State Plates
The Black Population of Hawaii
About 55,000 Black Hawaii residents — one in twenty-six — in the most multiracial state in the nation, where most Black residents also claim another race. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
Hawaii holds about 55,000 Black residents counted alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty-six of its people — with Black alone at about 24,000, or 1.6 percent. No state's Black data work quite like Hawaii's: the nation’s most multiracial state counts most of its Black residents in the 'in combination' column, its Black community was built by the maritime trades and then the United States military, and its most famous son — born in Honolulu in 1961 — became the first Black president, raised in a family and a state whose racial composition this article describes.
Hawaii's census arithmetic is its own subject. The state records the nation's highest multiracial share, and its Black population exemplifies the pattern: residents identifying as Black in combination with another race (Native Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, white, and others) outnumber those identifying as Black alone by a wide margin — the reverse of the mainland pattern, where alone predominates. The 'in combination' figure is therefore the honest headline for Hawaii, and the alone figure alone would understate the community by more than half. The Obama family's configuration — a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, a Honolulu childhood among the state's mixed communities — is the famous instance of a composition the census counts in the tens of thousands, including a substantial population of Black-Pacific Islander and Black-Asian children in the Oahu school data.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Hawaii sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 2 percent — 41 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 55,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Hawaii two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Hawaii is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Hawaii; read the two together. In Hawaii's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Idaho. In Hawaii, banding is a cartographer's compromise: it trades precision for pattern, letting the eye take in the geography of a whole country at once. The table restores the precision the shading rounds away, carrying the published share and count for Hawaii exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Hawaii, every figure on this plate descends from the federal count of the whole population — the decennial census and the American Community Survey that updates it between census years. Those instruments count everyone, which is what makes a share meaningful: 2 percent is not a sample of Black Hawaii, it is Black Hawaii measured against all of Hawaii. In Hawaii, the atlas's other plates return to this population again and again, because income, schooling, health, and ownership are all attributes of the people counted here, in this place, first.
Hawaii's profile closes the western arc of this section: a Black community carried across the Pacific by sail and then by service, counted mostly in combination in the most blended state in the union. Its 55,000 residents are the smallest complete profile in the reference's Pacific file — and the clearest demonstration that the 'alone or in combination' convention is not a technicality but, in places, the whole story.
Reading This Plate
In Hawaii, read the table from the top: the share first, because the share is what the map shades; then the count, because the count is what the share is made of. Shares and counts answer different questions. The share says how present Black life is in the everyday population of Hawaii; the count says how much of Black America lives there. Both are published figures, rounded as the source agency publishes them, and both are the ground every other Hawaii plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Hawaii, the Black alone count holds residents who marked Black and no other race; the alone-or-in-combination count adds residents who marked Black alongside another race. In Hawaii, the second is the larger and the more inclusive, and the gap between them is itself a fact about the place — widest where multiracial identification is most common, narrowest where it is rare. For Hawaii, the alone share of 2 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 55,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 55,000 |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.