Breaking the White Bubble

How Crossing Cultures and Embracing Aloha Helped Me Unlearn Prejudice and Find True Belonging

Growing up in Utah, “normal” meant white.
My Danish, Scottish, and English ancestors smiled down from the walls, and almost everyone at church, at school, and in the grocery store looked just like them.

The first cracks in that bubble came slowly: an American Indian boy in my junior-high art class, an adopted American Indian cousin, and eventually a single Hawaiian girl in my high school—each one whispering, “Your world is bigger than you were told.”

At home, no one would have dared call themselves racist.
Yet sentences like, “I hope they don’t let those Mexicans move into our neighborhood; it’ll devalue our home,” floated through the air as if they were just common sense.
I learned young that prejudice can sound very polite.

My first marriage was to a white man who checked all the acceptable boxes—and still turned out unfaithful and abusive.
Leaving that marriage opened the door to someone my community never imagined for me: a very brown, very charismatic Tongan man.
When I brought a Tongan boyfriend home, my mother looked shocked, as if someone had swapped the script of her life; my dad softened only when that young man picked up a guitar and crooned the old songs he loved.

Later, my grandmother said out loud, “I’m so glad you broke up with him. I couldn’t imagine you marrying one of them.”
She didn’t whisper.
In her mind, that was simply reality.
In my heart, it was a turning point.

Eventually, I did marry a Tongan man—a different one, but just as brown and just as good.
We had our beautiful mixed children and moved to his islands: Tonga, then American Samoa, then Hawaiʻi.
Utah had been a sea of white faces; suddenly I was the only white face in a crowd of Polynesians, the one who stood out, the one who didn’t quite belong.

There, I learned in my body what it feels like to be “the different one.”
I heard the same kind of jokes and stereotypes—this time about haoles and other groups—and I realized something important: prejudice is not owned by one race or one place.
It’s a human habit we all have to unlearn.

In Hawaiʻi, my children finally lived in a world where mixed families were normal.
Samoan and Tongan, Japanese and Hawaiian, Filipino and haole—love came in every shade, and nobody blinked when we stood in line at Zippy’s.
The only people who really stared were visitors from the mainland who hadn’t gotten the memo yet.

Years later, moving back to Utah, I found a state that looked more diverse but still carried many of the same old fears—just in nicer clothing.
Tongans and other Pacific Islanders often stayed in their own church groups because that was where they felt truly seen and safe.
I now worship in a Tongan ward and understand both the ache for integration and the deep need for a place that feels like home.

My children lean proudly toward their Polynesian side—the warmth, the alofa, the aloha, the community.
Sometimes my white side—the Danish, Scottish, English ancestors—goes missing from the conversation, and there’s a small sting.
Not because I want them to claim whiteness as better, but because I know there is light and shadow, beauty and brokenness, in both lineages.

That’s what racism and prejudice really do: they turn “us and them” into winners and losers instead of one big, complicated family that desperately needs each other.
So when I talk about “roasting the racism out,” I’m not just talking about strangers on the news.
I’m talking about my own grandparents’ words, my own community’s reactions, and my own blind spots.

The invitation is this:
Look honestly at the phrases you grew up hearing.
Notice who you stare at without realizing it.
Retire the jokes that make someone else smaller.

Do it with humor so we can stay in the room,
with compassion so we don’t drown in shame,
and with hope—because if a white girl from Utah can find home in a Tongan ward, maybe all of us can learn to love beyond the lines we were handed.