
When tourists exploring this newly accessible island idyll stopped to gawk at him, Obama’s white Kansas-born grandfather, Stanley Dunham, would sidle up behind them and whisper a plausible explanation for the youngster’s exotic appearance: He was the great-grandson of Hawaii’s first monarch, King Kamehameha.
Whether the story is true or not—and Obama suggests it may well have come from Gramps’ endless stock of tall tales—it conveys an important lesson about the place where Obama grew up. In those years before the civil rights movement, how many African-American children could be passed off, however jokingly, as royalty? And how many Americans of any origin experienced tourism from the vantage point of the outlandish subject, rather than the camera-toting viewer? In Hawaii, like nowhere else in America, such things could happen. This singular environment—where whiteness was never the norm and a different way of seeing things was—made a big difference for Obama. Now it matters vitally for the rest of the world, too.
It is not unusual, of course, for political leaders to reflect their geographical origins in the way they govern. Harry Truman’s no-nonsense stubbornness was as native to Independence, Missouri, as Jimmy Carter’s rural asceticism was grounded in Plains, Georgia. And it may have been the contradictory combination of patrician Connecticut and oil-patch Texas that gave George W. Bush such unwavering (and often misplaced) confidence in what his gut was telling him.
But Obama came to the White House infused with the spirit of a place very different from the rest of America. Hawaii, where he was born and attended school from the fifth grade to high school graduation, still celebrates a cultural heritage radically foreign to that of the rest of the U.S. And it has shaped the 44th president just as it does everyone of whatever ethnicity who grew up on the most remote, diverse and exotic state in the Union.
The West has already accommodated multiculturalism into music, culinary tastes and cinema. But to have a figure to which so much “foreignness” adheres as U.S. president marks a singular moment in American political history. The rest of the world registers it, too. Like it or not, America’s president is also to some extent president of the world. In Obama, the world has a leader who is not only open to other cultural influences and other points of view but has direct experience of them. The world is watching to see how much difference that will make.
In Hawaii, Obama was imbued with an islander’s sense of shared purpose. He grew up in a place less given to an “us versus them” mentality and more attuned to “we,” a place defined less by America’s frontier ethic than by the enormity of the Pacific Ocean. If Obama manages to keep that legacy alive, he could recalibrate America’s role in the world—and the world’s attitude toward America.
Doing so, however, is already proving to be a tough job. Obama tried the “we” thing with Republicans as he launched his bid to remake American health care, only to be roundly spurned. Now some on the Left have expressed bitter disappointment over Obama’s compromises on health care, his massive rescue package for Wall Street and his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. The president’s once soaring approval rating has fallen dramatically. Even abroad, where Obama’s conciliatory tone won him massive crowds and even a Nobel Peace Prize, there’s disillusionment. Some Europeans say he’s disengaged, hard to know, and they expected him to do more to make the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen a success. The aloha spirit may be a fragile flame at the mercy of the tensions in Washington and the world. Can Obama keep it alive?
Barack Obama’s birth in 1961 came amid the feverish growth that followed Hawaii’s statehood in 1959; as he moved from boyhood to adolescence, the islands consolidated their reputation as a tourist’s paradise. By that time, the often-fraught process of cultural negotiation between indigenous islanders, European and American Caucasians, and the Japanese had been going on for almost two centuries. Not everyone is happy, of course, with how that turned out. Many native Hawaiians believe their ancient culture has been brutally repressed, and that what’s left has been commoditized and pasteurized to the measure of mainlanders.
But unlike anywhere else in the U.S., latecomers to Hawaii adopted attitudes that were deep-set in the population well before British Captain James Cook first landed there in 1778. In the centuries since then, plenty of attempts have been made to uproot that culture. Missionaries arrived in 1820 to convert the population to Christianity; the unfamiliar concept of land ownership was introduced so that vast pineapple and sugarcane plantations could be established; and by the late 19th century, a series of political and military efforts had been launched by powerful non-natives, and ultimately by the U.S. government itself, to curtail the sovereignty of native Hawaiian monarchs. The last of them, Queen Lili`uokalani, gave up her throne under military pressure in 1893, and in 1900 the islands became a territory of a budding colonial power, the U.S.
While those changes disadvantaged the native Hawaiians, it didn’t mean they were entirely sapped of their cultural power. “Hawaii still has its own identity; it’s not somebody else’s place,” says Puakea Nogelmeier, a scholar of the Hawaiian language who came from the mainland in 1973 as a young adventure-seeker and has stayed on ever since. “Those who come after are conquered by absorption, but there is still a continuity of Hawaii’s inner self.”
Obama didn’t get to be president because he’s Hawaiian; he didn’t get to be Obama without Hawaii. “There’s no doubt that the residue of Hawaii will always stay with me, and that it is part of my core,” he said in a speech in Honolulu in December 2004, according to authors Stu Glauberman and Jerry Burris in their book The Dream Begins. “What’s best in me, and what’s best in my message, is consistent with the tradition of Hawaii.” Here is a catalogue of six Hawaiian cultural pathways reflected in Obama’s approach to politics.
The way of aloha kanaka
In the America of the 1960s and 1970s, Hawaii was a pretty good place to grow up for someone whose mother was from Kansas and father was from Kenya. Hawaiians aspire to the ideal of aloha kanaka, a Polynesian concept of open love for human beings of whatever origin. Whether they achieve it or not is, of course, a matter of dispute; there has been no lack of struggle among natives, Japanese, Caucasians and other ethnic groups. But the fundamental polarity of race on the mainland didn’t exist in the islands. Indeed, in the 1960s, when Obama was growing up, there was little clear sense in Hawaii—or in the mind of a boy raised without his father—of what it meant to be African-American.
Obama remembers feeling different, and there was at least one time he punched another kid who used a racist epithet. But the incidents of racism in Hawaii seem relatively harmless given the tumult surrounding race elsewhere in America in those days. Manu Aluli Meyer, a professor of education at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, remembers noticing young Barry Obama a couple of years below her class in Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School. A gifted basketball and volleyball player, she was surprised at how “mediocre” young Barry was on the court. “The only black guys we’d ever seen were in the NBA, and they were a lot better than Barry!” she says, laughing as she recalls the insularity that gave wind to such naïve preconceptions.
Still, that’s a prejudice far easier to cope with than the ones that often faced African-American men of his generation in the rest of America. When Obama was in his teens, about a third of Hawaii’s population was of mixed race. Africa’s legacy was rare, and naturally Obama was seen as different, but it wasn’t until he left the islands for college in California that he had to construct his own sense of being African-American. Because so many different skin colors co-existed and mixed in Hawaii, race relations didn’t have the polarity that typified the rest of the U.S. in the 1970s. Says Meyer, “Barry has a depth of knowing that what we have in common is our difference. That’s Hawaii.”
Obama said as much during his campaign. “I do think that the multicultural nature of Hawaii helped teach me how to appreciate different cultures and navigate different cultures, out of necessity,” he told U.S. News and World Report, adding that the place also has “a cultural bias toward courtesy and trying to work through problems in a way that makes everybody feel like they’re being listened to. And I think that reflects itself in my personality as well as my political style.”
If Hawaii’s multiculturalism in the 1970s was an exception, it is increasingly becoming the rule. Obama’s ability to navigate the crosscurrents of different cultures will be crucial to achieving some of his biggest ambitions, since goals like stopping climate change and kickstarting sustainable economic growth can only be reached by many nations working in concert.
The way of ho’oponopono
When damning proof emerged early last year that officials of the Bush administration had knowingly sanctioned torture to compel suspected terrorists to talk, Obama was under pressure to prosecute—quickly—the authors of a policy he had long condemned as corrosive to American interests and values. Obama chose not to settle scores. Of course, he made sure the practice was over, and he pushed for full disclosure of what had been done. But he didn’t pursue prosecutions. “It’s a time for reflection, not retribution,” he said.
Writing in The New Republic, veteran Washington journalist E.J. Dionne, Jr. cited that stance as evidence, as a senior Obama advisor told him, that Obama is a “devout non-ideologue.” That’s one way of putting it, surely. But Sally-Jo Bowman, the Hawaiian-born author of The Heart of Being Hawaiian, believes it reflects something else: ho`oponopono, a traditional Hawaiian family counseling technique whereupon participants seek to solve problems not by apportioning blame, but by “making right” relations that have gone awry. For Bowman, it’s one of many examples of how the culture of the Hawaiian Islands informs Obama’s approach to politics. “Hawaiians are affiliative; we really want to bond with people,” says Bowman. “Every time I see Obama, he’s touching people, connecting. That’s island all the way.”
Not all his attempts at ho’oponopono have fared as well. One of the major foreign policy changes Obama promised was to engage with Iran, a country his predecessor had included in the “axis of evil.” Obama shook hands with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September, and his staff pushed an innovative win-win plan to tie up most of Iran’s nuclear fuel stockpile by reprocessing it abroad. But the Iranian regime has spurned that deal and shown scant desire to answer Obama with its own will to engage. Now Obama is back to calling for serious sanctions to force Tehran to curtail what he’s now convinced are efforts to build nuclear weapons.
The way of pono
In a way, the very geography of Hawaii promotes social solidarity, just as the broad reach of an unsettled continent fostered the legendary self-reliance of mainland pioneers. “Whether it’s the New York state of mind or the California state of mind, it’s really all about ‘me me me,’” says Puakea Nogelmeier, a professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawaii. “In Hawaii, we cultivate a sense of self as part of a larger group, and that’s a thumbprint of Hawaii I see in Obama.”
In 1976, Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson built a 60-foot canoe of the sort scholars believe Hawaii’s first settlers used to make their way from the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia in the first millennium. In sailing it without navigational aids to distant islands, Thompson got a visceral lesson that he thinks has taken root in the islands ever since. When there’s no land in sight, when rancor between captain and crew can lead to everyone’s death, cooperation becomes bred in the bone. And as it is in a canoe, so it is on an island—or even in an entire country. Indeed, one can even argue that Obama extends the metaphor to the world at large in his nascent foreign policy: In Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, even Iran, he’s reached across traditions of isolation to try to build bridges.
Meyer believes being bound together in an endless sea helped foster the Hawaiian idea of pono—truth or genuineness. “Here if you don’t have integrity, people will see it; it’s a cultural imperative, not something beaten into you as a moral teaching,” she says. “I see Barry influenced by an ancient sensibility, and that’s good for America and the world.”
The way of malama
On an island, the need for sustainability is not a recent epiphany. There are no endless horizons to approach once the land you’re on has been tapped out. The principle of malama, or “taking care,” was a foundation for island living long before Westerners arrived. “Native Hawaiians were masters at closely managing scarce resources,” says Ken Stokes, a green economist and director of the Kauaian Institute. Yet by the time Obama was growing up in Hawaii, the environmental costs of the islands’ frenzied economic expansion had become obvious. Taming that process was the central political issue in the 50th state during the 1970s.
Native Hawaiians were balking, not just at the U.S. Navy’s use of the island Kaho’olawe as a bombing range, but the expansion of hotels and subdivisions into some of the archipelago’s most beautiful valleys and beaches. “Fairly early on, growing up in Hawaii, not only do you -appreciate the natural beauty, but there is a real ethic of concern for the land that dates back to the native Hawaiians,” Glauberman and Burris quote Obama as saying in The Dream Begins. “So it was natural for me, I think, growing up, to be concerned about these issues in a way now I think is common across the country but was more deeply embedded in Hawaii at the time.”
Obama has made a strong environmental policy a central plank of his recovery program. His administration has allocated $60 billion of the main stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to clean energy investments, from renewable energy and green job training to improving the energy efficiency of private homes and government buildings. Even as the U.S. auto industry undergoes a breathtaking reduction of capacity, Obama has announced tighter fuel efficiency standards after more than a decade of laissez-faire regulation. He has encouraged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deem carbon dioxide a pollutant that can be regulated, challenging the Senate to adopt legislation reducing CO2 emissions.
He may not manage that, just as he didn’t manage to cut through the knot of conflicting demands at Copenhagen. But it wasn’t Obama who set the limits of the non-binding agreement reached there. “We must bridge old divides and build new partnerships to meet this great challenge of our time,” he said—at the same time as he acknowledged, in a manner hardly typical of U.S. presidents, that there’s no one right way for the world to see the question on the table. “I think it’s important to be able to stand in the shoes of all the different parties involved here,” he said. That is a capability for which his opponents in Congress will likely only excoriate him, but it’s something the rest of the world—especially the island nations, which will bear the brunt of climate change—will surely value.
The way of nalu
Obama has made a point of talking about how basketball taught him important lessons in life. But maybe bodysurfing did, too. Both as a teenager and as an adult, he especially liked to go to Sandy Beach, which was the site of a signal battle between developers and preservationists. Nalu, Hawaiian for “wave riding,” is an ancient tradition in the islands, whether practiced with a surfboard or without. Either way, says Bowman, it stands for more than just a good time; it’s also a philosophical training ground. “In an ocean environment, you don’t just jump in; you study what you’re up against,” she says. “And once you are in the water, you use its force—fight it and you lose.”
That is a fair metaphor for the way Obama has formulated his positions on the most monumental decision he’s had to make so far: how best to deal with Afghanistan. On the Right, he was pilloried for mulling over that question to excess. It took Obama 10 high-level strategy sessions at the White House, and several demands for new policy studies, before he was ready to agree to most of what his top commander in the region, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, had requested. He will send 30,000 additional troops instead of 40,000, and he named a target date to begin pulling out of some regions. But he didn’t fundamentally challenge the military brass on how to proceed, and their backing has by all accounts been genuine. Obama has marshaled the force of the army to his side, or marshaled himself to it; it’s nalu either way.
Going with the flow doesn’t engender universal respect, though—far from it. Obama’s critics on the Left contend that if he’d fought harder he could have pushed the health-care debate further toward a public option that might have reined in costs and put the screws to profit-hungry insurance companies. But Obama held back, watching as Congress’ lawmaking process abraded the proposal into something 60 members of the Senate could swallow. Obama has made a point of talking about how basketball taught him important lessons in life. But maybe bodysurfing did, too. Both as a teenager and as an adult, he especially liked to go to Sandy Beach, which was the site of a signal battle between developers and preservationists. Nalu, Hawaiian for “wave riding,” is an ancient tradition in the islands, whether practiced with a surfboard or without. Either way, says Bowman, it stands for more than just a good time; it’s also a philosophical training ground. “In an ocean environment, you don’t just jump in; you study what you’re up against,” she says. “And once you are in the water, you use its force—fight it and you lose.”
That is a fair metaphor for the way Obama has formulated his positions on the most monumental decision he’s had to make so far: how best to deal with Afghanistan. On the Right, he was pilloried for mulling over that question to excess. It took Obama 10 high-level strategy sessions at the White House, and several demands for new policy studies, before he was ready to agree to most of what his top commander in the region, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, had requested. He will send 30,000 additional troops instead of 40,000, and he named a target date to begin pulling out of some regions. But he didn’t fundamentally challenge the military brass on how to proceed, and their backing has by all accounts been genuine. Obama has marshaled the force of the army to his side, or marshaled himself to it; it’s nalu either way.
Going with the flow doesn’t engender universal respect, though—far from it. Obama’s critics on the Left contend that if he’d fought harder he could have pushed the health-care debate further toward a public option that might have reined in costs and put the screws to profit-hungry insurance companies. But Obama held back, watching as Congress’ lawmaking process abraded the proposal into something 60 members of the Senate could swallow.
The way of aloha
The word has been used as a greeting since the 19th century, and misused as a ubiquitous watchword for all things Hawaiian for almost as long. Its true meaning, however, is all-encompassing and central to island traditions. In fact, a state law explicitly obliges government officials to hew to the aloha spirit, which it defines as “the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence.”
A tinge of that island-born world view may just be part of what made people consider Obama out of the ordinary when he hit the mainland. Dwight Hopkins, a professor of theology at the University of Chicago, met Obama when they both attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side. “In the black church, it’s almost unheard of for a favorite son politician not to take to the pulpit whenever he can,” says Hopkins. “But Obama’s air was more to be part of praising the world, not manipulating people into praising him.”
According to Hopkins, an expert on African-American theology who has looked in depth at how culture affects spirituality, Obama has offered ample evidence since then of what Hopkins calls “an embracing world view as opposed to one of ‘either/or.’ The idea that we all win and no one loses is radically different from the traditional way of seeing things on the American mainland.” Hopkins notes that Obama chose to honor his rival for the presidency, John McCain, at his pre-inaugural dinner. He gave his first public interview to the Arab press, with the message that his administration would take great care not to demonize the Muslim world. Says Hopkins, “That’s not mainline America, that’s not black and white—that’s the aloha spirit.”
Traditional Hawaiians are undoubtedly convinced that spirit can heal the world. If that’s true, it can’t hurt to have a president who wields it.
James Graff looks forward to trying out Barack Obama’s bodysurfing techniques in some balmy clime.
