Prejudice in Paradise: Hawaii Has a Racism Problem
Celia Padron went on a Hawaiian vacation last year, lured by the
prospect of beautiful beaches and friendly people. She, her husband and
two teenage daughters enjoyed the black sand beach at Makena State Park
on Maui. But a Hawaiian girl accosted her two teenage daughters,
saying, "Go back to the mainland" and "Take your white ass off our
beaches," says Padron, a pediatric gastroenterologist in New Jersey.
When her husband, 68 at the time, stepped between the girls, three
young Hawaiian men slammed him against a vehicle, cutting his ear, and
choked and punched him, Padron says. Police officers persuaded the
Padrons not to press charges, saying it would be expensive for them to
return for court appearances and a Hawaiian judge would side with the
Hawaiian assailants, the doctor contends.
Professor Haunani-Kay Trask believes Native Hawaiians have every right to feel hostile toward whites.
"There is no doubt in my mind [the attack] was racially motivated," she adds.
With no known hate groups and a much-trumpeted spirit of aloha or
tolerance, few people outside Hawaii realize the state has a racism
issue. One reason: The tourism-dependent state barely acknowledges hate
crimes. That makes it hard to know how often racial violence is
directed at Caucasians, who comprise about 25% of the ethnically
diverse state's 1.3 million residents. Those who identify themselves as
Native Hawaiian — most residents are of mixed race — account for nearly
20%.
Hawaii has collected hate crimes data since 2002 (most states began
doing so a decade earlier). In the first six years, the state reported
only 12 hate crimes, and half of those were in 2006. (All other things
being equal, the state would be expected to have more than 800 such
crimes annually, given the size of its population, according to a
federal government study of hate crimes.) There was anti-white bias in
eight of those incidents. But that doesn't begin to reflect the extent
of racial rancor directed at non-Native Hawaiians in the Aloha State,
especially in schools. For example:
The last day of school has long been unofficially designated
"Beat Haole Day," with white students singled out for harassment and
violence. (Haole — pronounced how-lee — is slang for a foreigner,
usually white, and sometimes is used as a racial slur.)
A non-Native Hawaiian student who challenged the
Hawaiian-preference admission policy at a wealthy private school
received a $7 million settlement this year.
A 12-year-old white girl new to Hawaii from New York City needed
10 surgical staples to close a gash in her head incurred when she was
beaten in 2007 by a Native Hawaiian girl who called her a "fucking
haole."
A vocal segment of Native Hawaiians is pushing for independence to
end the "prolonged occupation" by the United States and governance by
natives.
Demonstrators shouting racial epithets at whites disrupted a statehood celebration in 2006.
Anti-white sentiments such as these have been more than 200 years in
the making. The pivotal event occurred when American and European
businessmen, backed by U.S. military forces, overthrew Hawaii's monarch
in 1893 and placed her under house arrest two years later. The United
States annexed the islands as a territory in 1898, and they became a
state in 1959.
Little wonder then that as Hawaii prepares to observe the 50th
anniversary of becoming the 50th state on Aug. 21, it will a muted
celebration, devoid of parades or fireworks.
Classroom Warfare
Tina Mohr has lived in Hawaii for 25 years. She has Native Hawaiian
friends. But in the 2003-04 school year, her twin blond-haired
daughters, aged 11 at the time, began getting harassed by Native
Hawaiian kids at their school on the Big Island. "Our daughters would
come home with bruises and cuts," she tells the Intelligence Report.
One of her girls was assaulted twice in the same day. In one
scuffle, she had her head slammed into a wall, and her attacker
continued to threaten her. Her daughter suffered a dislocated jaw and
had headaches for five weeks, Mohr says.
The torment continued in the summer between 5th and 6th grades.
Native Hawaiian girls stalked and threatened her daughters and yelled
"fucking haole" at them. Midway through the 6th grade, Mohr began to
home-school her daughters.
She filed a complaint with the civil rights division of the U.S.
Department of Education in 2004. It was only recently, on Dec. 31,
2008, that the division finally released its report. The report
concluded there was "substantial evidence that students experienced
racially and sexually derogatory name-calling on nearly a daily basis
on school buses, at school bus stops, in school hallways and other
areas of the school" that Mohr's children attended.
The epithets included names such as "f*****g haole," "haole c**t"
and "haole *****," according to the report. Students were told "go
home" and "you don't belong here." Most of the slurs were directed by
"local" or non-white students at Caucasians, especially those who were
younger, smaller, light-skinned and blond.
The report also concluded that school officials responded
inadequately or not at all when students complained of racial
harassment. Students who did complain were retaliated against by their
antagonists. "They learned not to report this stuff," Mohr says of her
own daughters.
The Hawaii Department of Education settled Mohr's complaint with a
lengthy agreement in which educators promised to take various steps to
improve the reporting, investigating and eliminating of student
harassment in the future.
Today, Mohr's daughters are again attending the school where they used
to have trouble. They haven't been assaulted, but one was threatened on
a school bus earlier this year.
Racial Legacies
The resentment some Native Hawaiians feels toward whites today can be
chalked up in part to "ancestral memory," says Jon Matsuoka, dean of
the School of Social Work at the University of Hawaii. "That trauma is
qualitatively different than other ethnic groups in America. It's more
akin to American Indians" because Hawaiians had their homeland invaded,
were exposed to diseases for which they had no immunity, and had an
alien culture forced upon them, he says. Stories about the theft of
their lands and culture have been passed down from one generation to
the next, Matsuoka adds. (One difference now, of course, is that Native
Hawaiians in Hawaii are far more numerous than American Indians are in
their own ancestral regions, where the Indians remain politically weak
and largely marginalized by the far larger white population.)
Racial violence directed at whites in Hawaii, while deplorable, is
minor compared to the larger issues underlying it, Matsuoka says. The
Hawaiian spirit of aloha "is pervasive, but you have to earn aloha. You
don't necessarily trust outsiders, because outsiders [historically]
come and have taken what you have. It's an incredibly giving and warm
and generous place, but you have to earn it," he says.
Further fueling the resentment that some Native Hawaiians feel for
outsiders are attempts by the latter to usurp entitlement programs
given the former to redress previous wrongs. In recent years,
non-native residents have used the courts to try and rescind these
entitlements on grounds that they are racially discriminatory and
violate the U.S. Constitution.
Kenneth Conklin
Retired professor and "anti-sovereign" white activist Kenneth
Conklin and others prevailed in a lawsuit in 2000 that challenged a
requirement that trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs — OHA — be
of Native Hawaiian descent. OHA oversees huge tracts of lands that the
United States took from Hawaii when it annexed the islands as a
territory, and collects revenues from them for programs that benefit
Native Hawaiians.
The state government was going to sell 1.2 million acres of these
lands to developers for two state-sponsored affordable housing projects
when OHA and four Native Hawaiian plaintiffs sued to stop the deal. A
state court sided with the government, but the Hawaii Supreme Court
reversed in favor of the plaintiffs. This March 31, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled unanimously that the Hawaii high court erred and sent the
case back for further action.
There also was an unsuccessful legal challenge to the Hawaiian Homes
Commission Act, passed by Congress in 1921. The act allows a Hawaiian
agency to make 99-year leases at $1 per year to Native Hawaiians (but
not other residents) for authorized uses on lands ceded to the United
States when it annexed Hawaii. More than 200,000 acres of land were
designated for uses such as homes and ranches.
One of the more protracted legal battles involved a lawsuit filed
in 2003 by a non-Native Hawaiian student against the hugely wealthy and
influential private Kamehameha Schools. Kamehameha operates three
campuses for the benefit of children of Hawaiian ancestry. The
student's attorneys contended that violates civil rights laws. As the
U.S. Supreme Court was about to announce last year whether it would
hear the case, Kamehameha paid $7 million to settle it out of court.
'A Hateful Place'
A violent incident with racial overtones in 2007 near Pearl Harbor
prompted a good deal of soul searching about race in Hawaii. A Native
Hawaiian man and his teenage son brutally pummeled and kicked a
Caucasian soldier and his wife near Pearl Harbor after the soldier's
SUV struck the other man's parked car. The son shouted "fucking haole"
while attacking the soldier. The husband and wife suffered broken
noses, facial fractures and concussions. A prosecutor said the assault
was a road-rage incident, not a hate crime. But it generated much
debate on newspaper websites and blogs about the use of the word haole
and whether whites are the targets of racism in Hawaii.
"It is a hateful place to live if you are white," wrote a woman on
one Hawaii website's comments section. A Hawaii native who is white
wrote, "Racism exists in Hawaii. My whole life I've never really felt
welcome here." A sailor stationed at Pearl Harbor added that "this
island is the most racist place I have ever been in my life."
Other white residents, however, wrote that they had had no such
experiences. And many people maintained that arrogant mainlanders are
the most likely to incur natives' wrath. It's their "cultural inability
to be humble [that] is a huge contributing factor in a lot of violence
against them," one person wrote. "There is a high degree of arrogance
and lack of respect that mainlanders exhibit," added another.
A Hawaiian Studies professor at the University of Hawaii,
Haunani-Kay Trask, is one of the most caustic critics of whites in the
islands. In her 1999 book, From A Native Daughter, Trask wrote:
"Just as … all exploited peoples are justified in feeling hostile and
resentful toward those who exploit them, so we Hawaiians are justified
in such feelings toward the haole. This is the legacy of racism, of
colonialism."
In a poem titled, "Racist White Woman," Trask wrote: "I could
kick/Your face, puncture/Both eyes./You deserve this kind/Of
violence./No more vicious/Tongues, obscene/Lies./Just a knife/Slitting
your tight/Little heart."
Trask's opposite number is Conklin, the "anti-sovereignty" white
activist who has lived on Oahu for 17 years and says he loves Hawaii's
culture, spirituality and history, but is labeled a racist by some of
his detractors. He wrote a book entitled Hawaiian Apartheid: Racial Separatism and Ethnic Nationalism in the Aloha State.
"Here
in Hawaii, there is no compulsion to speak out on racist attacks. There
are all these hate crimes and violent things happening to white people
and you don't hear sovereignty activists speaking out against it," says
Conklin, who manages a massive website on Hawaiian issues. "The
violence has been going on for years and it's always been hush-hush."
State and Race
It's against this backdrop that Hawaii approaches its 50th anniversary
of statehood. The non-celebration will consist largely of educational
events at various venues. Iolani Palace won't be one of them. Once home
to Hawaii's monarchy and where the last monarch was imprisoned after
her government was overthrown, the palace is a potent symbol of
anti-statehood — and anti-white — sentiment.
Republican state Sen. Sam Slom learned that the hard way. Although
Statehood Day is a holiday in Hawaii, there were no celebrations for
about 10 years, until he organized one in 2006 at the palace. He and
others were confronted by demonstrators shouting racial epithets. Slom,
who is Caucasian and has lived in Hawaii since 1960, said the 30 to 40
"hard-core" protesters intimidated a high school band, which left
early, as well as some spectators.
The 50-year anniversary events figure to be "soft celebrations"
aimed at defusing sovereignty passions, Slom says. "It is a divisive
wedge that some people have exploited," he says. "There are people who
have made it a racial thing. [But] the vast, overwhelming majority are
proud to be United States citizens."
Still, a statehood commission planning commemorative events opted
not to re-enact the phone call to the Territorial House of
Representatives meeting at Iolani Palace in 1959 informing
representatives that Congress had voted in favor of Hawaiian statehood.
Commission member Donald Cataluna strongly opposed a reenactment,
according to the Honolulu Advertiser, saying he "didn't want any blood to spill."
That won't completely mollify sovereignty activists, Slom predicts. "There will be protests, there's no question about it."
Roots of Resentment Go Way Back
Conflicts between the Polynesians who settled in Hawaii and whites
began as early as 1779, when the locals clashed with English explorer
Capt. James Cook and his crew. Cook became the first European to set
foot on the islands the previous year, naming them the Sandwich
Islands. On a return voyage, he and his men got into a dispute with the
Hawaiians, who stabbed Cook to death in the surf.
In 1810, Kamehameha I became Hawaii's first king, and 10 years
later missionaries from New England arrived. This time, white people
came to stay, although Hawaii remained mostly autonomous in the ensuing
decades. When Queen Liliuokalani ascended to the throne in 1891, she
drafted a new constitution that would strengthen the monarchy's
authority.
American and European businessmen then formed something called the
Committee of Safety and sought U.S. military assistance to deal with a
purported "imminent threat to American lives and property." U.S.
Marines and sailors were deployed and the queen relinquished her
throne. President Grover Cleveland ordered an investigation. A report
by former congressman James Henderson Blount concluded that the United
States had abused its authority. Cleveland ordered the queen's
reinstatement, but provisional government president Sanford Dole, older
cousin of the pineapple magnate James Dole, refused.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted its own probe and
came to the opposite conclusion as Blount. The Republic of Hawaii was
then established in 1894, with Dole as president. An attempt the
following year to overthrow the republic was quashed, and Queen
Liliuokalani was convicted and imprisoned for a year in Iolani Palace.
In 1898, the United States annexed the islands. Hawaii became a
territory.
Six decades later, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill
allowing Hawaiian statehood, and 94% of residents voted on Aug. 21,
1959, in favor of it. Even so, there are today many sovereignty groups
in Hawaii. One of them, the Hawaiian Kingdom Government, maintains that
Hawaii has been "under prolonged occupation" by the United States and
even filed an unsuccessful complaint with the United Nations Security
Council in 2001.
On the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of Hawaii's monarchy in
1993, Congress passed what became known as "The Apology Resolution,"
expressing regret for the "suppression of the inherent sovereignty of
the Native Hawaiian people." President Bill Clinton signed the measure.
It was about that time that "we started seeing more [Native Hawaiian]
activism," says state Sen. Sam Slom.
Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka later began regularly introducing a
controversial bill that would recognize people of Native Hawaiian
ancestry as a sovereign group, similar to Native American tribes. If
passed, the bill would create a native-run government that would
negotiate with the U.S. government for things like the transfer of
lands. The legislation is pending before Congress.
Even pro-sovereignty advocates are divided over the bill, with
opponents contending it would leave Hawaii still beholden to the U.S.
government and hamper their efforts to restore the islands as an
independent nation controlled by natives. Others, however, see the
establishment of an independent Native Hawaiian government as a first
step toward eventual independence.
