Interracialism: The Ideological Transformation of Hawaii's Working Class

Abstract

A normative desire for interracialism undergirds and structures the sociology of race. However, focusing almost exclusively on racial divisions and conflicts, the sociology of race rarely subjects interracialism to explicit analysis. One consequence of this somewhat peculiar situation is that interracialism is understood negatively, as deracialization—the removal of racism. Even the few studies that appear to redress this negativity through explicit analysis reproduce it. Prototypically, there has long been a scholarly consensus that Hawaii's interracial working-class movement of the late 1930s and 1940s presupposed deracialization: that a “colorblind” class ideology, advanced by the left-led International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, effaced racial divisions. Refuting this interpretation, this paper demonstrates that a deracializing class ideology was not straightforwardly adopted by Hawaii's racially divided workers. Instead, a leftist ideology of class served as the initial pivot for an affirmative transformation of race, producing an interracial ideology that rearticulated, rather than disarticulated, race and class. The paper concludes with several implications of reconceptualizing interracialism affirmatively.