More than a decade ago, local journalist Chad Blair wrote an article, “No Aloha for Micronesians in Hawaii,” which argued that they suffer from discrimination and lack of understanding of their cultures. Unfortunately, those and other critical problems persist for Micronesians in our Aloha State, according to a new research brief by the Hawai‘i Scholars for Education and Social Justice (HSESJ), of which I am a member.

Our paper, “Racism and Discrimination against Micronesian Students in Hawai‘i: Issues of Educational Inequity,” reviewed numerous studies on the educational and other race-related issues concerning 15,000 Micronesians in Hawaii (hawaiischolars.weebly.com/research-briefs.html).

Among the major problems that Micronesians encounter in Hawaii is systemic racism, which refers to the institutionalized, deeply embedded, and society-wide system of racism and discrimination against them and other island minorities, such as Native Hawaiians and Filipino Americans. The three primary dimensions of systemic racism evident in the experiences of Micronesians include institutional discrimination, racist stereotypes and representations, and socioeconomic inequalities, which work interdependently to subordinate them.

Discriminatory practices and policies against Micronesians include their racial profiling by the Honolulu Police Department, according to the Hawaii chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. This illegal practice is evident in the gross overrepresentation of Micronesians arrested for violating the stay-at-home order (26%) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite their being only 1% of Hawaii’s population.

A state government policy that discriminated against Micronesians began in 2010 when 7,500 of them from the three nations — Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia — that have signed Compacts of Free Association with the United States, were dropped from Med-QUEST, Hawaii’s health care program for low-income residents. While they were placed in another program, it provided significantly less services and benefits and hence denied them equal treatment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racist stereotypes of Micronesians as “cockroaches” and “leeches” are disseminated widely through so-called “Micronesian jokes,” which depict them as excessively and undeservedly using government resources, such as public housing and health care. This extremely vile racism against Micronesians is apparent in their representation as not even human beings and thus their denial of a common humanity with others.

As for socioeconomic inequalities, due to the small size of the Micronesian population, survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau are available only for Marshallese, who are a majority of Micronesians in Hawaii. The bureau reported that Marshallese have the lowest median household income ($32,700), the highest poverty rate for individuals (51%), and the lowest percentage of persons 25 years and older with a college degree or higher (2.6%), which is much less than the figure for Hawaii (31%).

At the K-12 level, according to the state Department of Education, between 2013 and 2018, only 50% of students from Micronesia who entered the ninth grade four years earlier had graduated from high school, while the overall graduation rate was 86%.

Other studies report that Micronesian students experience bullying by other students and racial stereotyping by the latter and school officials and teachers, some of whom have low educational expectations of them.

Our brief concludes with policy recommendations directed to public institutions, such as the state Legislature, the University of Hawaii and the Department of Education, to address the persisting problems encountered by Micronesians in the public schools and Hawaii society.

For example, we urge UH, through its student affairs office at each campus, to develop college recruitment activities that target Micronesian students in public intermediate and high schools. The HSESJ offers our expertise and experience to assist in the development of our recommendations.

Lastly, we strongly encourage the people of Hawaii to affirm their commitment to living in a multicultural society by extending the values of aloha, equality, inclusion and social justice to the Micronesian community. This initiative can begin by not spreading jokes and racist slurs about them, and instead, sharing aloha with Micronesians.

Jonathan Y. Okamura is professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, Department of Ethnic Studies. Other contributors to the HSESJ brief include Brook Chapman de Sousa, Margary Martin, Katherine Ratcliffe, Colleen Rost-Banik and Lois Yamauchi, all of UH.