Barack’s family newly arrived in Hawaii in 1959. By the time his family arrived, Hawaii is a melting pot, an experiment in racial harmony. His racial stock caused his grandparents few problems, and they quickly adopted the scornful attitude local residents took toward visitors who expressed such hang-ups. Sometimes when his Gramps saw tourists watching him play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with appropriate reverence, that Barack was the great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. And Gramps would just as readily tell another story, the one about the tourist who saw him swimming one day, and, not knowing who she was talking to, commented that “swimming must just come naturally to these Hawaiians.” To which he responded that would be hard to future, since “that boy happens to be my grandson, his mother is from Kansa, his father is from the interior of Kenya, and there isn’t an ocean for miles in either damn place.” For my grandfather, the race wasn’t something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon. -P.28, August 5, 2021.
