FU, Xuanning and Tim B. HEATON, INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE IN HAWAII, 1983-1994

Abstract

FU, Xuanning and Tim B. HEATON, INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE IN HAWAII, 19831994. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1997, 207 pp., $89.95 hardcover. This book is another significant contribution to the on-going study of interracial marriage in Hawaii. The authors use the best available data from the Office of Health Status Monitoring, Department of Health, State of Hawaii, to describe trends and patterns of interracial marriage as well as the determinants of interracial marriage in Hawaii. The book is well-organized. It starts with a short social history of Hawaii with a focus on its 200 years of ethnic intermarriage, followed by a good review of prevailing explanations for interracial marriage. Next, trends and patterns, past and present, are presented. The authors then test models of outmarriage with logistic regression analysis using relevant variables derived from the marriage license data for the years 1983-1994. In the last chapter, based on the trends, patterns, social history, and determinants of intermarriage, the authors develop profiles of in- and out-marriage for the Native Hawaiians, Part-Hawaiians, Caucasians, Chinese, Koreans, Blacks, Samoans, Portuguese, Hispanics, Native Americans, other Asians and other Pacific Islanders. Fu and Heaton conclude with short discussions on the impact of intermarriage on Hawaii's racial and ethnic composition with specific regard to the definition of race and ethnicity reconsidered and Hawaii's future ethnic composition and its measurement. The theory chapter of this book, although informative, ignores past reviews of theories of ethnic intermarriage (see Cretser and Leon, 1982) and articles published in this journal. Specifically, they ignore those articles studying ethnic intermarriage in Hawaii (Leon and Weinstein, 1991; and Leon, Brown, and Weinstein, 1995) using the same data source and in one case the data of the same year. While this problem of not referring to all the literature available is one most researchers have (we are no exception), we believe one missing piece of this literature is especially important in their discussion of the EastWest pattern of ethnic intermarriage in Hawaii. In the Trends and Patterns of Marriage chapter (4), the authors test the hypothesis stated in the theory chapter (p.61) that there is an East West cluster of intermarriage in Hawaii, characterized by cultural similarity. This is a two-cluster model. The result of their cluster analysis of social distance among ethnic groups based on exogamy ratios in Hawaii: 1983-1994, is a three-cluster model. Cluster 1 is composed of Samoan, Hispanic, Black, Native American, and other Pacific Islander, while cluster 2 is composed of Caucasian, Hawaiian, Part Hawaiian, Filipino, and Portuguese, and cluster 3 is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian. Yet they conclude the general picture of East West has changed little from the late 1950s to the early '90s. Fu and Heaton do not note this East-West dimension (pattern) of ethnic intermarriage in Hawaii has been observed in data from 1928-1934 and 1948-1953 by Parkman and Sawyer (1967), from 1948-1953 and 1965-1969 by Leon (1975), and from 1975-l980 by Leon and Wood (1985). The data from 1969-1971 and 1979-1981 is described by Leon, Brown, and Weinstein (1995) in a further analysis of Schoen and Thomas's sum of the age-specific magnitudes of marriage attraction by ethnicity of bride and groom for Hawaii (1989,Table 3, p.373). To say it another way, the picture of the EastWest pattern as two clusters of ethnic intermarriage has changed little from the late 1920s. …