Abstract

Academics have long argued that the business elites of Hawaʻi, specifically those who operated sugar plantations, placed their employees in racially segregated housing as a means of controlling them. This assertion belies the oral narrative given by these former employees and some community historians. This article argues that ethnic and racial identities were artificially assigned to plantation employees as a result of the preoccupation that the continental United States had with White supremacy and its desire to assert its power over its newest territorial holding. We support this assertion by utilizing metadata extracted from a significant number of employee records from the Hawaii Sugar Company and deploying digital humanities methodology. Our results demonstrate that the racial segregation within plantation villages was not as pervasive as has been asserted by various academic fields over the decades, specifically in the twentieth century, and that the racial composition of plantation villages was diverse and complex.