Honolulu Sets Pattern as Capital of Diversity : Relations: City acts as model for civic unity, tolerance. But scholars warn against romanticizing the society.

Brown-skinned Hawaiians grumble about white-skinned bosses. Filipino laborers lament Japanese bureaucrats. And a popular Portuguese comedian pokes fun at them all--to nightclub patrons from all over the world.

“We have Caucasians filing race-discrimination cases, and we have Hawaiians filing race-discrimination cases,” said Linda C. Tseu, executive director of the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission. “It’s across the board.”

Aloha from Honolulu, the multicolored picture of a multiracial world, a place with too many skin pigments, accents and attitudes to count.

But if life sounds like a cross-cultural melee, guess again. “There’s more tolerance here,” Tseu said. “There’s more acceptance of diversity. I think it’s much better in Hawaii.”

This metropolis of 836,231 people, where intermarriage is humdrum, where steamed rice is served alongside Portuguese sausage, where Filipino vegetable patches sprout next door to Japanese flower gardens, offers just one vision of California’s future, if population trends keep up.

Like Los Angeles, Honolulu is home to a great ethnic hodgepodge, with no single group in the majority. Yet the differences are as striking as the similarities.

Residents say their island contains little of the ethnic and racial hatred that has led to violence from Los Angeles to Sarajevo to Cape Town.

Most of Honolulu’s ethnic groups long have identified with the larger community as well as their own. They have condoned an extraordinary rate of intermarriage, shared each other’s customs and lived together in ethnically scrambled neighborhoods.

Along the way, Honolulu’s economy has prospered, propelling many whose roots were in fields of sugar cane and pineapple, into the middle class.

Now, as Los Angeles continues to grapple with its own identity crisis, some say they believe that the experience on this far-off island carries an important message: “Ethnic diversity does not preclude some sense of civic unity,” said Kevin Starr, professor of planning and development at USC. “The model is there, and it’s a powerful model.”

For Los Angeles, Starr added, greater unity “is absolutely essential for large-scale economic recovery.”

Hate crimes, riots, boycotts of stores--the entire list of racial conflicts that have erupted in Southern California--are rarely suffered in Honolulu.

Instead, the melange of whites (known locally as haoles), Asians, Polynesians, Latinos and others cling to perches on the economic ladder, mingling cultures and blood to a degree unmatched almost anywhere.

“Everybody’s got a Japanese daughter-in-law or a Chinese son-in-law or a Filipino relative,” said David A. Heenan, a white corporate chairman whose wife is from the Philippines. “It’s hard to throw stones at somebody when they’re in the family.”

But make no mistake: This island society, a 2,557-mile plane ride from Southern California, is no multicultural paradise.

Behind the inviting spirit of aloha , social tensions smolder as sugar cane fields are paved over, living costs creep ever higher and rock-bottom service jobs await masses of the unskilled, often native Hawaiians.

Thus some scholars warn against romanticizing this society and wonder if the future will prove more fractious than the recent past.

“Maybe instead of you becoming more like us, we’re becoming more like you,” said Noel J. Kent, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii.

Still, he added, “it’s hard to imagine the stuff that went on in South-Central Los Angeles going on here.”

Like other big cities, Honolulu is a place where racial and ethnic backgrounds can be telling clues to someone’s niche in the social hierarchy.

Top jobs in industry are occupied mostly by whites, though the days when whites alone grasped the levers of power are gone. Japanese Americans dominate the public sector, notably the state bureaucracy and schools. Many Chinese Americans have prospered in finance and real estate.

Filipinos are clustered down the ladder, often in hotel and blue-collar jobs. At the bottom are the native Hawaiians, many in low-level jobs or none at all.

Those groups make up only part of the cultural mishmash: Honolulu’s island of Oahu is home to middle-class Korean Americans and Portuguese Americans, struggling immigrants from Samoa and other Pacific islands, fledgling entrepreneurs from Vietnam, impoverished Laotian refugees and many others.

“It’s chop suey--all mixed,” said Lily K. Yao, the Shanghai-born president of Pioneer Federal, a savings bank chartered by Hawaii’s last king in 1890.

“I’m Chinese. I have an executive vice president who is Japanese, and one of the other vice presidents is Portuguese.”

The mixing applies to neighborhoods, customs, even popular culture.

The local version of Japanese musubi is a slab of Spam on a rice ball with seaweed. Affluent whites and Asians live close together in pricey beachfront neighborhoods, where entry is based on income, not race. That symbol of lilting island music, the ukulele, is a Portuguese instrument named by the Hawaiians to mean “jumping flea.”

Intermarriage is the ultimate manifestation of it all. More than four out of 10 local weddings now unite people from different backgrounds, state statistics show--greater than 10 times the Mainland rate, sketchy U.S. data suggests.

In this climate, a recent Time magazine cover image of a young woman of mixed blood--created by a computer--tickled many Honolulu readers.

“We were just laughing,” said Mark H. Fukunaga, a Japanese American executive whose wife is white. “If you took an average kid in Hawaii, this is what she would look like.”

Indeed: An estimated six out of 10 Hawaiian births are now children of mixed blood.

Honolulu residents offer a few theories for their way of life: Native Hawaiian culture has stressed acceptance and hospitality, values picked up by newcomers for two centuries. Many immigrants are unified by a history of poverty and plantation toil.

Beyond that, some say, what choice is there? Hawaii is small and isolated, with few means of escape. “We have to make it work,” Fukunaga said.

Not that different ethnic groups treat each other too gingerly. Jokes are told on everyone that would not amuse the politically correct. Some groups are alleged to be cheap, some slow-witted, some shiftless and irresponsible. Some are said to be fond of dog meat.

Frank De Lima, perhaps Hawaii’s most popular comedian, says his own ethnic humor is based on his experience in Hawaiian society and intended to be affectionate rather than mean. Childhood memories--the accents of friends’ grandparents, a Japanese radio station, Hawaiian natives singing, his own Portuguese community--are all grist for humor.

“We make fun of everyone equally,” said De Lima, a former divinity student whose ancestors came from Portugal, Spain, Hawaii, China and northern Europe.

“If it weren’t for humor,” he added, “we’d be at each other’s throats.”

Rising opportunity has also served as glue for society’s disparate parts, many agree, with an economy that has been fueled by tourism, agriculture and the military. Unemployment is typically far below the national rate, approaching an infinitesimal 2% range at the end of the 1980s.

Fukunaga’s grandfather, for instance, got his start as a cook on a ranch in the early 1900s. Later, the immigrant from Hiroshima opened up a tiny garage.

Over the years, his business grew into Servco Pacific, a family enterprise that today owns Toyota and Chevrolet dealerships and sells boats, office equipment and home appliances, among its many operations.

“If Honolulu--or Hawaii--has one real contribution to make, it’s in putting together a successful, multicultural society,” said Fukunaga, 37, the company president.

The society is facing new strains, however. Job growth has stalled amid a stubborn recession that descended in late 1991. Tourism has been hit by the economic slumps in California and Japan.

On Oahu, there were 1.4% or 6,000 fewer payroll jobs in October than a year ago, according to Hawaiian bank economists.

More broadly, the gulf between rich and poor has widened, albeit less sharply than in the nation overall, while living costs remain punishing--up to 40% higher than the U.S. average. Affordable housing has long been scarce. Many labor at two or even three jobs to keep a roof over their heads.

Meanwhile, poorly educated islanders face the same barriers to a better life that have-nots face in South-Central Los Angeles and the rest of urban America.

Rodolfo Ramos, 47, a Filipino who worked his way from the sugar cane fields to a $12.41-an-hour job in the “shop,” will lose his job sometime this year when the Oahu Sugar Co. shuts down its refinery about 15 miles from downtown Honolulu.

“I’ve lost track of how to compete outside,” he said. But Ramos, who says he still remembers when his father drove a meat truck from camp to camp in the plantations, worries even more about his less-skilled counterparts.

Overall, 350 people are going to be laid off and set loose in a job market that requires ever-more credentials, even for tasks such as raking golf course sand traps and planting grass.

“You go to the golf course, but they want you to have good communication skills, know the job and be able to read,” Ramos said. “Some of the workers don’t have that. It’s sad.”

Downtown, in a 23rd-floor office, a corporate executive also worries about the economy’s ability to spawn an adequate supply of decent jobs for the future. Toss in the chronically high living costs and “it’s going to create social tension, no question about it,” said Heenan, chairman of Theo. H. Davies & Co.

His own company, part of Hawaii’s original “Big Five” corporate elite, illustrates some of the shifts reshaping the economy.

In the 1980s, TheoDavies unloaded a sugar cane plantation, cattle ranches and macadamia nut orchards, and picked up 85 Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants.

Oddly enough, it was Heenan’s predecessors in the corporate elite who dreamed up the policies that led to today’s ethnic stew. Business leaders, eager for a labor force, recruited plantation workers from China, Japan, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Korea and the Philippines as long ago as the mid-1800s.

Workers were divided by ethnic origin, housed in segregated villages and even paid different wage scales based on their origin.

Ultimately, however, the divide-and-conquer policies sparked a backlash. Organized labor preached a gospel of multiracial unionism, and, by the 1940s, it prevailed in Hawaii’s sprawling fields of sugar cane and pineapples.

“I’m told by the old-timers that they’d actually overturn elections” to ensure an ethnically varied union leadership, said Guy Fujimura, secretary-treasurer of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union Local 142.

“You’d have to have one Japanese guy, one Chinese guy, one Filipino guy and one Hawaiian guy.”

One result: Hawaii’s cultures have had a long time to get used to each other, unlike Los Angeles, which is being redefined by a much more recent wave of immigration.

Island politics, once dominated by white businessmen and the Republican Party, also has had time to evolve. Realpolitik, Hawaii style, has dictated inter-ethnic alliances since the 1950s, when Japanese American war veterans led a Democratic Party takeover of the state government.

“The genius of Hawaii’s politics is that nobody has 51%,” said Dan Boylan, a political commentator and historian. “If you want to win, you have to cross ethnic lines.”

Today’s more-inclusive politics has not meant social equality for all, however. A hierarchy of skin shadings exists to this day, with lighter colors often on top.

Daphne Barbee-Wooten, an African American lawyer who sits on the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission, recalled her own experience on the jobless line in the early 1980s: “I noticed that the people on the unemployment line were brown-skinned and the people behind the counter were Japanese. You could just visualize it.”

The disparities lead to accounts of bias. “We’ve heard stories from people whose employers are Caucasian, and we’ve heard stories from people whose landlords are Japanese or Chinese or Filipino,” said William T. Emmsley Jr., executive director of a jobs program for Samoans.

Overall, whites make up 31.6% of Oahu’s population, according to the 1990 census, a share inflated by the large, transient military community.

Japanese Americans are next with 23.3%, Filipinos, 14.4% and native Hawaiians with about 11%. African Americans, mostly in the military, make up 3%, while Latinos make up nearly 7%, though that figure is somewhat inflated because it includes many Filipinos.

Native Hawaiians, who once showered white newcomers with hospitality, are the most aggrieved of all: They suffer the highest rate of infant mortality and poverty, the lowest life expectancy and are more likely to wind up living in jail or on the beach than most others.

The growing sense of injustice has sparked an emerging Hawaiian “sovereignty” movement, which demands a return of government-owned lands to native Hawaiians, some form of self-government and added spending on social services.

“Hawaiians have given a lot of aloha and hospitality to generations of people from other countries,” said Davianna McGregor, a university professor born to a Hawaiian father and Portuguese mother. “Now it’s time for some reciprocation for the Hawaiians.”

That sort of talk raises new us-and-them issues, even for many who sympathize. “Does it mean I get some land and you don’t? I get a tax break and you don’t? I pay for water and you don’t?” asked Thomas P. Gill, an attorney and former Democratic member of Congress.

“What does it mean? You see letters coming into the newspaper, and people are starting to say: ‘Hey, what about me?’ ”

For now, at least, many with Hawaiian blood remain more concerned about everyday survival than separatist politics.

At a sugar refinery near downtown, Jason Sniffen is about to lose his job. The refinery, where he has worked for 10 years packing sugar, is going to switch technology and fire most of its 61 workers.

Yet Sniffen, 27, whose ancestors were Hawaiian, German and Filipino, expresses no envy of more privileged residents or anxiety about newcomers competing with him for the limited job supply.

His plan, he declares on a break from the conveyor belt, is to become a diesel mechanic, a goal he is confident he can reach.

“I’d have stayed here till I died,” he said, a snowy coating of sugar clinging to his worn black work boots. “Now I have more choices.”