Hawai’i is, by any standard, a unique place. It is the only state consisting solely of islands, and the only one with a feral population of wallabies. It is also the only state where you can tour a royal palace (it was once an independent kingdom) or visit the wettest spot in the United States (Mount Waialeale on the island of Kaua’i). Further, no other state has its own language — and certainly not a language as beautiful as Hawaiian. Nor is any other state entirely of volcanic origin.
But what we may be most proud of is our people. Hawai’i is a veritable kaleidescopoe of the human race: Asian Americans (predominantly of Filipino and Japanese descent, but also including Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese) constitute about 38% of the state’s population while haoles (a Hawaiian word that means ‘foreigners’ but usually refers to white people from North America) account for about a quarter of the total. The Aloha State is the only one in which Caucasians are neither a majority nor even a plurality.
Mixed race individuals — those carrying a significant amount of DNA from two or more ethnicities, such as Korean and Pacific Islander— are very close to the haoles in number, comprising 24% of the state’s population. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders — mostly Samoans and Micronesians , but also including Tongans and Maori from New Zealand— round out the picture with about…
