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.

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 whore," 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.

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.

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 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."

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."

Kill Haole Day

In Hawaii's schools, the last day of school before summer was traditionally known as Kill Haole Day. On Kill Haole Day, school children of Hawaiian ancestry harass, and sometimes assault white children. The origins of the day are unknown, but the tradition dates back to the 1950s.

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This is from Southern Poverty Law Center?...

I wouldn't believe anything they say as in always comes from some hard left agenda they have no credibility...

Now what theirs agenda is in this article I have no idea...

But Japanese folks have a problem gong to Korea after their sordid past treatment of the Koreans and I do not understand why but the Japanese have always had a thing for Hawaii.

That is true but that is changing. A lot of Japanese tourists visit Korea now. The "Korean wave" is pretty strong in Japan with Korean dramas and Korean popstars gaining lots of popularity there. A lot of Japanese people go to Korea to visit the places where their favorite K-dramas were filmed.

Since Cheju Island is targeted towards honeymooners, there's a certain romantic vibe there as well.

I'm not saying that Koreans don't have issues with racism. It does pop up from time to time. But if I have to compare the stories I have from American ex-pats in Korea vs. people who live in Hawaii, I'd rather go to Korea any day than Hawaii, particularly to raise a family.

I love Hawaii. My observations: No bad vibes from the locals in really any of the Islands except for Maui. Frankly, I do not really blame them...it is full of tourists from CALIFORNIA who are flashy and obnoxious. They grate on the Maui’ans especially.

Pretty much everywhere in the Islands thats true. I have Hawaiian relatives, I could have gone to Kamehameha schools because of that blood relation, but my parents couldn’t being themselves to do it. The Public Schools were bad enough, they sucked. I don’t even want to know who bad it would have been at a Kamehameha school. REALLY bad.

What’s true? That whites grate on Hawaiians everywhere? I wonder what percentage of them oppose statehood? (I know the referendum indicated 93% but it wasn’t only Hawaiians voting.)

I don’t blame a Hawaiian for being upset...but what I want to know is why can’t we Mainlanders complain when about the third world invasion of this country? (Don’t say it’s the Indians country, because the Hawaiians themselves “dislocated” a previous people.)

They ought to check out Subic Bay/Olangapo PI and Roosevelt Roads before they decide to throw the Haoles etal out....
When I ‘visited’ TH in the late 50’s it was pretty much Hotel Street for us young eager sailors on the first stop away from the world....A foreign country..WOW... The only ‘natives’ we had real problems with were the HASP as fine a bunch of club wielders one may venture to see.
BUT THEN AGAIN, there really isn’t any such thing as a bad liberty for a sailor....

(Haole — pronounced how-lee — is slang for a foreigner...)

A long time ago, when I was on the islands, and dating a lovely Hawaiian lady, I was confronted by a man using that term (circa 1980). I said, what does that mean? She told me that it was slang meaning a foreigner. I said no problem, and promptly kicked his ass. Almost went to jail, I did.

5.56mm

True. I know Tongans and Samoans who barely tolerate one another.

I once had an opportunity to take a job in Hawaii (actually, Oahu) but declined after I was warned by a friend, whose mother was native Hawaiian, that my two fair-haired high school age sons would have a very hard time being accepted. Paradise isn't worth that kind of grief.

“The state government was going to sell 1.2 million acres of these lands to developers…”
Geez…get your facts straight, Keller! It was only 1,128 acres and the initiative was started by John Waihee Hawaii’s first Native Hawaiian Governor!!! 1.2 million acres is ALL the ceded lands in the whole state of Hawaii!!! Idiot! And the ceded are held in trust by the State of Hawaii for all the people of Hawaii, so if the Native Hawaiians are going to get any of it for a reservation, it’s going to be only 20% of it. Try doing some research before writing blatantly erroneous articles. Your credibility is a joke!

“Well to be perfectly honest.... You don’t live here. I apologize I don’t know any other way to explain it.”

Ah, but I do live “here” and have owned property in the country on one of the outer islands for a long time. I think you need to check your statistics regarding population demographics.

I learned some “rules” a long time ago: Drive a battered vehicle if you want to explore out-of-the-way places. Leave the Mercedes in the garage except to go to church. Stay out of some out-of-the-way-places. Be very, very polite and prepared to ‘talk story’ if you want to get anything done, particularly trying to get any government service, such as a building permit, business permit, etc.

While everyone is very polite and smiles a lot, realize that endless patience is required and never, ever, expect to do business in the quick, efficient manner that it is done on the mainland.

I love Hawaii and would not even bother to return to the mainland if I didn’t have to for business reasons, but one of the reasons that I love it and like it is because I learned to live by the ‘rules’ there and I’m comfortable with that fact, but it doesn’t change the reality that whites are not welcome by many Hawaiians of Hawaiian heritage.

It’s too bad that you deprived you and your family of a great experience. I lived in Honolulu for 5 1/2 years as a teen. It was a great experience. There are problems everywhere, and Hawaii isn’t any worse. I had friends who were White, Black, Hispanic, Samoan, and mixed. Like all schools there are cliques. Kids make friends and overcome adversity. Situations teach kids how to deal with life. The kids would have been fine. Thank God my parents decided to take us to Hawaii.

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