Last December during a campaign rally in New Hampshire, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump unleashed another racist, xenophobic tirade against undocumented migrants in the U.S.

He said they are “poisoning the blood of our country. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” Trump repeated his arguments last month in an interview on Fox News.

Journalists have pointed out that the term “blood poisoning” was invoked by Hitler in his “Mein Kampf,” in which he expressed opposition to Jewish immigration and their supposed polluting of German blood through racial mixing.

While most people in Hawaii don’t subscribe to such fallacious racist views about intermarriage, its high rate here is mistakenly believed to be the result of tolerant and harmonious ethnic relations. In fact, demographic factors, such as the sex ratio and population size of ethnic groups, are more significant considerations.

Before discussing intermarriage in Hawaii, I’d like to emphasize that Trump’s reference to blood asserts a highly erroneous notion of race as being based on biology, rather than race being socially constructed by the members of a common society. Furthermore, Trump’s view of race as blood is a deluded belief that prevailed decades if not centuries ago.

Such racist ideas led to further mistaken beliefs about the detrimental consequences of interracial marriage, such as anti-miscegenation laws adopted in most states that were not ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967.

The “one-drop rule,” which meant that a person with traceable, however minimal, African ancestry was considered Black rather than white, is another racist view resulting from the false equation between race and blood.

While I have no doubt that biologically based notions of race prevailed historically in Hawaii, we never had any laws prohibiting outmarriage, which led to a much higher rate than in the mainland.

The reasons for this higher rate need to be clarified because it isn’t necessarily due to interethnic tolerance and harmony as widely believed. Demographic factors, particularly the population size of ethnic groups and their ratio of females to males, are much more relevant to account for our greater prevalence of intermarriage.

Before World War II, the significance of these demographic factors is clearly evident in the high incidence of outmarrying among Chinese men and, to some extent, Filipino men, due to the limited number of females in both groups, as a result of labor migration.

In contrast, both Japanese men and women had the lowest intermarriage rate because their sex ratio became much more balanced starting in the 1910s with the arrival of picture brides and the great numbers of children born in the territory. Japanese also were by far the largest ethnic group at almost 40% during this period.

Thus, their very low outmarriage rate can be explained demographically by their substantial population and relatively balanced sex-ratio that meant both Japanese men and women had far less difficulty finding a spouse of the same ethnicity than Chinese and Filipino males did. As for the small number of females in the latter groups, they intermarried minimally because of the numerous suitors from their respective communities.

During the pre-WWII period when systemic racism was rampant in Hawaii, it would be extremely difficult to argue that amity and tolerance prevailed among ethnic groups and hence contributed to the relatively high intermarriage rate of 23% in 1940.

More recently, the latest study on interracial marriage in Hawaii was published in 1997 by two sociologists, Xuanning Fu and Tim Heaton. They analyzed marriage data from the state Department of Health between 1983 and 1994, which included more than 110,000 marriages from seven ethnic groups that they also divided by sex.

The data sample consisted of marriages in which at least one of the spouses was a Hawaii resident so that honeymoon marriages of tourists would not distort the results. The study found that a very high 45% of marriages in Hawaii during the period concerned were either interethnic or interracial, which is about double the current percentage in the U.S.

However, not all ethnic groups outmarried at that rate. The group that had the greatest intermarriage rate was Korean women at 70%, while the group with the lowest rate was African American females at 19%.

Since the ethnic groups in the study differed widely in size and some in sex ratio, the researchers made statistical adjustments for their data analysis so that each ethnic group was about the same size and had a balanced sex ratio.

With those adjustments, the study concluded that people in Hawaii are seven times more likely to inmarry than to outmarry. In short, demographic factors — population size and sex ratio — are
more significant than interethnic tolerance and harmony to account for the 45% intermarriage rate.

Thus, in the cases of Korean and African American women, both ethnic groups are relatively small at less than 4% of the population, which contributes to Korean women outmarrying at the highest rate but not Black females having the lowest rate.

The latter is attributable to the unbalanced sex ratio in the African American community with far more males than females due to the military segment of their population. Much like Filipino and Chinese women in the past, their limited number make Black women greatly desired as spouses by their male counterparts.

With regard to haoles, unlike men, women continue to intermarry below the overall rate for Hawaii and, in fact, have never outmarried at or above that rate. Demographically, because haoles have been the largest group in the state since the 1960s, females find it easier to obtain a marital mate from their own group than if the white population was small.

I doubt that many people in Hawaii would agree with Trump that immigrants, whether undocumented or not, have poisoned our blood and instead would argue that intermarriage has enriched our culture and society. However, substantial outmarrying also has contributed to the mistaken belief that Hawaii doesn’t have major problems regarding ethnicity and race.

As a result, persisting systemic racism and ethnic inequality are obscured by the widespread view of Hawaii as a multicultural paradise where people of differing ethnicity get along so well with each other that they marry one another. We need to understand that the high intermarriage rate isn’t necessarily a consequence or a reflection of ethnic harmony.

I concede that Hawaii’s high incidence of outmarriage does indicate a more ethnically tolerant society than in the continental U.S. But besides the higher rate of intermarriage, we need to have a higher rate of socioeconomic mobility toward a more egalitarian society.