Voices of API Women: Education is Powerful

Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a member of the NAPAWF San Francisco branch. She is the producer and co-host of a Tongan radio program titled “Education is Powerful� broadcasted on Radio Tonga, San Francisco. She is also a PhD student and part of a grassroots movement working to implement Pacific Islander Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
I’m the oldest daughter in a Tongan American family. Tonga, an archipelago located in the Pacific Ocean, neighbors the islands of Samoa, Fiji and Hawai’i. My new home here in the Bay Area currently hosts the largest Tongan community in the U.S. Although the 2000 census reports that we Tongans and other Pacific Islanders are some of the hardest working Americans here in California, our myriad contributions are often unrecognized and images of Tonganness are seldom painted with affirmative brush strokes.
Tongans are many times defined by our big bones and ample brown bodies. Our physical differences are “othered� and hyper visible in the media. These are crucial components in the systems of racializing Tonganness here in the U.S. According to a community based research report on Pacific Islanders released in 2006, the fingers and hands of young Tongan youths are frequently classified by the police as “weapons� similar to loaded machine guns and other dangerous ammunition. In the U.S. imagination, Tonganness is defined as an imminent threat, a “weapon� to be contained. Correspondingly, the hyper visibility of Tongans as athletes in the sports arenas and the simultaneous invisibility of Tongans in academia and other prominent institutions are a direct manifestation of these stereotypes.

Mainstream representations of Tonganness are not only racialized but they are also severely gendered. Tonganness is imagined as the sole terrain of Tongan men while Tongan women’s lives are viewed as inconsequential. Unfortunately, many Tongans have deeply ingrained these images of ourselves. As a Tongan American feminist, I assert that it is precisely the normality of these images that reveal its prodigious influence in our communities. Racist and sexist images of Tonganness perpetuate our oppression in this country.
I recently participated with other Pacific Islander students in a meeting with campus administrators to voice our concerns about our invisibility at the University of California, Berkeley. Mirroring our invisibility in the public sphere, Tongans and Pacific Islander students are starkly underrepresented on this campus. I was disheartened to discover that more than half of the Pacific Islander undergraduate students at Berkeley were male athletes representing the football team. At this meeting, I witnessed many young male athletes bare emotional testimonies that revealed backgrounds dominated by hard work and poverty. They also revealed that their entrance into this elite institution was mitigated through sports because other venues were denied or closed to them due to their national origin, ethnicity and race. Conversely, the testimonies of young Tongan women revealed the same heartbreaking struggle against multiple forms of discrimination and poverty yet, unlike their male counterparts they were denied opportunities because of their gender; women’s sports are not privileged and within some Tongan households, women’s education are deemed secondary to the education of sons. As this narrative reveals, the mainstream images of Tonganness serve as social reminders to keep Tongans subservient and in “our place.� These insidious images disproportionately hurt Tongan women and Tongan girls and they limit the beautiful and empowering possibilities abound in Tongan manhood.