The Pacific Islands: United by Ocean, Divided by Colonialism

From Public Books:

The Pacific islands of Samoa and the Cook Islands are about as far from each other (960 miles) as the American West Coast cities of Los Angeles, California, and Portland, Oregon. And yet, the inhabitants of the two islands must contend with a time difference of a remarkable 23 hours. The reason is that they are separated by the International Date Line, which divides one calendar day from another. Here, deep in the Pacific, the impact of Western colonialism runs deep: it even shapes the way Pacific Islanders experience time. It does so by erecting a barrier between geographically close and historically linked islands, a divide, explains scholar Maile Arvin, that is “irreconcilable with Indigenous epistemologies of the Moana, or Pacific Ocean that emphasize the ocean as connection rather than barrier.”

The Pacific Islands have long had a shared culture, yet were divided by European colonizers—with terminology based on their encounters with Africa—into “Polynesia,” “Micronesia,” and “Melanesia.” “White people carved this vast oceanic world into categories of race,” Nitasha Tamar Sharma writes, “appointing Melanesians as the Black people of the Pacific because of their dark skin and curly hair, in contrast to Polynesians, whom Europeans considered closer to Whiteness.”

A case study for understanding Pacific Islanders’ relationship to whiteness can be found in Guam, a Micronesian island held by the US as a territory. One of the most militarized islands in the western Pacific Ocean, Guam contains two major military bases: Naval Base Guam in Santa Rita and Andersen Air Force Base in Yigo. It is the construction of modern Guam as a strategic military outpost for the United States that forms the basis of Alfred Peredo Flores’s Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962. Flores posits that Guam (which Flores calls Guåhan, the island’s Chamorro name, but which I will refer to in this essay as Guam for ease of recognition by unfamiliar readers) was developed by the United States through a process of “settler militarism,” and that the formation and maintenance of Guam’s civilian military labor system depended on privileging the needs—financial and sexual—of white Americans over those of Chamorro (the Indigenous people of Guam, also spelled CHamoru) and Filipino workers. “Settler militarism,” according to Juliet Nebolon, underscores the extent to which “settler colonialism and militarization have simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another,” making it a useful term to understand the development of Guam as both a cultural and military asset to the United States.

This question of proximity to whiteness is also considered by Arvin in Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania, which theorizes that Pacific Islanders’ identity has been shaped by a “logic of possession through whiteness.” By this logic, Arvin argues, Polynesians were considered “almost white”: allowing white settlers to claim indigeneity and thus settler colonial ownership over Hawaii and other parts of Polynesia. Such near-whiteness contrasts Micronesians (including Chamorros in Guam) and Melanesians, whom Arvin argues were considered closer to Blackness and, thus, racially subjugated in a more conventional manner. Polynesians’ perceived proximity to whiteness, according to Arvin, was primarily rooted in the belief that “because Polynesian language, myth, and biology contained an Aryan heritage, Polynesian peoples and land were naturally also the heritage of white settlers.”

Arvin’s “logic of possession through whiteness” illuminates Flores’s account of what happened in mid-20th-century Guam. Putting these two books in conversation, I argue that Chamorros’ racialization as dark and “other” in contrast to white Americans allowed for the privileging of whiteness and white labor in the settler colonial project in Guam, in contrast to Arvin’s example of settler colonialism in Polynesia, specifically Hawaii, relying on constructing Polynesians as proximal to white Americans. In the first instance, settler colonialism positioned Chamorros as distant from whiteness in order to underscore Pacific Islanders’ perceived inferiority as laborers and residents of Guam compared to their white counterparts. In the second instance, settler colonialism similarly exalted whiteness not by underscoring Pacific Islanders’ distance from whiteness but by locating Polynesians as “almost white as an attempt to make Polynesia into a Western, settler colonial project, not merely a place.”

In post–World War II Guam, then, Arvin’s “logic of possession through whiteness” operates slightly differently than it does in Polynesia to nevertheless exercise control over Chamorros, specifically by underscoring their distance from whiteness rather than assigning them an “almost white” status.

It is necessary to first define the parameters of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, even though the terms are a “form of knowledge production that structures settler colonialism.” Polynesia is the largest by area of the three regions and includes Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti Nui, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand, among other islands. West of Polynesia is Melanesia, which includes Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, among others. North of Melanesia are the islands of Micronesia, including Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Polynesians, specifically Native Hawaiians, were positioned as racially proximal to whiteness. As such, they were elevated above Micronesians and Melanesians, who were named so literally because of their melanin. Micronesians fell somewhere in between: darker in complexion than Polynesians but lighter than Melanesians, occupying the liminal space between whiteness and Blackness. Some scholars offer a more capacious definition of Blackness: According to legal scholar Charles Lawrence as summarized by Sharma, Blackness “includes Micronesian and Hawaiian men whose lives are burdened (and cut short) by racist people in positions of power—who in Hawai’i include Asians.” Under this framing, both Chamorros and Native Hawaiians occupy a position of relative Blackness compared to non-Indigenous Asian and white settlers.

So where do all Pacific Islanders, considered separately from Asian Americans (with whom they have been grouped), stand in relation to whiteness? Considering this question is important as Asian Americans litigate their own positionality in relation to whiteness, especially with looming discourse contending that Asian Americans are “honorary white people” in light of issues such as affirmative action and policing.

Pacific Islanders are often lumped together with Asian Americans in US community surveys, data reports, and government-sanctioned celebrations. These include Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, alternatively referred to by the federal government as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and, most recently, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: three names that underscore the government’s ongoing uncertainty when it comes to defining and locating Pacific Islander communities in relation to Asian Americans.

In 1997, the US Census finally separated the categories “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” and “Asian.” Still, Pacific Islanders are seldom considered separately from Asians in mainstream news coverage and scholarly criticism, beyond references to the Pacific Islands in geopolitical and military contexts. But there are “stark, documented inequalities between Asian American and Pacific Islander groups,” as Arvin observes. Moreover, grouping them together ignores “the distinction that Pacific Islanders are Indigenous peoples,” meaning they are the earliest known inhabitants of the region.

And the dearth of specific information about the demographic makeup and needs of Pacific Islander communities has led to fewer resources for those communities, especially when health and economic studies in reality focus primarily on Asian ethnicity groups but purport to target AAPI communities. Disaggregating data among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities can help: a San Francisco Unified School District student population recount found that almost three times as many students identified as Pacific Islander compared to the school’s initial report for the 2018–19 academic year—and that more than half of them identified as Samoan, which led to the creation of an educational pathway for students “rooted in Sāmoa Aganu’u indigenous values and practices.” Clearly, when it comes to Pacific Islanders, questions of terminology have material consequences.

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG doesn’t agree with ideas of racial guilt or historical racial subjugation as the most relevant elements in today’s society.

He also disagrees with the statement in the OP that “The Pacific Islands have long had a shared culture.”

How did this sharing of culture take place in a region that covers an enormous area—64 million square miles—a space larger than all the land masses of the world combined—during times when a huge portion of Pacific Islanders could only travel by small boats powered by sails or paddles?

PG will limit himself to a discussion of only one more statement in the OP – “White people do not need to be present for whiteness to exert its hegemony.”

What is “whiteness”? Is the “whiteness” of Finland the same as the “whiteness” of white people living in South Africa? How about the “whiteness” of Alaskans and the “whiteness” of white sharecroppers who live in Alabama?

The author of the OP is a woman named Meena Venkataramanan (Harvard University, BA in English; University of Cambridge, MPhil in English), who writes for The Washington Post and speaks English, Spanish and Tamil.

On Ms. Venkataramanan’s blog, we learn that:

My writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, POLITICO, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Harvard Magazine, the Texas Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and ABC News. My work has been featured on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and All In With Chris Hayes, and I have discussed my reporting across national and regional media.

On a different page of her blog, we can see “links to selected media appearances on television, radio, video, and podcasts.” In various of these media appearances, we learn that she is a recognized expert on why more American women want their tubes tied and how Queen Elizabeth’s death resurfaced colonial trauma for some people. Additionally, her thoughts about a “Bad Bunny and El Muerto Variant Cover” on TikTok apparently rated an article in The Washington Post.

Ms. Venkataramanan is certainly a useful expert on a wide variety of subjects—where Pacific Islanders stand in relation to Whitness, knowledge production that structures settler colonialism, how Asian Americans litigate their own positionality in relation to Whiteness, and so forth.

PG just realized that he forgot to mention another field of expertise Ms. Venkataramanan has mastered – Why “Some Black Germans want change.”