Velasquez-Manoff presents a side of Hawaii that a majority of mainlanders have never really gotten a chance to understand or relate to. The title of this article really hits it out of the park in describing what is to come and Velasquez-Manoff really goes into his ideas based on racial attitudes in Hawaii and the story behind why he got into this topic.
Velasquez-Manoff is heavily influenced by Dr. Pauker, who he mentions primarily throughout his piece. Describing her as “a psychology professor is of mixed ancestry, her mother of Japanese descent and her father white from an Italian-Irish background.” (Velasquez-Manoff) Her focus being primarily “essentialist thinking” in which she conducts studies in both Hawaii and Boston (Velasquez-Manoff). From this, she found that people on what is referred to frequently throughout this piece as the “mainland”, were more apt to stereotyping people based on their looks than people in Hawaii. This is all relates to Velasquez-Manoff because he took an interest in Dr. Pauker’s work, at one point stating “I’m interested in all of this partly because I myself come from a mixed background. I have an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother (neither of which, I should point out, is a race).” (Velasquez-Manoff). He is able to relate to her work and it certainly piques his interest, as he comes to meet her later on. He states “The question of how people from mixed backgrounds create their identity has, until recently, mostly been ignored by psychologists.” (Velasquez-Manoff) which I think is what really gets in the ball rolling in terms of how he developed his ideas.
He understands and realizes that normally, people have biased views when observing others, quickly categorizing them by just one look, at one point he even succumbs to this himself. He mentions when he was on the campus in Hawaii “The campus was clearly diverse, but I quickly realized the assumption underlying my fieldwork was fatally flawed. Here I was trying to discern ancestry, but how was I to know anyone’s background just by looking, particularly in a place where people were so mixed?” The views that he is certainly against is something that even he falls short to at some points but he realizes that and looks to go further than that and we see that throughout the piece.
