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COMMENTARY Class difference remains an American reality John Griffin |
Two very different events come to mind when I think about the role of class in the nation and in Hawai'i.
One is the traumatic early TV scenes after Hurricane Katrina and the flood first hit New Orleans, which shocked the country and world into looking again at both class and race in America.
Many Hawai'i people wondered what we would look like after a major tragedy struck, leaving thousands homeless.
The other, happier event was the Hawai'i Okinawa Association's 2005 Legacy Awards program at the Sheraton Waikiki. It featured several figures who became influential success stories and symbols of upward mobility from the plantation era. That included families that founded Times Supermarkets, Zippy's restaurants and Waipahu's fabled Arakawa Store. More about such changes later.
But what is class anyway?
Well, it's the ranking of people into a hierarchy within a culture — or within several cultures in a society such as Hawai'i's. Various methods consider education, income, wealth, occupation, genealogy, social prestige, manners and style, land ownership and even political standing.
Some would say that class is how the judge described pornography: you know it when you see it. But that doesn't mean it's just superficial style trappings because, as a rich guy said of an attractive woman in an old movie: "You can buy taste but you can't buy class."
Billionaire Donald Trump may have cash but that doesn't mean he has class.
Most Americans may like the idea — or the ideal — of a classless society with economic mobility, but the reality is something else, according to several long takeouts early this summer by leading media.
A New York Times editorial said its long national study titled Class Matters "has found that there is far less mobility up and down the economic ladder than economists once thought or that most Americans believe. Class based on economic and social differences remains a powerful force in American life and has come to play a greater, not lesser, role over the last three decades."
A parallel series in The Wall Street Journal found that the gap between rich and poor has widened in America. The odds that a child will climb from poverty to wealth, or fall from wealth to the middle class, have remained the same.
Americans are no more likely to rise or fall from their parents' economic class than they were 35 years ago, and that hardens class differences.
At the same time, studies have pictured both the diminishing of the middle class and the rise of the ultra wealthy, further stretching the rich-poor gap.
Where does Hawai'i fit? As usual we seem to include parts of the national pattern in our own special way.
Class seemed much simpler to my naive malihini eye when I came here in 1950 to finish at the University of Hawai'i and move into journalism. There were the Big Five business kama'aina haoles with some missionary descendants at the top, the plantation folks with their various racial and ethnic subdivisions, a rising young Asian generation, led by World War II vets, moving into politics and the professions, and Hawaiians who often seemed marginalized except for some old royalty and a few well-off families.
Class still divides Hawai'i in various ways, some unfortunate but others useful in preserving cultures. But now you see more categories and class lines are more blurred.
I gave up trying to rank classes on some fixed upper-to-lower scale. These represent old-new classes I see or were mentioned by people interviewed:
There is also something scholars call the "X factor" or "do it yourself tribalism" where younger people are banding together to form a new class of social activists or for other purposes, including politics.
And finally there are two other classes of people among the most important in Hawai'i.
One is called "local." This "hapa culture" has been growing with inter-marriage and as our multicultural population looks for a common identity. Still, there are those who fear localism (as seen from pidgin to pop culture to politics) is being diluted or even disappearing amid a Los Angelesation or "Californication" of Hawai'i.
In any event, localism, a blend of Asian, Hawai'i and haole roots, is evolving.
The other class is Hawaiians, a group that has been called "our real wild card" and the host-culture glue that holds much else together in our very mixed society.
Yet the two sides to that picture are much on display. On one, Hawaiians have come far in the last 40 years with a cultural renaissance and many individual success stories that include our first Hawaiian governor since statehood.
Some day Congress might pass the Akaka bill as a step toward preserving Hawaiian special rights and starting on a road to more sovereignty akin to American Indians. To me that would be minimum justice.
However, on the other side we see the dismal statistics and social indicators of a lower "caste minority" well-behind other racial and ethnic groups in economic needs and physical health and too far ahead in crime, prison and other negative indicators. Improving that side of the picture has to be a priority for everyone here.
One more factor in considering the role of class in Hawai'i and elsewhere: You can't blame everything on luck, but scholars and others cite its major role.
For luck determines a range of factors that include family wealth, educational opportunities and physical health and looks. Thus, it's said by some that the most important decision you may make in life is picking your parents.
A bottom line here, as elsewhere in bettering American society, is the need to improve our public education system and make educational opportunities more accessible to low-income students. That could mean more affirmative action programs in college, better early education, and stronger anti-poverty measures in general.
The old saying that the poor will always be with us may have some unfortunate truth. But that shouldn't mean that, as now indicated by trends, too many young people are doomed to be born and stay in an underclass.
The early New Orleans scenes dramatized that this nation has its own Third World. We need to think of that and of what kind of Hawai'i everyone, regardless of class, should want.
John Griffin, a frequent contributor, is a former Advertiser editorial page editor.
