Aleph, UCLA Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences

In this paper, I explore how Filipinx settlers in occupied Hawaiʻi are racialized in proximity to Blackness, in relation to US-centric and colonial articulations of Blackness, and within the settler colonial system of power and domination in the transpacific. Across the Filipinx diaspora, critiques of white skin valorization are conceptualized primarily as colorism where Asian beauty and desirability are routed through the white colonial imagination. However, drawing from ethnographic research on local skin whitening discourse among first and second-generation Filipinx-American settlers in Hawaiʻi, I consider how these stories of skin reveal how Filipinx settlers are racialized in proximity to Blackness, where Blackness is denigrated, whiteness reigns supreme, and Kanaka Maoli are entangled in US racial binaries. As such, I move beyond colorism to argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin whitening is an anti-Black project of US empire that renders dark-skin bodies abject and undesirable. In confronting anti-Blackness in Hawaiʻi, I contend that Afro-Asian-Indigenous relationalities challenge enduring racial colonial discourses and contribute to alternative possibilities for Blackness, Indigeneity, and settler allyship to become entwined components of an anti-racist and decolonial Hawaiʻi.