HONOLULU (AP) _ Growing up as a young man of mixed race, Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii's racial climate.

His childhood in the country's idealized melting pot was far from painless, though.

As part of the islands' small group of black Americans in the 1970s, he encountered racism and struggled to form a black identity.

Obama's experience in Hawaii is echoed by other blacks, including some of his schoolmates, and challenges the state's vaunted image of racial harmony.

"A big joke amongst the brothers was you could be anything else but a brother and have free rein of the world in Hawaii," said Rik Smith, a black former schoolmate of Obama's at Punahou, an elite private school in Honolulu. "When it comes to people of color, black people, there's a huge amount of racism."

In his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama, who is half black and half white, recalled a seventh grader calling him a "coon" and a tennis pro who joked that his color might rub off. One person wanted to touch his hair, and he was asked whether his father, a native of Kenya, ate people. An assistant basketball coach used a racial epithet in referring to black players.

Obama, who attended Punahou on scholarship, was among a handful of black students at the K-12 school.

In a 1999 essay for the Punahou alumni magazine, Obama wrote: "Hawaii's spirit of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete. But it was — and is — real."

Smith estimated that about six black students were enrolled in high school at Punahou around the time that he and Obama attended.

Smith, a geriatrician in California, said his experience at Punahou and in the islands was similar to Obama's. Smith recalled classmates at Punahou agreeing that he should put his individual identity ahead of his race and remembered girls he wanted to date telling him they'd meet him somewhere else when he came to pick them up.

"Even in Hawaii, I'd walk down the street with a white guy, white girl, Asian person, and they would get uncomfortable if there were a whole bunch of black GIs coming down the street," he recalled. "It wasn't that different from the South or the mainland."

Lewis Anthony Jr., another black student at the school in the 1970s, said there were clear boundaries between black students and students of other races when it came to dating.

He remembered when the parents of a white girl objected to her going to the prom with him, fearing someone would have a problem seeing a black man and a white woman together and shoot at them.

"I bought into the whole melting-pot theory of Hawaii," Anthony said. "I thought it was true. And in many ways it was until it became more personal."

Hawaii's almost iconic status as the nation's most diverse state stems from its mix of mostly Asian cultures. Asians — mainly Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos — number around 700,000 and constitute more than 50 percent of the state's population, the highest percentage by far of any state. They are followed by whites and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders as the largest racial groups in Hawaii, according to the most recent U.S. Census estimates.