In Hawaii interracial marriage and interracial dating is not such a big deal to the majority of people who live here. Maybe it is because so many ethnicities shared a common work heritage stemming from the sugar and pineapple plantations, and also living on an island forces you to get along!
Judge people for who they are and fall in love with you like. Take my husband's and my immediate family. His family is Okinawan and Japanese. My family is Chinese with a little bit of Hawaiian. We have a haole (Caucasian) brother-in-law from Michigan, and a haole ex brother-in-law from New York. We have a Chinese brother-in-law and Chinese sister-in-law, a Korean sister-in-law, and a Puerto Rican and Hawaiian ex brother-in-law. ( Our sisters are now dating another haole guy and the other a Filipino guy.)
Many of my nieces and nephews are getting married now and they are not even choosing people of different races from Hawaii anymore, they are marrying people from different countries! My niece married an Australian, another a Hungarian (who she divorced) and is now dating a Brazilian, my nephew married a girl from Tahiti and another nephew married a girl from China.
Another niece is dating a hapa haole Japanese (meaning half Caucasian and half Japanese) guy, and another nephew is dating a local girl of mixed heritage. We have more nieces and nephews that are still children and who knows who they will date when they grow up.
As you can see, we don't care what people's ethnicity is, we just want them to be nice and good people.
What is it like in your family?
aloha hawaiivacationgifts,
the two things which impressed me most upon arrival in hawaii were: the aloha spirit of its people + the amazing blend of people of various nationalities living there and respecting each other.
aloha, pua
Posted by: Pua | August 06, 2007 at 07:18 AM
Our area of New Jersey is pretty multi-racial, so no one thinks twice about mixed race couples in my neighborhood, or in the area surrounding it, as it should be! I think as the current generation grows up, race and ethnicity will be less of an issue, since by about mid-century something like half of kids will be non-Caucasian in this country, according to a statistic I've seen. So people will be used to it everywhere by then, I would guess.
Posted by: Mauigirl52 | August 06, 2007 at 09:02 AM