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Selling the “Golden People”

This chapter studies the Hawaiʻi tourism industry's efforts to market Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. Although Hawaiʻi had long been a draw for wealthy tourists, jet travel, which arrived the same year as statehood, allowed a larger and broader cohort of mainland Americans to vacation in the islands, which the tourism industry portrayed as a quasi-foreign space where mainlanders could experience social amity and forge multicultural self-identities in the comfort of a safe, American milieu. In the process, the chapter argues that tourism helped turn race and racial tolerance into saleable—if intangible—commodities. Meanwhile, a massive military rest and recreation (RR) program in Hawaiʻi for combat soldiers during the Vietnam War exposed the limits of global mutual understanding and racial tolerance. Instead of encouraging its consumers to learn from Hawaiʻi's mixed multicultural society, RR in Hawaiʻi upheld the nuclear family and sought to insulate servicemen from the wider world. The tourism industry epitomized the ways in which much of the liberal racial discourse in the post-civil rights era conflated race, culture, and ethnicity, and in the process, depoliticized all three.