Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Critical Race Theory: Bridging the Gap From Access to Degree Attainment

• In Event: 65.035 - Higher Education and the Role of Co-Option

Abstract

The recent critical mass of high profile Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (PI) success represented by former NCAA student-athletes like Manti Te’o, Haloti Ngata, and Mike Iupati reaching professional status in the National Football League has garnered much media coverage, but the more pressing question for the NCAA context is what does their success suggest of demographic transitions in intercollegiate athletics and portend for future enrollment of PI student-athletes in NCAA member institutions? This study addresses the historical context of PIs in the US to understand contemporary circumstances in our community, and aims to produce preliminary research on PI student-athletes through an NHPI critical race analysis. This NHPI CRT proposes nine tenets that I consider necessary in understanding and researching PI student-athletes’ experiences in higher education.

Akin to other communities of color, PIs have historically utilized athletics as a non-traditional pathway to higher education. These non-traditional pathways have been created by specific experiences in the US by people of Color within the context of racism, conquest and colonization. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (PIs) have endured a history of colonization, economic imperialism, and militarization in the Pacific that have placed conquerors in control of not only land and other natural resources, but educational systems that control socioeconomic mobility, access to political power, and health resources. This history has placed PI communities in abject and oppressive living conditions within our own Native lands, and has created a trend of migration to the mainland US for better living conditions, academic opportunities, and the dream of property ownership. For many, the reality is relocation to urban communities near ports and airports, where low property values perpetuate the inequitable distribution of educational resources. In these urban communities “untraditional” pathways (i.e., military and athletics) have become prevalent mechanisms for access into higher education and career opportunities.

Despite the growing participation (and active recruitment) of NHPIs in college athletics and the rising prominence of PI professional athletes we find virtually no reliable research on the experiences of PI student-athletes. What we do find in existing data suggests that PI college football players, for example, have among the lowest graduation rates (NCAA, 2005). The challenge posed by this example, though, is while the PI student-athletes have become hypervisible in athletics, they are nearly invisible in academic and student outcomes data: we know next to nothing about the experiences of PIs in higher education in general, much less about PI student athletes, to even begin to understand the reasons for this underachievement. College football has become a mechanism of colonization that 1) promises PI student-athletes an education through one-year renewable contracts that operate from inequitable positions of power, 2) controls the allocation of alienated labor and brown bodies as natural resources, and 3) currently maintains an 11% graduation rate for NHPIs in the FCS division. In creating a framework and common language around the research of NHPI student-athletes, I suggest an NHPI CRT.

Author

• Keali'i Troy Kukahiko, University of California - Los Angeles