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."

the folks mentioned in the article had ventured to one of the ‘off limits’ beaches

Article said Makena, pretty popular beach for all. Never heard of any "off limits" beaches but don't doubt they exist.

Why would I want to fly 12 hours to a beach full of idiots when I can get to the cheaper Carribean in about 3 or Europe in 8 hours? Screw Hawaii. Let’s drop them as a state and see how they like it. They’d be back to living in dirt huts and sacrificing goats to their pagan gods.

I’ve never been to Hawaii but I’ve heard enough horror stories firsthand to know not to bother. The mentality of contemporary thinking on racism is that only white skinned people can be racist and all other minorities may pracice it freely and without hesitation. Liberal thought has done nothing for racial equality but create a false sense of security and achievement that only aggravates the problem.

Hate crime? No, just the normal interaction between haole and kamaaina.
I was stationed there for several years. It wasn’t long before I began to have the kamaaina attitude toward tourists. Tourists seem to act snotty toward locals everywhere, but the further they are from home the worst they seem to become. Some of the mainland tourists in Hawaii were the worst of the worst. While I was attending a beach party on the Waianae Coast with locals - not a tourist area at the time - tourists tried to invite themselves, just as if it was a tourist luao at a Waikiki hotel. When we told them they weren’t welcome the got mad and couldn’t understand it. I could make a list, but it would be far too long to post.
While this couple might not have done anything to warrant the attack, I can understand it.

The family should go to Samoa and see what island racism is really like. There's a whole lot of stink-eye in those islands. Beautiful place largely filled with ignorant and hateful people. Doesn't matter if it's a five year old or a 50 year old, you're going to have trouble. I've dissuaded quite a few people from visiting there after my visit in 04. I tell ‘em to go to Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga or the Cook Islands if they want a beautiful experience. Never go to Samoa.

Geez — two places I’ve never really wanted to go. Las Vegas and Hawaii. Now, I’d love to see Hawaii, but I don’t like to go where I’m not wanted. And therre is nothing I can’t stand worse than a bunch of people living on tourist dollars who spend their time hating tourists.

On Maui our last trip we were warned not to go hiking in the high country becasue of drug growers.

Now I wonder if it really wasn’t the knowledge the “natives” would attack us on the trails.

We have vacationed in Hawaii 5 times over the years. I was just looking at a map this AM and thinking about another winter trip there.

This story completely took my breath away. I don’t think we will be going on vacation to Hawaii anymore.

...I’ve never really wanted to go. Las Vegas...

That's what I thought until I went to Vegas the first time. If you can go out there on the company's dime it's great. And if you're not into gambling it's a pretty cheap vacation.

Vegas has some of the best free entertainment I've ever encountered. Just find a good vantage point and watch the people.

We lived there for a few years. Racism is horrid. The locals want the haoles there to work and pump money in to the socialist structure while they go surfing and collect the spoils of the haoles’ labor. It’s pretty bad; we left because of it.

Nice place to visit, though.

(I suspect the folks mentioned in the article had ventured to one of the ‘off limits’ beaches....not smart).

Wow. So I suppose it won't be long until there are "Haole Only" drinking fountains and lunch counters.

One in 3 in Maui at any given time are tourists (one in 10 in Oahu) . Many of the tourists are and act obnoxious. Anti-white sentiment is less on other islands.

>Wow. So I suppose it won’t be long until there are “Haole Only” drinking fountains and lunch counters.<

That’s coming. They are trying to get the “Akaka Bill” through Congress that will legally segregate Hawaii by having areas that will only be for natives. The US will “negotiate” with the State of Hawaii to turn over portions of the islands to the new “Native Hawaiian Governing Entity,” which will be a separate government just for Native Hawaiians.

They do this by pretending that Native Hawaiians are actually an “Indian tribe” entitled to their own “sovereign” government. Once they have that, they can legally discriminate to their heart’s content.

This is why I like the Caribbean. I tell my friends to try out some of the islands in the Caribbean. It's a much more friendly place in my opinion. If you go to the right places they are happy to see a white face. If you spend just a small amount of money they will treat you like a king.

Even though I live in California, I'll travel east when I want a tropical vacation. Screw Hawaii.

I know a woman who used to live there. When she would ride the bus when pregnant the locals would put their bags on the seats next to them or move over to keep her standing.

She also said the locals threw acid is the soldiers faces in off base bars.

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