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Critical Race Theory Hawaiian-Style: A Peculiar Ideological Combination Alleges Actual Native Hawaiian Victimhood; Asserts Native Hawaiian Inherent Racial Supremacy; Expresses Anti-U.S. and Anti-White Hostility; and Demands Asians in Hawaii to Ally with Native Hawaiians in the Interest of Social Justice.

Critical Race Theory Hawaiian-Style: A Peculiar Ideological Combination Alleges Actual Native Hawaiian Victimhood; Asserts Native Hawaiian Inherent Racial Supremacy; Expresses Anti-U.S. and Anti-White Hostility; and Demands Asians in Hawaii to Ally with Native Hawaiians in the Interest of Social Justice.

(c) Copyright July 4, 2021 by Kenneth R. Conklin, Ph.D.
All rights reserved

In honor of July 4 being a quadruple holiday for Hawaii:

July 4, 1776: U.S. created by proclamation of its Declaration of Independence.

July 4, 1894: Republic of Hawaii created by proclamation of its Constitution. Thanks to President Sanford Dole.

July 6, 1898: U.S. Senate, returning from holiday, passes joint resolution by vote of 42-21 accepting the Treaty of Annexation offered by Hawaii and previously passed by U.S. House by vote of 290-91. Thanks to President William McKinley.

July 4, 1960: 50th star officially added to U.S. flag. Thanks to President Dwight Eisenhower. (A star gets added on the first July 4 after the new State's Admission Act is passed and signed.)

A note about URLs (internet links) in this lengthy webpage:
Any link can easily be copied and then pasted into an internet browser, or you can type it into your browser one character at a time.
Some links are lighted up, which makes them clickable so there is no need to copy/paste or retype them in order to go visit the item. It's time-consuming to make a link clickable, so the fact that it is lighted up means that Ken Conklin considers it to be an important item definitely worth reading when time permits.
Some links are not lighted up, which means that to follow that link you must copy it and paste it into your browser. The fact that it is not lighted up means that Ken Conklin placed the link there as a footnote, to provide a reference source in case you want to do your own further research. Simply copy/paste it if you wish to visit it.
As time goes by some links will become "dead." That happens because the document has been removed from its website, or perhaps the entire website where the document was stored has been abandoned or taken down. Too bad! Sorry! Not my fault!.


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SUMMARY

In the Hawaii version of critical race theory it's not Blacks but ethnic Hawaiians claiming greatest victimhood and demanding greatest reparations. Aside from historical grievances and demands for reparations, Hawaiians use a twisted version of a beautiful ancient creation legend to assert a blood-and-soil theology to justify claims of a fascist right to racial supremacy in culture and personal stature; and a right to race-nationalist political power. An anthropological theory of racial memory passed down genetically through generations, provides a basis for claiming authenticity of reinvented ancient knowledge and skills. Ethnic Hawaiians are portrayed as having genetically inherited racial supremacy, which surely must cause feelings of moral indebtedness and loss of self-esteem in the minds of children lacking Hawaiian blood who are taught these beliefs in the mandatory "Hawaiian Studies" components of the tax-supported schools as well as in the private schools.

As on the mainland, Whites in Hawaii are stereotyped as evil villains and colonial oppressors. Even if individual Whites have no personal history of racial misconduct nor harboring racist attitudes, they allegedly have ingrained "privilege" because the whiteness of their skin allegedly ensures that they have always been treated with deference. Like on the mainland, every White person allegedly has "implicit bias" against all other groups and especially ethnic Hawaiians -- the more a "haole" denies it, the more probing and therapy must be administered to bring it out into the open. Extensive training will be required to intimidate White people to confess racism; to recognize their own implicit bias; and how to adjust their personal and political behavior to compensate for this incurable disease.

Critical race theory regards Asians in Hawaii, like Asians on the mainland, as being quasi-White. They are stereotyped as "bananas": yellow on the outside but white on the inside. On the mainland Asians are a minority small enough to be ignored, but in Hawaii they are the majority. Hawaiian activists say Asians, including multi-generation locally born and raised Asians, are foreign settlers whose hard work and silent submissive assimilation make them accessories to, and facilitators of, White oppression of Hawaiians. Hawaiian race-partisans demand that Asians (and Whites who feel "Hawaiian at heart") expiate the guilt they might not know they have, and step forward as allies to throw off the yoke of White oppression by becoming submissive to Hawaiians instead of to Whites. Asians (and Whites who want to be allies to Hawaiians) should listen and learn; stay in the background; offer advice in private but never try to set policy or assert leadership; give labor and money to rebuild and maintain taro patches, fishponds, and historic sites; serve food at political rallies; etc. Some ethnic Hawaiian organizations (including proposed or alleged sovereign nations) reflect this attitude in their governing bylaws or Constitutions: people with no Hawaiian native blood are welcome to join, attend meetings, and contribute money or labor; but all [pejoratively-labeled] "non-Hawaiians" are either relegated to second-class status where they cannot vote or hold office, or else the organizations' bylaws require that a majority of the board of directors and public spokespeople must be ethnic Hawaiians (for example the statewide politically active Hawaiian Civic Clubs and formerly huge Ka Lahui [literal Hawaiian translation of La Raza]; and even the small friendly local Kailua environmental group 'Ahahui Malama i ka Lokahi).


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TABLE OF CONTENTS: 6 PARTS


WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN MAINLAND USA?
1 scholarly essay, 1 newspaper article, and a China girl's personal diary during Mao's Cultural Revolution published as a book in U.S.


HOW MAINLAND-STYLE CRITICAL RACE THEORY IS MERGING INTO THE HOMEGROWN HAWAIIAN VERSION
University of Hawaii Law School replaces leftwing White liberal dean with new Black female founder of Critical Race Theory, accompanied by a Black female leader of Black Lives Matter to occupy endowed Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals. Longtime ethnic Hawaiian race-partisan holding UH Ph.D. in American Studies and Law School degree publicly admits UH indoctrinated her with Critical Race Theory 2 decades ago, while UH President was pledging to use UH as engine for Hawaiian sovereignty and also tolerating threats of violence to stop opponent from teaching a course with opposing views. Two outstanding articles in "The Economist" of September 4, 2021 explain (a) "How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life? And how deep will its influence be?"; and (b) How an intellectual elite of modern "progressive liberals" are enforcing their new critical race orthodoxy by using the same socially repressive and violent tactics of the spiritual elite of the medieval Church in Europe which the true liberals of that time successfully fought against, including doctrinal orthodoxy, proselytizing, compulsion, suppressing blasphemy and expelling heretics, book-banning, speech codes, forcing job-seekers to explicitly espouse creeds.


NATIVE HAWAIIANS CLAIM TO BE THE WORST VICTIMS OF NEARLY ALL MEDICAL DISEASES AND SOCIAL DYSFUNCTIONS. THEY HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY SUCCESSFUL IN DESIGNING "STUDIES" AND TWISTING DATA TO SUPPORT THEIR CLAIMS AND IN PRODUCING PROPAGANDA CELEBRATING THEIR VICTIMHOOD.
Virtually all so-called "Native Hawaiians" are racially mixed, and perhaps 3/4 of them each has 3/4 of their personal heritage from Asia, Europe, or Africa. Yet they insist they are "Hawaiian" period. Researchers of medical disease and social dysfunction classify anyone with even one drop of Hawaiian blood as being 100% Hawaiian, thereby denying victimhood points to other ethnicities. In this way "Native Hawaiians" appear to have the worst statistics for all bad things, and their alleged disproportionate victimhood wins government and philanthropic grants plus public sympathy leading to political power.


NATIVE HAWAIIAN ASSERTION OF RACIAL SUPREMACY IN PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY, CULTURAL WISDOM, POLITICAL ENTITLEMENT, AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THEOLOGY, RACIAL MEMORY, MANA, MAGIC BLOOD
Theology: Beautiful creation legend twisted to say only ethnic Hawaiians are children of the gods and brothers/sisters to the land, therefore entitled to racial supremacy in governance.
Racial memory: Wisdom, knowledge, and skills of the ancestors are genetically embedded in every ethnic Hawaiian, but special curriculum and teaching methods are needed to bring out the memories.
Mana: Ethnic Hawaiians have special spiritual power which some of them manifest in personal charisma displaying the Aloha Spirit, making them natural-born leaders.
Magic blood: A single drop of Hawaiian native blood conveys the full essence of membership in the family of gods, and of the racial memories, and the mana. Lack of any magic blood relegates "non-Hawaiians" to the permanent status of "others."


ASIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM
The book "Asian Settler Colonialism" published by University of Hawaii Press (subsidized by taxpayers) is triply insulting to Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry. The book tells them they are guilty of collaborating with Caucasians to oppress ethnic Hawaiians; then tells them that even if their families have lived in Hawaii for several generations, they are merely "settlers" in someone else's homeland and they have a duty to abandon their hard-won equal rights in order to accept a position of subservience to ethnic Hawaiians; and finally the book attempts to undermine their patriotism by telling them they have a moral duty to help Hawaiian sovereignty activists liberate Hawaii from American colonialism and rip the 50th star off the flag. Psychotherapy is based on a belief that a person can be cured of mental illness when he is able to see clearly the nature of his illness and the events in his life which brought it about. In 2020-2021 people are getting an injection of a small fraction of an ounce of vaccine to stave off a deadly pandemic disease. Thus it can be hoped that understanding the full depth of the spiritual sickness in this book will help to immunize Asians in Hawaii against attitudes fostered by Hawaiian sovereignty activists that would lead to politically disastrous and morally evil consequences.


THE LARGE ETHNIC GROUPS IN HAWAII HAVE HISTORICAL GRIEVANCES AGAINST THE U.S. AND THEREFORE AGAINST WHITES (as the dominant group in the U.S., and historically dominant group of "colonists", in Hawaii). THESE OLD GRIEVANCES CAN EASILY BE REVIVED BY ETHNIC HAWAIIAN RACE-NATIONALISTS TO BUILD ANTI-U.S. AND ANTI-WHITE SENTIMENT, CREATING PREJUDICE AGAINST ALL WHITES INCLUDING THOSE BORN AND RAISED IN HAWAII.
Hawaii ethnic population statistics
Ethnic Hawaiian historical grievances
Ethnic Filipino historical grievances
Ethnic Japanese historical grievances


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WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN MAINLAND USA?
1 scholarly essay, 1 newspaper article, and a China girl's personal diary during Mao's Cultural Revolution published as a book in U.S.


(1)

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/critical-race-theory-fight/
Imprimis [Hillsdale College] Vol 50, No 3, March 2021

Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It

by Christopher F. Rufo
[Graduate of Georgetown University and a former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.]

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it -- and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream - the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

Fortunately, the early proponents of this revolutionary coalition in the U.S. lost out in the 1960s to the civil rights movement, which sought instead the fulfillment of the American promise of freedom and equality under the law. Americans preferred the idea of improving their country to that of overthrowing it. The vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson’s pursuit of the Great Society, and the restoration of law and order promised by President Nixon in his 1968 campaign defined the post-1960s American political consensus.

But the radical Left has proved resilient and enduring -- which is where critical race theory comes in.

WHAT IT IS

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.

There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality - the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.

In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”

One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.

An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation -- critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

HOW IT WORKS

What does critical race theory look like in practice? Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.

This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.” In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration - from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.

This is a revolutionary change. When originally established, these government institutions were presented as neutral, technocratic, and oriented towards broadly-held perceptions of the public good. Today, under the increasing sway of critical race theory and related ideologies, they are being turned against the American people. This isn’t limited to the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., but is true as well of institutions in the states, even in red states, and it is spreading to county public health departments, small Midwestern school districts, and more. This ideology will not stop until it has devoured all of our institutions.

FUTILE RESISTANCE

Thus far, attempts to halt the encroachment of critical race theory have been ineffective. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, too many Americans have developed an acute fear of speaking up about social and political issues, especially those involving race. According to a recent Gallup poll, 77 percent of conservatives are afraid to share their political beliefs publicly. Worried about getting mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse, they remain quiet, largely ceding the public debate to those pushing these anti-American ideologies. Consequently, the institutions themselves become monocultures: dogmatic, suspicious, and hostile to a diversity of opinion. Conservatives in both the federal government and public school systems have told me that their “equity and inclusion” departments serve as political offices, searching for and stamping out any dissent from the official orthodoxy.

Second, critical race theorists have constructed their argument like a mousetrap. Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias,” or “internalized white supremacy.” I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim - such as “all whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children” - and then when confronted with disagreement, they adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame. Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort,” and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.”

Third, Americans across the political spectrum have failed to separate the premise of critical race theory from its conclusion. Its premise - that American history includes slavery and other injustices, and that we should examine and learn from that history - is undeniable. But its revolutionary conclusion - that America was founded on and defined by racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way of life should be overthrown - does not rightly, much less necessarily, follow.

Fourth and finally, the writers and activists who have had the courage to speak out against critical race theory have tended to address it on the theoretical level, pointing out the theory’s logical contradictions and dishonest account of history. These criticisms are worthy and good, but they move the debate into the academic realm, which is friendly terrain for proponents of critical race theory. They fail to force defenders of this revolutionary ideology to defend the practical consequences of their ideas in the realm of politics.

POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast achieving “cultural hegemony” in America’s public institutions. More and more, it is driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.

Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak to the facts. Do they support public schools separating first-graders into groups of “oppressors” and “oppressed”? Do they support mandatory curricula teaching that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support public schools instructing white parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? Do they want those who work in government to be required to undergo this kind of reeducation? How about managers and workers in corporate America? How about the men and women in our military? How about every one of us?

There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces of critical race theory: governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle.

We already see examples of governmental action. Last year, one of my reports led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical race theory-based training programs in the federal government. President Biden rescinded this order on his first day in office, but it provides a model for governors and municipal leaders to follow. This year, several state legislatures have introduced bills to achieve the same goal: preventing public institutions from conducting programs that stereotype, scapegoat, or demean people on the basis of race. And I have organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and government agencies that impose critical race theory-based programs on grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).

On the grassroots level, a multiracial and bipartisan coalition is emerging to do battle against critical race theory. Parents are mobilizing against racially divisive curricula in public schools and employees are increasingly speaking out against Orwellian reeducation in the workplace. When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas - race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation - which violate the basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many Chinese-Americans have told me that having survived the Cultural Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing happen here.

In terms of principles, we need to employ our own moral language rather than allow ourselves to be confined by the categories of critical race theory. For example, we often find ourselves debating “diversity.” Diversity as most of us understand it is generally good, all things being equal, but it is of secondary value. We should be talking about and aiming at excellence, a common standard that challenges people of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. On the scale of desirable ends, excellence beats diversity every time.

Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America -- a story that is honest about injustices in American history, but that places them in the context of our nation’s high ideals and the progress we have made towards realizing them. Genuine American history is rich with stories of achievements and sacrifices that will move the hearts of Americans -- in stark contrast to the grim and pessimistic narrative pressed by critical race theorists.

Above all, we must have courage -- the fundamental virtue required in our time. Courage to stand and speak the truth. Courage to withstand epithets. Courage to face the mob. Courage to shrug off the scorn of the elites. When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, or more who stand up together for the principles of America.

Truth and justice are on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.

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(2)

https://www.unionleader.com/opinion/op-eds/lily-tang-williams-a-chinese-immigrant-s-warning-on-critical-race-theory/article_88cc1f5c-a3ae-5c63-b16d-059e34f67d83.html

New Hampshire Union-Leader April 15, 2021

A Chinese immigrant’s warning on Critical Race Theory

by Lily Tang Williams

MY NAME is Lily Tang Williams and I grew up in Communist China under the reign of Mao Zedong during a painful era called the Cultural Revolution. The origins of the Cultural Revolution preceded my birth, when a Western ideology, Marxism, was injected into China by Mao.

Marxism would later evolve into Maoism. Like all forms of Marxism, Maoism epitomized the worst in humanity: division, hatred, envy, and vengeance. Unlike most revolutions, the Cultural Revolution was not a war against a regime, but a regime-inspired holy war against its own people, society, and culture. Mao’s Cultural Revolution sought to destroy the “Four Olds”: traditional ideas, culture, habits, and customs. Through it, he led a campaign to silence dissident opinions, purge his political enemies, and, in the process, destroy age-old social institutions and gain absolute power.

Identity politics was a hallmark of Maoism, dividing people into five “red classes” and five “black classes.” The “red classes” were identified as poor and lower-middle-class peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, cadres, and revolutionary martyrs. The “black classes” were landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad-influencers, and rightists. Mao shut down the schools and universities, urged the Red Guard (urban youth) to hate and hold “Struggle Sessions” to shame the black classes publicly by forcing them to self-criticize, confess their “crimes” and denounce themselves. The consequences for defiance were assault, torture, or imprisonment at a “re-education” camp. Some children were so brainwashed they would even change their surnames, cut ties with their families, and publicly denounce and betray their families.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a top to bottom orchestrated social justice movement like no other. An estimated 20 million Chinese died during the Cultural Revolution due to Mao’s toxic ideas and murderous policies. Today in China, no memorials or museums to those of this forgotten holocaust exist; even the phrase “Cultural Revolution” is banned on the Internet by the Chinese government.

In today’s populist, racially-charged “social justice” movement in America, I see the shadows of the Cultural Revolution in Critical Race Theory (CRT), and in the ideology that inspired this movement. For those unfamiliar with CRT, it is the idea that American law, society, and institutions are inherently racist. Whites are born racist because of the cultural domination by White people in furthering their own economic and political power at the expense of “people of color.”

After I left China for America at the age of 23, arriving in Austin with nothing more than a suitcase, I discovered Texas to be filled with the kindest and most generous people I have ever encountered. There I was, a stranger in a strange land, being invited into American homes and offered help. Now, 33 years later, I am living the American Dream. This is not something one would expect to happen to a non-White, non-English speaking foreigner in a country that is “systemically racist.” My experience is certainly not unique. Many people of color agree with me that America has made huge progress since the Civil Rights Movement.

While CRT and Maoism are not identical ideologies, they share five features in common. The first is the development of a quasi-religious following of zealous youth devoted to unrestrained destruction of what is old to advance that which is new. Whereas Mao called for traditional Chinese culture to be destroyed, CRT calls for “dismantling systems of oppression,” which, like Mao’s definition of “the old,” is subjectively dependent on what they define as oppressive. The second feature is that both ideologies reduce complex problems to the classical Marxist dichotomy: society is constituted of those who “oppress” and those who are oppressed. CRT divides society into oppressor class (White) and oppressed class (people of color). Third, the processes in CRT training are similar to those in Struggle Sessions: writing self-criticizing letters, apologizing for being born White, public shaming, instilling guilt and hatred. Fourth, both ideologies are taught to school-age children without parental consent. The students are made to feel ashamed and guilty about their family history going back generations. Children are taught and trained to be “social justice warriors” by advocating for racial equity, which is about wealth redistribution. Fifth, the chaos, violence, identity politics and social division conjured up by both ideologies open the way for political factions to systematically divide and conquer until usurpation of the existing political system is one check-mate away.

I genuinely believed that the spirit of American individualism would resist the Siren’s song of Marxism that I left behind. I was naïve. It once again returns under a different name — as it always does — and now threatens to poison America, my refuge. This time, however, I have nowhere to run. I plead with you, learn from this immigrant’s story and the lessons of history — fight back.

Lily Tang Williams is co-chair of New Hampshire Asian American Coalition. She lives in Weare.

----------------

(3) "Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution" by Ji-Li Jiang, published by Harper Collins, 1997.

This extremely powerful and popular book describes the events and personal feelings of a schoolgirl growing up in China during Mao Zedong's cultural revolution, especially focusing on class warfare and group-pressure techniques whereby people were forced to conform to ideological beliefs through schooling, mass propaganda, and manufactured community pressure. Critical race theory, and "Black Lives Matter", draw upon the same Marxist ideology and employ the same methods for destabilizing America's political and cultural life, and shaping public opinion, even though America's cultural revolution now in progress focuses mostly on race rather than social class. The book is written in simple language easily accessible to middle-school children while also intellectually eye-opening and thought-provoking for adults.

25 copies of the first-edition are available in the Hawaii Public Library system.

Amazon.com offers multiple editions, over 900 ratings/reviews; numerous summaries, study guides and teacher lesson plans; and audio materials some of which are free.


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HOW MAINLAND-STYLE CRITICAL RACE THEORY IS MERGING INTO THE HOMEGROWN HAWAIIAN VERSION
University of Hawaii Law School replaces leftwing White liberal dean with new Black female founder of Critical Race Theory, accompanied by a Black female leader of Black Lives Matter to occupy endowed Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals. Longtime ethnic Hawaiian race-partisan holding UH Ph.D. in American Studies and Law School degree publicly admits UH indoctrinated her with Critical Race Theory 2 decades ago, while UH President was pledging to use UH as engine for Hawaiian sovereignty and also tolerating threats of violence to stop opponent from teaching a course with opposing views. Two outstanding articles in "The Economist" of September 4, 2021 explain (a) "How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life? And how deep will its influence be?"; and (b) How an intellectual elite of modern "progressive liberals" are enforcing their new critical race orthodoxy by using the same socially repressive and violent tactics of the spiritual elite of the medieval Church in Europe which the true liberals of that time successfully fought against, including doctrinal orthodoxy, proselytizing, compulsion, suppressing blasphemy and expelling heretics, book-banning, speech codes, forcing job-seekers to explicitly espouse creeds.


Critical race theory (CRT) has come to public attention on the mainland in recent years because of some peaceful protests but mostly organized rioting, vandalism and looting in large cities in response to shootings of Black men by White police officers during routine investigations of street crimes or traffic violations. Lawyers, professors, teachers, and journalists -- all of them mostly leftwing -- began spewing political slogans and intellectual rationalizations, mostly from CRT, to explain why "social justice" and "racial equity" require defunding police, abolishing bail requirements, and appointing or electing "diverse" (i.e., non-White, non-cis-male) corporate and political leaders.

Fortunately Hawaii has not recently seen mob violence in the name of "social justice"; but see webpage
"Violence and threats of violence to push demands for Hawaiian sovereignty -- past, present, and future"
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/bigfiles40/HawSovViolence.html

University of Hawaii's William S. Richardson School of Law has a reputation as a politically left-wing institution, training generations of lawyers steeped in "social justice" advocacy. When leftist Law School dean Aviam Soifer finally stepped down in 2020, the Law School veered even farther to the left in its choice of a new Dean who is major figure in the development of Critical Race Theory.

https://www.jbhe.com/2020/04/the-university-of-hawaii-school-of-law-names-camille-nelson-as-its-next-dean/
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, April 20, 2020

The University of Hawai’i School of Law Names Camille Nelson as Its Next Dean "Professor Nelson’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of critical race theory and cultural studies, with emphasis on health law, criminal law and procedure, and comparative law. Before entering the academic world, she was a clerk for the Supreme Court of Canada. She was the first Black woman to clerk for Canada’s highest court."

UH Law webpage proudly provides a description of Dean Nelson's background, and list of some of her publications, at
https://www.law.hawaii.edu/person/camille-a-nelson

One probable reason why the Law School loves Critical Race Theory is because of its sub-field "Tribal Critical Race Theory" [google it], which clearly is related to the idea of creating a federally recognized Hawaiian tribe.

Camille Nelson somehow managed to bring with her to the University of Hawaii her good buddy Alicia Garza, one of the founders of "Black Lives Matter." Garza was given a faculty position in an endowed chair.

https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2020/09/08/garza-manoa-speaker-series/
University of Hawaii News, September 8., 2020

Black Lives Matter co-founder to deliver UH Mānoa keynote

The civil rights activist who co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement has been selected as an endowed chair at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Alicia Garza, a special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and principal at the Black Futures Lab will headline a live presentation “The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart” ...
Garza was selected to serve as the Dan and Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals at UH Mānoa for fall 2020. She will be in virtual residence for the month of September, participating in a variety of events with students, faculty and local activists. The chair is hosted in the UH Mānoa Department of American Studies in the College of Arts and Humanities and the William S. Richardson School of Law and was created to bring significant public figures to Hawaiʻi to foster public discourse regarding democratic ideals and civic engagement."

In a June 20, 2021 essay in Honolulu Civil Beat, longtime race-partisan Trisha Kehaulani Watson confesses she was indoctrinated with the concepts of Critical Race Theory in the University of Hawaii "American Studies" department (where she earned a Ph.D.) and Law School (where she earned a J.D. degree) decades ago.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/06/trisha-kehaulani-watson-its-time-to-face-painful-truths-about-racism/
"I myself studied critical race theory over 20 years ago while a graduate student at Washington State University and then later while in law school. An article from the American Bar Association explains it like this: '(Critical race theory) critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.' There’s no doubt that discussing race and colonialism is complex, painful and politically divisive. It is nonetheless necessary. We cannot lament over all of the growing problems in Hawaii if we are unwilling to face the historic roots of these same problems. Ignoring problems, especially systemic ones, does not eliminate these problems, it only enables them."

The article Watson quoted from is "A Lesson on Critical Race Theory" in the January 12, 2021 issue of the American Bar Association human rights magazine, where it was published in response to President Trump's executive order to purge CRT from personnel training programs and human resources departments in the military and in federal government agencies. See the lengthy ABA article at:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

For more about Trisha Watson's attitude, honed by her indoctrination in CRT at UH, see webpage "Dialogs with a racist -- Bringing to public awareness the explicit, enthusiastic, and unapologetic racism of Trisha Kehaulani Watson, a featured blogger on the public website of the largest circulation newspaper in Hawaii" at
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/DialogsRacistWatson.html

At the time Watson was at University of Hawaii (and continuing to now) UH has been a hostile environment for any students or professors expressing conservative political views, especially views in opposition to ethnic Hawaiian assertions of racial supremacy and racial entitlement.

In April 2002 the UH Law School held a public forum on "Rice and its Progeny" to "educate" students about the Rice v. Cayetano Supreme Court decision of 2000 and followup lawsuits it spawned, including the Arakaki decision desegregating candidacy for members of the board of directors of the state government Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and another lawsuit seeking to dismantle OHA and the Dept of Hawaiian Homelands. But, as usual, all members of the panel were on the same side of the issues, defending racial entitlement programs while asserting that those who opposed such programs are racists. Distinguished lawyers who were active in those cases on behalf of plaintiffs were excluded from the panel, even though one of them was present in the auditorium; and two had written articles on these topics published in the Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal and were also adjunct professors teaching occasional courses at UH Law School. A webpage about this panel discussion, including links to published articles, is at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/riceprogeny.html

Trouble occurred a few months later, in Summer 2002, when a "politically incorrect" course was listed in the small catalogue of an outreach program at UH. Intimidation began the moment the course title and instructor's name were announced: "Hawaiian Sovereignty: Another Perspective" by Ken Conklin, Ph.D. The outreach program, "Academy for Lifelong Learning," offers non-credit courses taught by unpaid volunteer instructors to students who are mostly elderly, including "retired" scholars. The instructor, Ken Conklin, was already well known among Hawaiian sovereignty activists as an outspoken opponent of their fundamental beliefs. Two years previously he was part of a multiethnic group of thirteen plaintiffs who won a lawsuit allowing non-ethnic-Hawaiians to run for the state government position of trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs; and following that court victory, he then became the first non-ethnic-Hawaiian ever to become a candidate for OHA trustee. Threats of violence were made both in-person and by telephone against the coordinator of the program, resulting initially in the cancellation of Conklin's course because prospective students feared for their safety. Publicity about this incident resulted in a newspaper editorial urging that academic freedom must be defended. The course was reinstated, but classes met in an undisclosed location including security precautions. Meanwhile the university President was pledging to harness UH as an engine for Hawaiian sovereignty, and provided greatly increased budget support for the Center for Hawaiian Studies. For details see "Expanded Introduction: University of Hawai'i and Hawaiian Sovereignty -- A Case Study in Political Correctness Run Amok" at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/uhacafreeintro.html

One doctrine of CRT on the mainland is the accusation of "systemic racism", alleging that the laws and power structure are set up in a way that automatically and systematically discriminates against Blacks. An example is redlining whereby banks refuse to give mortgages to Black families wanting to buy a house in neighborhoods where homeowners are predominantly White, or refuse to give loans to consumer businesses like grocery stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

In Hawaii there is indeed systemic racism, right out in the open, explicitly written into laws and government programs; and the victims are the 80% of Hawaii's people who lack Hawaiian native ancestry. The State of Hawaii has one agency, the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, implementing the U.S. Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, setting aside over 200,000 acres of Hawaii land to be leased exclusively to people with at least 50% Hawaiian blood. The State of Hawaii has another agency, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, written into the state Constitution in a 1978 amendment, which allows an elected board of directors to give out tens of millions of dollars every year exclusively to benefit people with at least one drop of Hawaiian blood. As of April 1, 2011 a Grassroot Institute of Hawaii webpage had identified and described 856 racial entitlement programs funded by tax dollars from the federal and state governments exclusively for the benefit of "Native Hawaiians." Since then hundreds more have been enacted. Keep in mind that that compilation pertained only to government programs funded by taxpayers, and does not include enormous privately funded programs such as Kamehameha Schools (Bishop Estate) which alone is worth $10-15 Billion, Lili'uokalani Childrens Trust, and many others. More recently, the U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Native Hawaiian Relations, published in 2016 a 217-page list of federal programs and grants for ethnic Hawaiians, and probably continues to update the list annually. The webpage "For Hawaiians Only" was apparently vandalized at some point, and also damaged when the entire Grassroot Institute website was reorganized. But for more information see a new small "For Hawaiians Only" at
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/ForHawaiiansOnly.html

-----------------

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/09/04/how-did-american-wokeness-jump-from-elite-schools-to-everyday-life
The Economist, September 4, 2021, pages 15-17

Out of the Academy
How did a loose set of radical ideas leap from campus to American life?

** Online title is:
How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?
And how deep will its influence be?

You could use a single word as a proxy. “Latinx” is a gender-neutral adjective which only 4% of American Hispanics say they prefer. Yet in 2018 the New York Times launched a column dedicated to “Latinx communities”. It has crept into White House press releases and a presidential speech. Google’s diversity reports use the even more inclusive “Latinx+”. A term once championed by esoteric academics has gone mainstream.

The espousal of new vocabulary is one sign of a social mobilisation that is affecting ever more areas of American life. It has penetrated politics and the press. Sometimes it spills out into the streets, in demonstrations calling for the abolition of police departments. It is starting to spread to schools. San Francisco’s education board, which for more than a year was unable to get children into classes, busied itself with stripping the names of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from its schools, and ridding department names of acronyms such as vapa (Visual and Performing Arts), on the ground that they are “a symptom of white supremacy”.

What links these developments is a loose constellation of ideas that is changing the way that mostly white, educated, left-leaning Americans view the world. This credo still lacks a definitive name: it is variously known as left-liberal identity politics, social-justice activism or, simply, wokeness. But it has a clear common thread: a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.

These notions were incubated for years in the humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular), without serious challenge. Moral panics about campus culture are hardly new, and the emergence of a new leftism in the early 2010s prompted little concern. Even as students began scouring the words of academics, administrators and fellow students for microaggressions, the oppressive slights embedded in everyday speech, and found them, complacency ruled. When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”, the response was a collective shrug.

The complacency was naive. America harboured a “Vegas campus delusion”, says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group. “What happens on campus will not stay on campus.” It has not. The influence of the new social-justice mindset is now being felt in the media, the Democratic Party and, most recently, businesses and schools.

How did this breakout happen? Three things helped prepare the ground: a disaffected student body, an academic theory that was malleable enough to be shaped into a handbook for political activism, and a pliant university administration.

First came a new generation of students keenly aware of unsolved social problems and willing to see old-fashioned precepts of academic freedom (such as open debate) as obstacles to progress. Various events—the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the police killings of unarmed black men, especially that of George Floyd—fed frustration with traditional liberalism’s seeming inability to end long-run inequities. This hastened the adoption of an ideology that offered fresh answers.

In a book entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Mr Lukianoff and a social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, posit that overprotective parenting in the shadow of the war on terrorism and the great recession led to “safetyism”, a belief that safety, including emotional safety, trumps all other practical and moral concerns. Its bounds grew to require disinviting disfavoured campus speakers (see chart 1), protesting about disagreeable readings and regulating the speech of fellow students.

Many students latched onto a body of theory which yokes obscurantist texts to calls for social action (or “praxis”) that had been developing in the academy for decades. In 1965 Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist, coined the phrase “repressive tolerance”, the notion that freedom of speech should be withdrawn from the political right in order to bring about progress, since the “cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion” might be necessary to end oppression. Another influence was Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator whose “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (published in English in 1970) advocated a liberatory pedagogy in the spirit of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in which “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation”.

The Great Awokening

Today the most prominent evangelists for what political scientists such as Zachary Goldberg call the Great Awokening are Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Both these scholar-activists have written bestselling books that sketch the expansive boundaries of systemic racism. Both minimise the role of intent, but in different ways. In Mr Kendi’s Manichaean worldview actions are either actively narrowing racial gaps, and are therefore anti-racist, or they are not, in which case they are racist. “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he concludes.

Ms DiAngelo is concerned with the racism of everyday speech. For her, the intent of the oppressor is immaterial if an oppressed person deems the conduct to be offensive. How “white progressives cause more daily harm [to black people] than, say, white nationalists” is the subject of her latest book, “Nice Racism”. She sees liberal norms like individualism or the aspiration for colour-blind universalism as naive: “Liberalism doesn’t account for power, and the differential in power,” she says.

The embrace of this ideology by students and professors might have remained inconsequential had it not been for the part played by administrative staff. Since 2000, such staff in the University of California system has more than doubled, outpacing the increase in faculty and students. The growth in private universities has been even faster. Between 1975 and 2005 the ranks of administrators grew by 66% in public colleges but by 135% in private ones. As their headcount grew, so did their remit—ferreting out not just overt racism or sexual harassment but implicit bias too. The University of California, Los Angeles, now insists that faculty applying for tenure include a diversity statement.

In 2018 Samuel Abrams, a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College, published data showing that these administrators are even more left-leaning than the professors: liberals outnumber conservatives by 12 to one. For writing about this, Mr Abrams faced a campaign by outraged students aiming to revoke his tenure. Campaigns by a vocal minority of activists have cast a pall on campus life, he says. “Large numbers of people hate this. They just don’t know what to do,” he laments. “They don’t want the mob coming to them.”

An upheaval in mass communication accelerated the trend. On Twitter, a determined minority can be amplified, and an uneasy centre-left can be cowed. “Weaponisation of social media became part of the game. But what I think nobody foresaw was that these tactics could so easily be imported to the New York Times or Penguin Random House or Google,” says Niall Ferguson, a historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “The invasion…was just a case of the old problem: that liberals defer to progressives. And progressives defer to outright totalitarians.”

Mr Trump’s election added to centrists’ unease, leaving the poles to grow ever more extreme. “Anything but far-left progressivism was lumped in with Trump,” says one (Democratic) prosecutor in San Francisco. In the protest against Mr Trump’s handling of the Mexican border, for instance, the old Democratic line of enhanced border security and a path to citizenship for the long-term undocumented became passé. Progressives proved their sincerity by being in favour of abolishing immigration authorities entirely.

Having grown strong roots, social-justice consciousness has spread most readily to non-academic institutions largely peopled by those who have come through elite universities. As the students who have embraced this messy body of theory leave university, they enter into jobs and positions of influence. The question is whether, outside the ivory tower, the ideology will retain its intolerant and belligerent zeal, or whether it will mellow into a benign urge for society to be a little fairer.

Newspapers are a prime example. The digital revolution has devastated local newspapers and crowned new online-only champions. As newsrooms adapted by aping the upstarts, hacks who had risen through the ranks thanks to shoe-leather reporting were replaced by younger staffers stuffed with new ideas from elite universities. One prominent journalist argued for replacing “neutral objectivity” with “moral clarity”—making unflinching distinctions between right and wrong.

The urge to purge

Changes in newsrooms were also related to efforts to increase demographic diversity, on the assumption that this is the only authentic way to give voice to minorities. But the campus zeal for deplatforming voices deemed offensive and defenestrating those found guilty of violating the ethos has also been imported. (James Bennet, who resigned as editorial-page editor of the New York Times after one such row, now works for The Economist; he was not involved in this article.) Non-journalists on the staff of newspapers, including young engineers, can be even more activist in campaigning against colleagues judged to be producing content at odds with the new vision of social justice.

As with universities, this stridency met little rebuke from the heads of newsrooms. Lee Fang, a left-leaning journalist for “The Intercept”, an online publication specialising in “adversarial journalism”, was accused by a colleague of racism for posting an interview with an African-American supporter of Black Lives Matter who offered a personal criticism of the group. He was made to apologise.

The quiet cultural revolution has also affected the Democratic Party. A decade ago, around 40% of white liberals agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days”; today over 70% do (see chart 2). In 2013, according to Gallup, a pollster, 70% of Americans thought black-white race relations were going well; that has dropped to 42%. Among white conservatives and moderates, there has been little movement on such questions.

In the past decade a far greater share of white liberals than African-Americans came to believe that blacks should have “special favours” to get ahead (see chart 3). Ideas for promoting racial equity that once belonged to the Democrats’ left fringe have become mainstream. Cash reparations for African-Americans are supported by 49% of Democrats, for example, and 41% endorse reducing police funding.

Democratic politicians have responded. In 2008 Barack Obama criticised overheated sermons of his pastor, saying “they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” The pastor’s view is now ascendant among Democrats.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton started giving speeches on the need to end systemic racism. By 2020 this movement was the defining fault line of the presidential primary. Joe Biden, an avatar for Democratic consensus, won by taking positions far to the left of Mr Obama, including on matters of identity politics. That is why his administration speaks much more social-justice patois than Mr Obama’s ever did. And why it embraces reparations-adjacent policies like the creation of a $4bn fund to pay off the debts of only non-white farmers, and a proposal that 40% of benefits from climate-change investment go to previously disadvantaged communities.

Wokers of the world, unite!

This new political prominence makes the question of what happens to the ideology of social activism as it spreads beyond the ivory tower all the more important. Does it retain its purity and potency? Or does it become diluted?

The corporate world will be a big test. Businesses, particularly those in the knowledge economy, have been grappling with the challenge of how to respond to social-justice consciousness as young employees agitate for change and woke consumers threaten boycotts.

An increasingly common argument is that there is no trade-off between greater diversity and profits. “I’d like to get to a place where we thought that diverse representation was just as important as profitability, because we believed it was linked to so many things that were going to come back and drive value,” says Julie Coffman, the chief diversity officer of Bain & Company, a management consultancy. Others make an explicit business case. McKinsey, another consultancy, has released a stream of reports arguing that firms with greater ethnic and gender diversity have a greater chance of financial outperformance.

Since Floyd’s murder, American businesses have issued a dizzying number of equity-related missives and quotas for hiring and procurement. Facebook, a social-media giant, has promised to hire 30% more black people in leadership positions and has set a goal that “50% of our workforce be from underrepresented communities by the end of 2023”. Target, a retailer, has pledged to spend more than $2bn with black-owned businesses by the end of 2025. Walmart, another retail titan, has set up a Centre for Racial Equity and says it will give it $100m to “address the drivers of systemic racism”.

Importing the language of equity without university-style blow-ups can be difficult. “What you’re seeing is Gen Z or young millennials basically engaging in this collective war against the boomers and the Gen Xers who actually run the organisations,” says Antonio García Martínez, whom Apple fired in May after 2,000 employees circulated a petition questioning his hiring, citing passages they found to be misogynistic in an autobiography published five years ago. When Brian Armstrong, the boss of Coinbase, announced that workplace activism was to be discouraged, he was inundated with private messages of admiration from ceos who felt that they could not do the same—and public criticism.

“Corporate wokeism I believe is the product of self-interest intermingled with the appearance of pursuing social justice,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive and author of “Woke, Inc.”. He argues that Big Tech pursues corporate wokeism because appearing to embrace social justice suits such firms’ commercial interests—both in terms of recruitment and appeal to their customers. It performs allegiance to identity politics while simultaneously rejecting the left’s critique of capitalism. “A lot of Big Tech has agreed to bend to the progressive left,” he says, but “they effectively expect that the new left look the other way when it comes to leaving their monopoly power.”

Such hypocrisy is increasingly prevalent. The founder of Salesforce, a tech behemoth based in San Francisco, is known for championing social-justice causes like a surtax to fund homelessness services in the city. Yet the firm itself paid no federal taxes on $2.6bn in profits in 2020.

Wokeness’s next frontier, with the greatest potential to make a mark on the future, will be the classroom. In California’s recently approved ethnic-studies curriculum, which may become a high-school graduation requirement, one lesson plan aims to help students “dispel the model-minority myth” (the idea that to dwell on Asian-American success is wrong). Roughly one-sixth of the state’s proposed new maths instruction framework is devoted to social justice. It approvingly quotes from studies suggesting that word problems about boys and girls knitting scarves be accompanied by a debate about gender norms. Last month the governor of Oregon signed a bill eliminating high-school graduation requirements of proficiency in reading, writing and maths until 2024—justified as necessary to promote equity for non-white students.

Woker or weaker?

Such proposals hint at the difficulties of translating some of the theories embraced by the new left into policy. Because disparities are theorised to be the result of largely implicit discrimination, systems must be dismantled. This leads to odd conclusions: that racial test-score gaps in maths can be ameliorated by dialectic; and that not testing for the ability to read is a worthy substitute for teaching it. Material conditions that the old left cared about, such as persistent segregation in poor districts and schools, get little attention.

There are some signs of a backlash. Three members of San Francisco’s board of education, including its president, are under threat of a recall election. So is the city’s ultra-progressive district attorney. However, the underlying engine—the questionable ideas of some academics, and the generational change they are rendering—is not shutting off. America has not yet reached peak woke.

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https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/09/04/left-wing-activists-are-using-old-tactics-in-a-new-assault-on-liberalism
The Economist, September 4, 2021, page 18

Echoes of the Confessional State
Old Tactics are being revived in a new assault on liberalism

Liberalism was forged in the revolt against the confessional state that had ruled Europe for more than a millennium. In medieval Europe the Roman Catholic church employed a transnational army of black-coated clerics who demanded obedience on all matters spiritual and moral, and had a monopoly in education. The Reformation introduced religious competition, strengthening the confessional state. John Calvin crushed dissent in Geneva with imprisonment, exile and execution. Henry VIII took to boiling dissenters alive. The Roman church invented the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books.

Liberalism started to pick apart this fusion of church and state 350 years ago. John Milton wrote that if the waters of truth “flow not in a perpetual progression they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition”. Baruch Spinoza insisted that scripture must be interpreted like any other book. David Hume and John Stuart Mill argued that the best way to establish truth is by vigorous debate.

The fruit of this thinking was plucked in three revolutions. In America’s, Thomas Jefferson called “the loathsome combination of church and state” the root of most of the world’s ills. The French also established a secular republic. The gradualist English revolution left the Church of England intact but marginalised.

Yet something extraordinary is happening in the West: a new generation of progressives is reviving methods that uncannily resemble those of the confessional state, with modern versions of loyalty oaths and blasphemy laws. And this effort is being spearheaded in the heartland of Anglo-Saxon liberalism—often by people who call themselves liberals. Here is how the old tactics are being revived.

Imposing orthodoxy. Today’s orthodoxy is sustained by an intellectual elite instead of a spiritual one. Their natural home is the university. Some 70-80% of right-leaning academics and doctoral students in Britain and America say that their departments are hostile environments, according to Eric Kaufmann, of Birkbeck College, London.

The progressive left is even more dominant among students. There’s nothing new about left-wing student revolts, but the protests of the 1960s were against the remnants of the confessional state: radicals at Berkeley in California turned Sproul Plaza into a free-speech zone, where anything could be said, and People’s Park into a free-for-all zone, where anything could be done. Today’s radicals demand the enforcement of codes of behaviour and speech. A poll of more than 4,000 four-year college students for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that 68% felt that students cannot say what they think because their classmates might find it offensive.

Proselytising. Religious faiths have always had a vanguard, such as the Jesuit order, who see it as their job to move the boundaries of belief and behaviour towards righteousness. The vanguard of the woke revolution are young activists. Belief in foundations of liberalism such as free speech declines with each generation. The Pew Research Centre notes that 40% of millennials favour suppressing, in various unspecified ways, speech deemed offensive to minorities, compared with 27% among Gen Xers, 24% among baby-boomers and only 12% among the oldest cohorts.

Progressives replace the liberal emphasis on tolerance and choice with a focus on compulsion and power. As in many religions, righteous folk have a duty to challenge immorality wherever they find it. They find a lot of it, believing that white people can be guilty of racism even if they don’t consciously discriminate against others on the basis of race, because they are beneficiaries of a system of exploitation. Classical liberals conceded that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Today’s progressives argue that your freedom to express your opinions stops where my feelings begin.

Expelling heretics. The new confessional state enforces ideological conformity by expelling heretics from their jobs, a practice that liberals shed much blood trying to eradicate. In academia this is becoming wearily familiar.

In 2018 Colin Wright, a post-doctoral student at Penn State University, wrote two articles arguing that sex is a biological reality not a social construct, a statement that would once have been uncontroversial. Critics posted a warning that “Colin Wright is a Transphobe who supports Race Science” and sent emails to search committees condemning him. Sympathetic academics told him privately that they could not offer him a job as it was “too risky”.

Book banning. In Restoration England Oxford University burned the works of Hobbes and Milton in the great quad next to the Bodleian Library. Today academics put trigger warnings on books, alerting students to the dangers of reading them. Young publishers try to get controversial books “cancelled”.

Though they have failed on their highest-profile targets such as J.K. Rowling (publishers have to make money), they are succeeding with lesser fry, creating an atmosphere in which senior editors are less likely to bet on unknown authors with controversial opinions. Alexandra Duncan, a white American, even cancelled her own book, “Ember Days”, after writing from the point of view of a black woman, something that is now dismissed as “cultural appropriation”.

Creeds. Churches demanded that people sign a statement of religious beliefs, like the Anglican church’s 39 Articles, before they could hold civil office. The University of California (uc) is doing something similar. Applicants for faculty posts have to complete statements about how they will advance diversity and inclusion.

These are worthy goals. But Abigail Thompson, until recently chair of maths at uc Davis and a lifelong liberal, points out that uc’s scoring system rewards a woke view of how to realise them. In 2019 the life-sciences department at uc Berkeley rejected 76% of applicants on the basis of their diversity statements without looking at their research records.

Blasphemy. Scotland, a cradle of the Enlightenment, abolished the crime of blasphemy in March. At the same time, however, it reintroduced it by creating new offences such as “stirring up hatred” and “abusive speech”—punishable by up to seven years in prison.

The analogy with the past has its limits: no one is getting burnt at the stake. But it is a useful reminder that liberal values such as tolerance cannot be taken for granted. They were the product of centuries of argument and effort. The liberal state is still much younger today than the confessional state was when liberalism replaced it.


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NATIVE HAWAIIANS CLAIM TO BE THE WORST VICTIMS OF NEARLY ALL MEDICAL DISEASES AND SOCIAL DYSFUNCTIONS. THEY HAVE BEEN REMARKABLY SUCCESSFUL IN DESIGNING "STUDIES" AND TWISTING DATA TO SUPPORT THEIR CLAIMS AND IN PRODUCING PROPAGANDA CELEBRATING THEIR VICTIMHOOD.
Virtually all so-called "Native Hawaiians" are racially mixed, and perhaps 3/4 of them each has 3/4 of their personal heritage from Asia, Europe, or Africa. Yet they insist they are "Hawaiian" period. Researchers of medical disease and social dysfunction classify anyone with even one drop of Hawaiian blood as being 100% Hawaiian, thereby denying victimhood points to other ethnicities. In this way "Native Hawaiians" appear to have the worst statistics for all bad things, and their alleged disproportionate victimhood wins government and philanthropic grants plus public sympathy leading to political power.


For decades politicians, academics, and the people of Hawaii have been bombarded with claims that Native Hawaiians have the worst victimhood statistics for virtually every terrible disease or social dysfunction: heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, drug abuse, poverty, incarceration -- the list of woes is endless. Such claims are presented along with statistics which appear to prove them. The claims, sometimes accompanied by statistical "studies", are published in newspapers or academic journals to influence public opinion to feel sympathy for those poor, downtrodden Native Hawaiians and to build political support for racial entitlement programs. The "studies" are also cited when powerful institutions with well-established bureaucracies apply for government or philanthropic grants to conduct race-based screening programs and further studies, which are then used to apply for additional grants, etc.; thereby perpetuating the institutions and the salaries of their bureaucrats.

Victims are assigned to the category of "Native Hawaiian" without regard to the other ethnicities that make up a majority of their ancestry. This greatly inflates the alleged victimhood of Native Hawaiians while at the same time depriving those other ethnicities of the victimhood recognition to which the facts entitle them. Anyone with even a single drop of Hawaiian native blood is classified as "Native Hawaiian" and solely as Native Hawaiian (see the "smoking gun" confession of statistical malpractice copied from a scholarly article cited below). The opposite sort of one-drop rule is used when counting Caucasians. A person whose ancestry is 7/8 Caucasian might be classified as Filipino merely because the father has 1/8 Filipino ancestry. These two applications of the one-drop rule grossly increase the apparent level of Native Hawaiian victimhood while also reducing the apparent level of Caucasian victimhood. An accurate assessment of ethnic victimhood would require researchers to have the courage to ask the politically incorrect but scientifically essential question: What are you? What racial groups are present in your ancestry, and what is the percentage of each one?

If victimhood is to be ascribed as being genetically caused by or correlated with race, then each racial group should be awarded a fractional victimhood tally mark for each victim, equal to the fraction of that race in the ancestry of each victim. If victimhood is to be ascribed as being caused by ethnic lifestyle or culture or religion, then a researcher should create for each lifestyle or culture or religion a list of activities or attitudes that characterize each culture or religion, and award fractional points to each of them according to the activities or attitudes of each victim. Whether genetics or lifestyle is being studied as a cause or correlation of victimhood, a graph should be drawn for each kind of victimhood with regard to each ethnic group, comparing percentage of ethnicity against percentage of victimhood. If women with a low percentage of being Native Hawaiian by race or lifestyle have a low percentage of breast cancer while women with a high percentage of being Native Hawaiian by race or lifestyle also have a high percentage of breast cancer, then it would be reasonable to conclude that being Native Hawaiian is correlated with and probably a cause of getting breast cancer. Researchers could then try to discover what specific elements of genome or lifestyle cause the trouble. It would certainly be scientifically interesting to discover clear causes for the bad outcomes. But then would arise the question what should be done with such knowledge. It would be politically incorrect and socially dangerous to recommend genetic modification for Native Hawaiians, or changes in culture or lifestyle, as ways to prevent victimhood. Just imagine the reaction coming forth from a politically active ethnic Hawaiian woman after telling her that to prevent or mitigate breast cancer she must become "less Hawaiian" either through gene splicing or through changes in behavior!

Comparing Native Hawaiians against other ethnicities as entire groups without regard to age levels, makes Native Hawaiians appear to have lower incomes and higher rates of incarceration and drug abuse. That's because Native Hawaiians as a group are 16 years younger than the rest of Hawaii's people! In Census 2010 the median age of "Native Hawaiians" in Hawaii was 26, while the median age of the remainder of the population was 42. People at age 26 have far lower incomes, and higher rates of drug abuse and crime than people at age 42 -- it's not race that is the cause of social dysfunction, but rather it's the rebelliousness and hormone-driven emotional excesses of youth. Violent crimes such as shooting, stabbing, or robbery through home invasion deserve more severe prison sentences and are far more likely to be committed by young people. Non-violent crimes like fraud or embezzlement deserve lesser prison sentences and are more likely to be committed by older people. The fact that Native Hawaiians as a race are found guilty of more crimes and serve longer prison sentences than other races does not mean Native Hawaiians are worse criminals or are being discriminated against -- it merely results from the fact that Native Hawaiians on average are 16 years younger than other groups, so it is statistical malpractice to lump an entire racial group together without regard to age when making comparisons between racial groups. The right way to compare income, crime, or incarceration disparities between ethnic groups would be to compare 15-19 year olds of one ethnicity against 15-19 years olds of other ethnicities, then compare 20-24 year-olds, etc.; and also to award fractional tally marks to different ethnic groups in proportion to the fractions of ethnicity in the ancestry or lifestyle of each person whose data are analyzed.

Many people lack a background in mathematics, or are even frightened by it. When they see a news report saying that Native Hawaiians have double the rate of some terrible disease as any other group, or 30% lower income, they take the report at face value because they lack the mathematical sophistication to raise questions about how the data were collected and analyzed. But the reports compiled by the Native Hawaiian grievance industry are created by experts with strong backgrounds in statistical analysis. They SHOULD know better. Some of them certainly DO know better -- they have been told about their statistical malpractice but continue engaging in it. Knowing the truth but proclaiming a falsehood is not merely an unfortunate error -- it is a deliberate LIE. In the Native Hawaiian grievance industry many experts have been knowingly perpetuating lies for many years to get public sympathy, political power, and hundreds of millions of dollars in government and philanthropic grants. It's a SCAM whose costs are measured not only in wasted megabucks but also in heightened racial tension as the racial group who believe they have proof of victimhood demand monetary and political reparations from groups they perceive as their oppressors.

Sadly we remember the legacy of racial entitlements in the U.S. South. There might be two drinking fountains side by side. One had a sign saying "Whites Only." The other had no sign and was available to people of all races (including whites who, of course, never drank there). "Separate but equal" was the law of the land, although in actual practice the segregated facilities available to blacks were grossly unequal. Jim Crow laws and socially established customs mandating racial segregation have taken their rightful place in the dungheap of history -- except in Hawaii where they flourish and worsen as each year goes by. Hawaii's racial entitlement programs have established racial separatism and attitudes of racial supremacy as social norms; and are fueling demands for federal recognition of "Native Hawaiians" as a sovereign Indian tribe. The main justifications offered for racial entitlement programs are claims of racial disparities, which are based on bogus statistical analysis due to deliberate refusal to allocate victimhood to ethnic groups in proportion to the percentage of each ethnicity in the heritage (biological and/or behavioral) of each victim, and the refusal to compare ethnic group victimhood data within same-age cohorts.

Suppose help is given to people in a race-neutral way based on need alone. Then "Native Hawaiians" will automatically get the lion's share of the help, if "Native Hawaiians" truly have the worst statistics among all ethnic groups. A 450-page monster book proclaiming and celebrating Native Hawaiian victimhood "studies" over the years was produced by Kamehameha Schools "Policy Analysis and Systems Evaluation" division in 2006 just at the right time to influence debate in the U.S. Senate over the Akaka bill to create a Hawaiian tribe. But a different way to think about that book is to see it as a 450-page proof that "Native Hawaiians" will get more help than other ethnic groups if help is given based on need alone. It is selfish, immoral, and racially divisive for "Native Hawaiians" to demand more government and philanthropic assistance than would be warranted by their actual needs.

RELATED WEBPAGE: On March 1, 2017, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget posted a notice in the Federal Register seeking comments on "Revision of Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity: Proposals From Federal Interagency Working Group". The notice is at
https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=OMB-2017-0003-0001
Ken Conklin wrote a webpage in response, and posted a comment on the OMB "regulations" webpage summarizing his webpage and providing a link to it. The title of Conklin's webpage is:
"Factual vs. aspirational answers to the Census race (and gender) question(s) -- special focus on Native Hawaiians. Race statistics are badly skewed when researchers count mixed-race respondents solely as members of the race favored by respondent or researcher. The race question on Census surveys must be asked more precisely so that respondents do not answer aspirationally while news media and researchers assume they answered factually. Aspirational answers should be expected from mixed-race minorities who are politically active in asserting minority rights or demanding racial entitlements." That webpage is at
http://big11a.angelfire.com/CensusRaceAndGenderQs.html

Here is a list of topics covered on webpage entitled
"Native Hawaiian victimhood -- malpractice in the gathering and statistical analysis of data allegedly showing disproportionate Native Hawaiian victimhood for disease and social dysfunction. How and why the Hawaiian grievance industry uses bogus statistics to scam government and philanthropic organizations, politicians, and public opinion." at
https://big11a.angelfire.com/NatHwnVictimhoodStatScam.html

1. A scholarly article in January 2017 is a "smoking gun" that reveals statistical malpractice in analyzing Native Hawaiian and Caucasian victimhood data. A professor with expertise in statistics, commenting on the article, describes an astonishing statistical experiment confirming the malpractice.

2. Native Hawaiian healthcare act

3. Some lists of Native Hawaiian racial entitlement programs funded by the government with tax dollars, and how much money they have grabbed for one racial group while excluding all others

4. In-depth analyses of Native Hawaiian victimhood claims and how they are used for political purposes

5. "Native Hawaiian Victimhood Claims -- What Are They? Why Are They Being Asserted? How Can the Bad Statistics Be Explained?"

6. "The Hawaiian Grievance Industry -- Panhandling for Race-Based Handouts and Political Power"

7. How the Obama Family Will Benefit from the Caucasian Government Reorganization Act of 2040

8. Gordon Pang, "Forced assimilation may hurt Hawaiians" Honolulu Advertiser, June 20, 2005. This "news report" is a typical combination of junk history and junk science fueling the Hawaiian grievance industry. 30-page analysis of the statistical, historical, and moral issues raised by this newspaper article, together with citations of numerous articles claiming historical grievances and current victimhood statistics

9. "Legacy of A Broken Heart"

10. Gordon Y.K. Pang, "Data show Native Hawaiians lag" Honolulu Advertiser, Tuesday, September 13, 2005.

11. Ethnic Hawaiians Disproportionately Incarcerated? Not!

12. "Census 2010 Native Hawaiian data -- some political implications for the Akaka bill, Act 195 state recognized tribe, and the Hawaiian grievance industry racial victimhood allegations"
Topics include
* 80,337 "pure Hawaiians" in Hawaii? and 156,146 nationwide?
* 527,077 "Native Hawaiians" nationwide including 289,970 in Hawaii;
* In 2010 the median age of Native Hawaiians in Hawaii was only 26, compared to a median age of 42 for the rest of Hawaii's people;
* Failure to consider blood quantum causes huge distortions when interpreting data.

13. Warnings have been given to the Hawaiian grievance industry about statistical malpractice but the warnings have been ignored

14. Native Hawaiians As the State Pet or Mascot: A Psychological Analysis of Why the People of Hawaii Tolerate and Irrationally Support Racial Separatism and Ethnic Nationalism

15. What does the United States owe to Native Hawaiians?

To see the detailed analyses of these topics, including internet links to underlying documents, go to webpage
"Native Hawaiian victimhood -- malpractice in the gathering and statistical analysis of data allegedly showing disproportionate Native Hawaiian victimhood for disease and social dysfunction. How and why the Hawaiian grievance industry uses bogus statistics to scam government and philanthropic organizations, politicians, and public opinion." at
https://big11a.angelfire.com/NatHwnVictimhoodStatScam.html


===========

NATIVE HAWAIIAN ASSERTION OF RACIAL SUPREMACY IN PERSONAL SPIRITUALITY, CULTURAL WISDOM, POLITICAL ENTITLEMENT, AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THEOLOGY, RACIAL MEMORY, MANA, MAGIC BLOOD
Section A: Theology: Beautiful creation legend twisted to say only ethnic Hawaiians are children of the gods and brothers/sisters to the land, therefore entitled to racial supremacy in governance.
Section B: Racial memory: Wisdom, knowledge, and skills of the ancestors are genetically embedded in every ethnic Hawaiian, but special curriculum and teaching methods are needed to bring out the memories.
Section C: Mana: Ethnic Hawaiians have special spiritual power which some of them manifest in personal charisma displaying the Aloha Spirit, making them natural-born leaders.
Section D: Magic blood: A single drop of Hawaiian native blood conveys the full essence of membership in the family of gods, and of the racial memories, and the mana. Lack of any magic blood relegates "non-Hawaiians" to the permanent status of "others."


---------------

Section A: Theology.
A beautiful creation legend says humans are children of the gods and brothers/sisters to these islands (which are also living children of the gods); but Hawaiian racial supremacists twist the legend to say it applies only to people who have at least one drop of Hawaiian native blood and are therefore entitled to political power.

An important webpage has this title: Hawaiian religious fascism. A twisted version of a beautiful creation legend provides the theological basis for a claim that ethnic Hawaiians are entitled to racial supremacy in the governance and cultural life of the Hawaiian islands.
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/HawnReligFascism.html

Here are the subtitles of that webpage's 7 sections. Each section provides a thorough explanation accompanied by numerous clickable links to more-detailed explanations and documents.

1. How the gods, the world, and human beings are related to each other according to the Hawaiian creation legend Kumulipo; and how Hawaiian sovereignty activists twist the legend to provide a fascist theological basis for claiming a right to racial supremacy in the political and cultural life of the Hawaiian islands.

2. Hawaiian natives themselves overthrew their old religion in 1819, before the Christian missionaries arrived in 1820. U.S. law now forbids establishment of a government religion. But sovereignty activists sidestep both objections in their drive to create Hawaiian religious fascism.

3. A Hawaii Supreme Court decision explicitly says that Jonathan Osorio has standing to bring a lawsuit to prohibit the state from selling a parcel of government-owned land because he has some [perhaps small] amount of Hawaiian native blood and because he cites the special religious relationship between his racial group and the land. This state Supreme Court decision exemplifies Hawaiian religious fascism -- it violates the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment by establishing the old Hawaiian religion as a basis for government policy, and violates the 14th Amendment requirement that all races must have the equal protection of the laws.

4. Examples showing how ethnic Hawaiians are already using the theology of "sacred places", "sacred bones", and "indigenous status" to assert racial supremacy in political decision-making.

5. The role of education in transmitting a culture; and a look at how the Hawaii schools from kindergarten through university have become propaganda factories promoting racial supremacy and racial separatism.

6. The claim to racial supremacy is displayed in the proposed constitution for a future federally recognized Hawaiian tribe adopted on February 26, 2016; in the writings of Zuri Aki who was its chief author; and in the writings of Hawaiian Studies department chair Professor Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa. The constitution's declarations can be construed as a declaration of jihad (race-war).

7. The histories of Japan and the Middle East show how religion greatly magnifies the zealotry, intransigence, and violence endemic to societies where race, nationality, culture and religion are inextricably intertwined.

See also:

"Religion and Zealotry in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement -- how religious myths are used to support political claims for racial supremacy in Hawaii"
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/religion.html
Includes sections entitled
"Political claims to collective cultural "intellectual property" rights (especially regarding spiritual symbols, ways of knowing, and the spiritual/cultural interpretation of political leadership)"
and
"How the dogmatism and zealotry of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement compare with religious dogmatism and zealotry (especially Muslim Wahhabist fundamentalism)

----------------

Section B: Racial memory.
The concept of "racial memory", "mental archetypes", "collective unconscious" or "deep culture" is asserted by some anthropologists, sociologists, psychotherapists, and writers of novels.

Numerous psychiatrists follow the theories of Carl Jung who believed that people suffering mental dysfunction can be helped if they are led to look deeply into their psyche to discover ancestral character-types that skew their perceptions or responses to current events.

Author Jean M. Auel wrote a very popular novel "Clan of the Cave Bear" [and five more sequels] describing how Neanderthal children were born with instinctual knowledge and skills inherited from their ancestors; that the newer species of Homo Sapiens lacked such racial memories; but a child born to a Homo Sapiens mother impregnated by a Neanderthal man had at least some of the ancient memories.

William Wordsworth wrote a famous poem "Ode to Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" celebrating the innate wisdom in the spontaneity of little children arising from the fact that their collective unconscious is able to be manifested because they have not yet had it buried under the weight of mundane everyday experiences.

These concepts of recent centuries are not exactly new.

Plato's theory of the Forms includes his belief that someone can achieve wisdom and become a Philosopher King by breaking the chains that bind us to our dark cave of materialism in this world of appearances, step outside, and turn the whole self around (con-version) to see the Sun and the absolute Forms, thereby achieving en-lightenment. Immanuel Kant followed along Plato's analysis: Kant's distinction between noumena vs. phenomena is similar to Plato's distinction between Forms vs. appearances. Kant also thought that one way to encounter and implement noumena is through moral decision-making and artistic expression. More recently the existentialists have said that we define ourselves by the choices we make; therefore it is helpful to be confronted by a crisis which forces us to make a choice instead of sitting idly while watching the world go by.

Such ideas are also at the core of Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. Knowledge goes beyond mere right opinion. Although Truth is transcendent and ineffable (can never be expressed through words and therefore cannot be directly taught), master-teachers can help students discover it by using Socratic method or Zen techniques of meditation or posing unanswerable questions to elicit what was already buried inside from before birth but was forgotten.

The concept of racial memory has an important place in modern Hawaiian theology and cultural practices. A belief in the central role of racial memory is displayed when Native Hawaiians invoke "na 'aumakua" (the human ancestors and also animal guardian spirits of a family) in prayers when blessing a new house or starting a business, or simply convening a meeting. A family identifies with one or more animal species, such as shark, owl, sea turtle. Every animal (or plant) species is a kinolau -- a body-form manifestation of a specific god; and in addition a human family will regard a particular animal species as a family member who will serve as guardian in the natural environment and perhaps an advisor through dreams, just like human ancestors.

A family hierarchy from top down includes these components in order of rank: Ke Akua [creator-God]; na Akua [multiplicity of 400,000 gods at various levels including kinolau (embodiments in animals and plants)]; 'aina [the natural world including islands as living beings born of the gods]; na 'aumakua [a family's ancestral guardian-spirits providing protection and advice through dreams or prayers]; kupuna [family human elders including dead ones]; makua [parents]; elder and younger siblings [specific words are used for elder vs. younger and whether same-gender or opposite gender]; one's own children; and then the children's future generations into the infinite future -- all generations past and future are present in the actions of daily life. Every person with at least one drop of Hawaiian native blood is a child of the gods, a descendant of the primordial ancestor Haloa, and a brother/sister to the 'aina and the taro plant in one specially-blessed family, while anyone lacking a drop of the magic blood is forever outside that family and is therefore "other."

Perhaps the best example of an intellectually respectable assertion of racial memory in Hawaiian theology comes from Ben Finney -- a "haole" [White non-ethnic Hawaiian] anthropologist from California who built his own 40-foot Polynesian-style double-hull canoe in 1965, came to Hawaii, became founding President of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in 1973, organized construction of the voyaging canoe Hokule'a in 1975, recruited the canoe's first crew, supervised a year-long training program, and led the first voyage of Hokule'a in 1976, to Tahiti. Since he was haole, his leadership was deeply resented and he suffered racial hate crimes at the hands of ethnic Hawaiians including crew members during that first voyage.

But the reason for mentioning Finney here is because he wrote a book about Hokule'a which includes lengthy descriptions and detailed footnotes concerning the theory of racial memory. Among other things he attributes the success of the famous Nainoa Thompson to racial memory, almost as though Thompson must have had an ancestor who navigated by the stars to find Hawaii. The implication is that somehow Thompson already knew from birth about star maps, and the configuration of the stars over Hawaii and Tahiti, and the skills of reading winds and clouds and sea-swells in the open ocean (despite the fact that Thompson trained extensively with the star-projector machine in the planetarium at Bishop Museum). Finney also discusses the theory of racial memory as the main reason for defending the authenticity of an important later cultural ceremony rededicating a marae at Taputapuatea (although without the human sacrifices that had been essential ingredients in the historical dedication). See webpage
""Polynesian" Voyaging -- Political Agenda, Ethnic Dominance, Cultural Authenticity, and Blood Nationalism. An extended book review of Ben Finney, "Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging"" at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/polynesianvoyaging.html
especially these two sections:
3. Cultural authenticity of Polynesian voyaging depends on a theory of collective racial memory of a deep culture. Finney's book discusses that theory at length as he tells the story of Hokule'a at Taputapuatea. Ken Conklin in this essay offers an explanation and critique of some philosophical underpinnings of the theory of racial memory and deep culture
4. Some of Finney's footnoted sources on the topic of racial memory as a basis for claiming cultural authenticity for reconstructed knowledge and ceremonies

Well-known felon Dennis "Bumpy" Kanahele, pardoned by Governor Cayetano, used semi-violent tactics to extort the State of Hawaii to give him a long-term lease on land in Waimanalo where he established a cult compound, asserting that it is an independent "Nation of Hawaii." Bumpy calls himself "Pu'uhonua" -- a word which means "place of refuge" but can also be used as a cultural title for a person such as the historic Ka'ahumanu who could give protection to anyone who seemed to deserve it. Bumpy's nephew Brandon Makaawaawa has held the title of Deputy Head of State at Nation of Hawaii from 2017 to now. The following one-paragraph statement shows that the "racial memory" theory continues to be asserted nowadays. The statement was posted on the "Nation of Hawaii" Facebook page on May 21, 2021, and appears to be attributed to Brandon, although anyone who has watched video conversations between Brandon and Bumpy will understand how doubtful it is that either of them could have written such an insightful and eloquent statement.

https://www.facebook.com/PuuhonuaOWaimanalo/posts/1697078983835776
"We are all vessels of the ancient ancestral knowledge and traditions of our Kūpuna [elders/ancestors]. We do not own this knowledge or these traditions, we did not all of a sudden come up with these great ingenious ideas or customs, we are merely recalling what is already inside us. We carry in our DNA thousands and thousands of years of ancient knowledge and traditions that were passed down to us by our Kūpuna who got them from their Kūpuna and so on. Therefore our most important kuleana in life is to recall and to teach and perpetuate the Kūpuna ‘ike ['ike = knowledge/insights] with our next generation like our Kūpuna shared with us to make sure our ancient ancestral knowledge and traditions continue to guide our people forever."

There is a difficulty in the Hawaiian religious concept of racial memory, which is displayed in a phrase in that statement which is a gross exaggeration often asserted by Hawaiian race-activists: "We carry in our DNA thousands and thousands of years of ancient knowledge and traditions that were passed down to us by our Kūpuna who got them from their Kūpuna and so on." Really? Thousands and thousands of years? But nobody believes any humans lived in Hawaii more than 2000 years ago. In fact, a review of radiocarbon dating techniques by an international team of scholars including [former] UH Professor Terry Hunt concluded the most likely date for humans to arrive in Hawaii was around 900 years ago. See UH announcement about publication of the research, at
http://www.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=4097

But even if the first humans arrived in Hawaii 2000 years ago, that still means that every ethnic Hawaiian living today has more than 99% of ancestry from Europe, Asia, and Africa; because human ancestry goes back hundreds of thousands of years.

Even aside from that, consider that there are almost zero "pure" Hawaiians alive today -- they are nearly all racially mixed; and most of them have most of their recent ancestry from outside Hawaii. Perhaps 3/4 of all "Native Hawaiians" today each has perhaps 3/4 of their known ancestors from the most recent 5 generations arriving in Hawaii from Asia, Europe, America, or Africa.

But ethnic Hawaiian sovereignty activists often identify themselves solely as Hawaiian, even though Hawaiian native ancestry might be only a small part of their pedigree. They proudly trace the Hawaiian component of their genealogy as many generations back as possible, but seem uninterested in tracing the vast majority of their ancestors who lived in Europe, America, and Asia. One well-known Hawaiian race-hustler activist who is a professor at the University of Hawaii is 5/8 Portuguese, 1/8 Chinese, 1/8 Dutch, and 1/8 Hawaiian; grew up in California until moving to Hawaii at age 31; and describes her heritage this way: "I was born on Oahu and am of Kanaka Maoli descent." That's it! She could lay claim to being an indigenous Chinese with just as much correctness as claiming to be "Kanaka Maoli"; but 3/4 of her ancestry is Caucasian, from two nations who sent explorers to discover, colonize, exploit and oppress native populations throughout the world. Yet she claims her primary affiliation to be indigenous Hawaiian!

So what about the racial memories from the ancestors who comprise the overwhelming majority of the ancestry of each and every so-called "Native Hawaiian"? Why is it that so many Hawaiian race-partisans don't know and aren't interested in their non-Hawaiian ancestors? Do today's ethnic Hawaiians receive messages or protection or inspiration from their non-Hawaiian ancestors? If a Hawaiian travels thousands of miles away, do their ancestors still speak to them or send them dreams?

And why is it that the only language ever used when praying to the Hawaiian gods is Hawaiian? Europeans, Americans, and Asians have been coming to Hawaii and speaking non-Hawaiian languages for about 250 years now. Are the Hawaiian gods deaf, or such slow-learners, they still have not learned any of those other languages? Would it be useless, or even morally wrong, for someone to pray to a Hawaiian god in a different language? Decades ago the Roman Catholic Church officially gave up the requirement that the Holy Mass must be performed in Latin. Church theologians, including the Pope, proclaimed that priests must use local languages, and must face the congregation. The intention of asking these questions is not to throw insults at Hawaiians or their gods. These are important theological questions that need to be answered by the scholars who believe in the Hawaiian gods. The total lack of interest in asking or answering these questions is evidence that nobody takes the Hawaiian gods seriously. So why do Hawaiian pastors and cultural leaders chant and pray only in Hawaiian language? It must be for show, to evoke racial pride, to make an audience believe that a ceremony is authentic that they are paying money to attend.

Hayden Burgess, alias Poka Laenui, is an attorney in Hawaii who has been active for many decades pushing the concept that Hawaii rightfully remains an independent nation although under U.S. occupation and colonization, and the United Nations should help force the U.S. to withdraw. He formerly paid for two one-hour talk-radio infomercials per week for many years on an obscure O'ahu radio station where he attracted numerous regular callers for thoughtful dialog. He has also appeared on numerous cable TV programs and in-person public forums. He has a useful compilation of documents and videos on his poorly-organized "Hawaiian Perspectives" website at
http://www.hawaiianperspectives.org

Especially relevant to this present webpage's discussion of racial memory is Burgess' concept of "deep culture" summarized in his essay at
http://mooaupuni.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/DIE-OLA.pdf

"There are cultural codes in the collective sub-conscious of all societies which defines within that society what is right and wrong, what is moral and natural, what forms of behavior is appropriate in given circumstances and as a direct influence of such codes, the societies develop they systems which express those cultural codes. These codes derive from the myths and legends, from the deep national memories, from the environmental conditions, from the internal conflicts and from a multitude of other processes which have taken place over long periods of time in a society. These codes are generally unwritten. They do not form a constitutive document or are in some explicit statement. They are generally unspoken. But they are so ingrained in a society that they become the driving force of the society. You can see them in the routines and habits of people, in the fears and pleasures of a people, in their dreams and expectations and the systems of reasoning. These codes form the deep culture of a society."

Mr. Burgess then identifies what he apparently regards as two conflicting deep cultures in Hawaii:
DIE = Domination, Individualism, Exclusion;
and
OLA = 'Olu'olu, Lokahi, Aloha.
Burgess was very clever in choosing those acronyms, since "DIE" is obviously very bad while "OLA" is the Hawaiian word for "Life" and its three components are beautiful concepts sometimes called "Hawaiian values."

But what really is the "deep culture" of Hawaii from its past, which Burgess imagines would be restored in Hawaii if the U.S. and its "DIE" culture were tossed out? Human sacrifice was an essential part of Hawaiian religion and culture for many centuries before Captain Cook's arrival in 1778 and even for decades thereafter; but in radio conversations Burgess has made clear that it should not be regarded as part of Hawaii's deep culture. Likewise the rigid caste system, slavery, ritualized warfare as a sort of cultural hobby, and other things now considered bad; somehow only the things we now consider good are part of Burgess' Hawaiian deep culture. But then Burgess contradicts himself by saying that we should not judge the past by the standards and values of the present; that it was OK for Kamehameha to slaughter tens of thousands of native Hawaiians and destroy entire villages including civilians in his wars of conquest, because that was then and this is now. Burgess' vague, poorly defined concept of "deep culture" is clearly politicized rather than being intellectually consistent or respectable.

Burgess himself has a face and body which appear mostly Chinese, although his surname Burgess suggests that he also has English ancestry; and he claims Hawaiian ancestry. He does not reveal much about his mo'oku'auhau (genealogy); and aside from being a practitioner of Tai Chi, which many people who are not Chinese also enjoy, he hardly ever publicly celebrates his Chinese (or his English) heritage. Does he not have the racial memories of those non-Hawaiian ancestors? To his credit, Burgess insists that a restored independent nation of Hawaii must be like the multiracial nation it was during the 1800s, where people with no Hawaiian blood have property rights and voting rights. But he also insists that, unlike in the Kingdom, there must be some topics (like foreign relations and land-use policy) where only ethnic Hawaiians should have voting rights. Why? Perhaps because he is committed to the work of the United Nations, especially the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Or perhaps the real reason is that he is a racist at heart, seeking racial supremacy for ethnic Hawaiians in a multiracial society (in some ways resembling the multiracial society of South Africa under apartheid where a White minority of the population oppressed the majority of Blacks by controlling the government and laws).

To do a good job of teaching it's important to know how students learn. Are ethnic Hawaiians different from everyone else merely because they have a drop of the magic blood? Do they have unique ways of knowing and learning that should compel teachers to use unique methods of teaching, and unique curriculum content? Is that one drop of the magic blood so powerful that it outweighs all the rest of a child's genealogy?

Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer says YES. In 2004 she was a professor of teacher-education at a branch campus of the University of Hawai'i in Hilo. In 2021 she is Director of Indigenous Education at University of Hawaii - West Oahu. Professor Meyer is a dynamic, inspirational speaker who easily impresses audiences with her use of academic jargon and her frequent naming of noted philosophers whose theories she cites. Her scholarly work is focused on epistemology: the branch of philosophy that examines how we get knowledge, and how we know whether our beliefs are true. That branch of philosophy has a special, very important relevance to the analysis of school curriculum and methods of teaching. Professor Meyer's first book was a mimeographed copy of portions of her Ed.D. dissertation, distributed through a bookstore in Honolulu owned by her sister. Her second book is also self-published, but very nicely produced, and includes portions of her dissertation as well as articles she wrote as student term-papers or for publication since then. Professor Meyer tries to synthesize an eclectic philosophical viewpoint mainly drawing from empiricism and the contextualist theories of Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.

Meyer's theory, although developed two decades ago, fits in perfectly with Critical Race Theory Hawaiian-style. For a description of her theory, extensive quotes from her book, and examples of her influence on curriculum and teaching methods for ethnic Hawaiian kids, see webpage
"Hawaiian Epistemology and Education -- A claim that anyone with a drop of Hawaiian native blood has genetically and culturally encoded unique ways of knowing and learning; and therefore ethnic Hawaiian children (and other ethnic minorities to a lesser degree) have special needs for uniquely tailored curriculum and instructional methods"
at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles2/HawaiianEpistemology.html

As a final example showing how Hawaiian religious fascism is integrated into the tax-supported public schools of Hawaii, consider the Hawaiian-culture-focused charter schools. Beginning in year 2000 the legislature established the "New Century Charter Schools" funded with tax dollars but allowing local groups of parents to exercise great control over curriculum and staffing. By 2002 ethnic Hawaiian racial partisans had established 12 racial indoctrination schools [similar to Muslim madrassas] -- about half of all the New Century schools. Although it is illegal for tax-supported schools to be racially exclusive, about 95% of all the children in the Hawaiian-focus schools are ethnic Hawaiian, while the "non-Hawaiian" kids have parents who pledge that they will support the school's ideology.

One of the schools, named "Kanu O Ka 'Aina", was founded on Hawaii Island by activist Ku Kahakalau, who was not only the head of her own school but also the head of the consortium of 12 of these schools. In 2002 she produced a webpage which was shockingly honest about her motives. For details about Kahakalau's school see
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/ethnhawcharterschools.html

Here are some quotes:

"The name "Kanu o ka 'Aina" evolved from of a Hawaiian proverb that refers to natives of the land from generations back as "kalo kanu o ka 'aina" literally "taro planted on the land". This name was chosen because this model wants to give native Hawaiians of all ages the opportunity and the choice to remain natives of their kulaiwi and to perpetuate Hawai'i's native language, culture and traditions into the future. In addition, Kanu wants to empower Hawai'i's native people, who are direct descendents of earthmother Papa and skyfather Wakea, to once again assume our rightful stewardship over our archipelago."

"The purpose of Kanu is to provide students of Hawaiian ancestry residing in the Hamakua and Kohala area of Hawai'i Island with an equal opportunity to quality education that addresses their distinctive cultural learning styles and allows them to successfully walk in two worlds. Presently students of Hawaiian ancestry, one fourth of Hawai'i's entire public school population, make up not only the largest, but also the most undereducated major ethnic group in the State. Providing culturally driven education, that is specifically designed to meet the unique wants and needs of native students, is Kanu's primary focus. While we accept students that do not have Hawaiian blood, these students and their families, like their native counterparts, must make a commitment to be actively involved in the perpetuation of native Hawaiian language, culture and traditions. In addition, they must consent to being taught according to native Hawaiian values and teaching strategies and behave in a culturally consistent manner."

"Probably the most unique and critical aspect of Kanu's educational foundations is the fact that Kanu wants to actively prepare native students to participate in - and perhaps even lead - Hawai'i's indigenous sovereignty movement. Initially I was sort of hesitant to claim that Kanu represents a liberatory pedagogy. However, the more I reflected on the true purpose of my model the more I realized that my model is definitely designed to liberate. Specifically, Kanu wants to encourage Hawaiian students to become politically conscious, and individually and collectively tackle the problem of Hawaiian oppression by the United States and our subjugation to American law and a Western way of life. In that vein, Kanu has the potential of significantly contributing to the Hawaiian sovereignty effort."

"Utilizing problem-posing as an instructional technique, Kanu hopes to make our students realize that the occupation of Hawai'i by the United States of America is not fatal and unalterable, but merely limiting and therefore challenging. Additionally, Kanu wants to empower our students to accept this challenge and find solutions to this and the many other dilemma, that face Hawai'i's native people in their homeland today. By actively participating in finding solutions to native problems, it is envisioned that Kanu students will become an intricate part of the process of native liberation from American domination that nearly caused the demise of our native people and our way of life."

In 2002 Ku Kahakalau and her consortium of Hawaiian-focus charter schools were already trying to get a bill passed in the legislature to set up the consortium and all future Hawaiian-focus schools as a completely separate department of Native Hawaiian education that would no longer be subject to the same education objectives and curriculum standards as the other public schools. Racial separatism and ethnic nationalism run amok! See
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/billsb2919.html

In Section A we saw that a beautiful creation legend gets twisted into an evil and dangerous justification for race-based political power. The twisting happens when a racist assertion is made that the only people who are descended from the gods and are siblings to the land are those who have at least one drop of Hawaiian native blood. Everyone else is forever outside the sacred family, although outsiders can marry someone inside the family and make babies who will also be inside the family.

Like the creation legend, the concept of collective unconscious or mental archetypes is also a beautiful idea which says humans are in contact with our ancestors (and perhaps also our gods) whose spirits dwell inside us, capable of giving us inspiration and guidance. The evil, which leads to dangerous political consequences, is an assertion that the only ancestors whose memories make a difference are those who were of one specific race.

-------------

Section C: Mana

The word "mana" is such an important word in Hawaiian language and thought that there is no definition of it in a scholarly book by that title, devoted to explaining that topic, which runs 484 pages and was authored/edited by Kamanapono Crabbe, CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs!

In search of even a limited definition, start with today's standard unabridged "Hawaiian Dictionary: Revised and Enlarged Edition by Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), page 235. The word is identified as both a verb and a noun (many Hawaiian words are like that). "Supernatural or divine power, mana, miraculous power; ... to give mana to, to make powerful; ... divinely powerful, spiritual; possessed of mana, power ..." In Hawaiian religion the concept is revered and sacred, somewhat like the Hebrew word abbreviated JHWH which represents the name of God but is so holy it should not be spoken (although "mana" is spoken often).

Every person has mana to at least some extent. Indeed, every animal and plant, and even rocks have a little mana. Hawaiian is an animist, pantheistic religion where creator God and 400,000 (metaphorical number) subordinate gods are manifested in numerous kinolau (body-forms). Plants or colors regarded as kinolau or symbols for a particular god might be used in making musical instruments or costumes or leis for performance of a hula dedicated to that god. Hula dancers are expected to personally gather the flowers and ferns they will use, and probably to make their own costumes; while the chanter beating the drum might have personally made it from part of a coconut tree and the skin of a shark (whose species might be the family 'aumakua). People are born with mana deriving from their genealogy (high or low); they might acquire mana from personal or family achievements through expertise or war. A fisherman whose father was an expert at fishing might use a bone harvested from his father's dead body to make a fishhook imbued with father's mana, thereby honoring the father and ensuring a good catch because father's mana is in the hook; a warrior might embed the teeth of a hated warrior he killed into a wooden bowl used as a spittoon or feces collector, thereby inflicting damage on the mana of the enemy's family. Some kahunas reportedly were able to use the mana in body parts or fluids, or even clothing, to pray someone to death.

One way of trying to define "mana" is to provide examples illustrating it. "Hawaiian culture" is a term which also is poorly defined but is frequently invoked as a label for whatever human behaviors are regarded as good and which display the mana found in the aloha spirit. Perhaps the best effort to describe "Hawaiian culture" is a book of about 600 pages by George Kanahele, published in 1986, entitled "Ku Kanaka: Stand Tall: A Search For Hawaiian Values."

Occasionally someone indeed stands tall as a shining example of the ideal values; but such an individual is the exception rather than the rule. The "Hawaiian values" are actually universal aspirations for all people regardless of race and place; there is nothing uniquely Hawaiian about them. In his book Mr. Kanahele openly laments the fact that the values he describes are goals which are seldom actually achieved and are not actual descriptions of ethnic Hawaiian lifestyles. That's why the last portion of his book's subtitle is "A Search for Hawaiian Values"; because he kept looking for them but in the end was unable to find and list them.

Another way of describing "mana" is to look at how the "aloha spirit" is displayed when human interactions are especially virtuous or charismatic. But what is the aloha spirit? See an important webpage
"The Aloha Spirit -- what it is, who possesses it, and why it is important"
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/big60/AlohaSpirit.html
and also
"The Aloha Spirit. How aloha for all, manifested in the twin pillars of unity and equality, can overcome Hawaiian religious fascism which is the theological basis for a claim to racial supremacy."
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/AlohaUnityEquality.html

A 484-page book entitled "Mana" was written/edited by OHA CEO Kamana'opono Crabbe, Ph.D., using numerous OHA staffers and outside consultants, paid for with OHA (i.e., State of Hawaii) funds.

The remainder of this Section C on the topic of "Mana" is a description of the OHA-sponsored book by that title.

The full title is: Mana Lahui Kanaka [Power of the ethnic Hawaiian race] Mai nā kūpuna kahiko mai a hiki i kēia wā [From the ancient ancestors and brought to this era]

The byline identifies a few of the OHA staff and outside consultants who did research and writing:
By Kamana‘opono M. Crabbe, Ph.D. with Kealoha Fox, Ph.D. and Holly Kilinahe Coleman Edited by Meredith Desha Enos, Lisa Watkins-Victorino, Ph.D., RaeDeen M. Keahiolalo, Ph.D., Nicole Mehanaokalā Hind

It was officially published in 2017, after working on it reportedly over a period of 5 years. The book was published suddenly, on the OHA website, with little publicity for such a major undertaking. At this time in June 2021 it can still be downloaded free of charge in pdf format at
https://19of32x2yl33s8o4xza0gf14-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/OHA_MANA_LAHUI_KANAKA.pdf

There are five chapters:
1 Mana in History and Mo'olelo [legends]
2 Contemporary Usage of “Mana”: Hawai‘i Newspaper Analysis, 1996–2012
3 Measuring Mana-Related Concepts: Review of Instruments
4 Conversations and Modern, Lived Mana: Focus Groups and Photovoice
5 Future Mana: Recommendations and Possible Directions

There's a lot of attention to "process" in the middle of the book (chapter 3), providing detailed descriptions about how the data were gathered and analyzed. That portion of the book will be skipped by most readers, but it needs to be there in order to persuade skeptical readers that some semblance of "scientific method" was followed.

When claims are asserted that ethnic Hawaiians are disproportionately victims of medical diseases, drug abuse, poverty, incarceration etc., it's important to adjust the comparisons for the fact that ethnic Hawaiians are significantly younger than other ethnicities; and that nearly all people classified as "Native Hawaiian" are of mixed race with most of them having most of their ancestry from outside Hawaii. Who counts as Hawaiian? Shouldn't a "Hawaiian's" other ethnicities get fractional tally marks for victimhood equal to the fraction of each ethnicity in the individual's heritage? Age and genetics are of primary importance when considering medical discrepancies between races and age is clearly relevant on some social behavioral topics such as drug abuse and criminal behavior. Social determinants of health and behavior are important and hardly anybody even tries to measure them. One strength of the OHA book "Mana" is the contribution it makes to trying to develop methods for quantifying which behaviors are distinctively "Hawaiian" so that in future the fractional method of allocating victimhood among the ethnicities in a person's heritage can be used in regard to determining how Hawaiian is the lifestyle of a victim. Maybe people who frequently sink their feet into the mud of a taro patch are more likely to get certain diseases than people who work in a hardware store; maybe eating poi, or yelling war chants during a male hula performance, raises testosterone levels resulting in more aggressive behavior.

A photo of the book's cover was published as the cover of the OHA monthly newspaper for December 2017, and the accompanying story on pages 14-15 is as follows:

https://iskh447eqhe3kks2q2rvzg06-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/KA_WAI_OLA_201712.pdf

Cultivating Mana Lahui

BY TREENA SHAPIRO

Understanding mana is critical to understanding the contemporary Native Hawaiian identity and a key element in building stronger, healthier communities, according to a new book from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Released Nov. 20, Mana Lāhui Kanaka is a multidimensional study of mana: what it is, how to articulate it, and how to access and cultivate it. Five years in the making, the 300-page volume builds on Kukulu Hou, the vision for kanaka leadership presented by author and OHA Ka Pouhana Kamana‘opono Crabbe, Ph.D.

Mana Lāhui Kanaka draws from literary and historical records, social science research and first-person accounts – much of which wouldn’t have been possible without the translation of Hawaiian language nūpepa, vehicles of mana in their own right. “This book represents a framework to incorporate mana in the 21st century, and is just one tangible representation of our sophisticated identity – who we are as a living culture for the past, present and future,” wrote Crabbe in the introduction.

We intend for this book to be a positive view which, through connecting our kūpuna’s words and ideas with contemporary understanding, can then move forward with assertive forward- thinking built from the core of our cultural strength – the mana possessed by each one of the kānaka, mana that is ‘ōiwi, the mana lāhui.

What is Mana?

Historically, European and American scholars described mana in Oceanic cultures as spiritual, supernatural, a magical force, a source of power and more. In Hawaiian traditions, the book states: “Mana was part of a vibrant system that intertwined many other foundations of Hawaiian culture and identity, and was evident to Native Hawaiians through akua, and in their ali‘i, themselves, and their environment.”

However, English translations of mana fall short of expressing its meaning and significance from a Native Hawaiian perspective, which is more implicitly discussed in traditional oral literature, genealogies and Hawaiian mele and mo‘olelo, notes Crabbe.

A quote from Bradd Shore’s Mana and Tapu points out how essential it is to understand mana, even if the concept is hard to define: “Manulani Aluli Meyer and other scholars have long held that it’s impossible to understand the Polynesian worldview without understanding mana as central to contemporary Native Hawaiian identity. Mana is often felt, seen and experienced, rather than described in words; moreover there are ways to gain and lose mana through behavior. Here, mana is part of the spiritual world, but felt in the material world. In Western terms it might be described as power, or an essence of god or godliness. In some Polynesian languages the literal mean- ing of mana is ‘thunder, storm or wind.’”

Ancient Hawaiians believed mana could be inherited through lineage or acquired through great feats, skill, artistry, talents and gifts, which are cultivated through education and training. But mana is more than a historical concept and remains part of each one of our genealogies today.

“That places and objects in a Native Hawaiian worldview were imbued with mana remains pertinent today. Efforts to repatriate funerary artifacts, as well as iwi küpuna, demonstrate this,” the book’s literature review concludes, pointing to the controversy over Mauna Kea stewardship and the Thirty Meter Telescope as examples of places where mana should be protected as sacred.

Inherited Mana

Ancient Hawaiians believed the gods were the primary source of mana, embodied in the familial and spiritual connection känaka have to the ‘äina and its resources. “Mo‘okü‘auhau [genealogies] allowed Hawaiians to trace the origins of their lineage and mana to the ancestral gods,” the book notes, citing Lilikalä Kame‘eleihiwa, Ph.D. Genealogy helped order the Hawaiian class hierarchy; the ali‘i, or ruling class, could trace their lineage more directly to the akua than maka‘äinana, who were further removed. Ali‘i, therefore, had more mana than the common people, and could enhance or acquire more mana by acting in ways that were considered pono and fulfilling their kuleana.

Acquired Mana

But mana isn’t only a privilege of birth; it can be acquired and actively cultivated through education and training. Expertise and keen intellect were highly admired, as was great skill. Experts in every field, great athletes, winning competitors and triumphant warriors were respected and known for having great mana. “Thus, it was a cultural imperative for Native Hawaiians to külia (to strive, to be outstanding) and to become hiapa‘i‘ole (foremost, expert). Traditional Native Hawaiian education reflected the high value of deft practice and honed intellect, but also reflected the importance of mana,” Crabbe wrote.

Mana in Places

In the Hawaiian worldview, mana is also connected to place and resources. Some of these places are sacred: wao akua, the realm of the gods, was a place of mana – one rarely penetrated from wao känaka, the realm of the people, except by those in certain specialized positions. Wahi pana, or storied places, can also have mana for the acts and deeds performed there. Heiau, shrines, burial caves and graves have mana, for example, as do places men- tioned in traditional oral literature. Places could also impart mana, such as at Kükaniloko, a birthing stone site used by generations of ali‘i to ensure their children would be suffused with mana at birth.

“That places and objects in a Native Hawaiian worldview were imbued with mana remains pertinent today. Efforts to repatriate funerary artifacts, as well as iwi küpuna, demonstrate this,” the book’s literature review concludes, pointing to the controversy over Mauna Kea stewardship and the Thirty Meter Telescope as examples of places where mana should be protected as sacred.

How do we articulate mana?

Mana Lähui Känaka dedicates a chapter to social science methods and research that can help identify and assess mana with relation to the body, mind and spirit. Another chapter offers descriptions of lived mana: “There comes a time when something happens that ignites the spirit and the hearts of the po‘e. You know, that comes from our ‘äina, that comes from the land. And it’s a voice that we all pick up collectively and we hear, and we work in the capacity that we’re meant to work to address what is happening,” noted a member of the focus group discussions on mana.

“Assessing mana requires a multi-dimensional approach informed by a variety of sources – the assessment of mana requires many different perspec- tives covering different domains. For these reasons, mana is not likely to be captured by a single assessment,” the book notes in its conclusion.

How do we cultivate mana?

Mana Lähui Känaka isn’t meant to be prescriptive, instead it includes a framework for ways mana can be used to raise our communities. “Programs/behaviors/communities etc. that want to consider mana should keep the following in mind: Mana could be construed as a disposition, a set of behaviors, beliefs, knowledge, experiences, or a combination of any of the aforementioned,” notes Crabbe.

--------------

Section D: Magic blood

Several years ago Ken Conklin invented the term "magic blood" as a pejorative, sarcastic way of mentioning the concept that anyone with even a single drop of Hawaiian native blood has inborn wisdom, inherent moral rights, and racial supremacy including racially exclusionary political and economic entitlements.

What is it that makes the blood magic (according to those who believe in it)? See sections A (Theology) and B (Racial memory). Anybody with even one drop of Hawaiian native blood is a descendant of Haloa, the primordial ancestor of all Native Hawaiians; and therefore is, by birthright, a child of the gods and a brother/sister to these islands in a way anybody else ever can be who lacks a drop of the magic blood. That is very powerful magic! The term "magic" implies that it's not merely economic or political; it's not about place or date of birth -- it's about something deeply spiritual which somehow waves a magic wand to infuse a person with the racial memories and transform their wisdom, character, and skills. The term "magic" implies that the power that makes it work is hidden behind the scenes and cannot be fully described or quantified. Mana (section C) is a manifestation of the magic, and might provide someone with a special charisma leading to public adoration and political power, as some ali'i had in relation to their maka'ainana, or as Plato's Philosopher Kings had in relation to the people they led.

Although the magic in "magic blood" is primarily spiritual, it also has a practical meaning in economics. As of April 1, 2011 a Grassroot Institute of Hawaii webpage had identified and described 856 racial entitlement programs funded by tax dollars from the federal and state governments exclusively for the benefit of "Native Hawaiians." Since then hundreds more have been enacted. Keep in mind that that compilation pertained only to government programs funded by taxpayers, and does not include enormous privately funded programs such as Kamehameha Schools (Bishop Estate) which alone is worth $10-15 Billion, Lili'uokalani Childrens Trust, and many others. More recently, the U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Native Hawaiian Relations, published in 2016 a 217-page list of federal programs and grants for ethnic Hawaiians, and probably continues to update the list annually. Thus we see that the magic in magic blood is extremely powerful economically. The webpage "For Hawaiians Only" was apparently vandalized at some point, and also damaged when the entire Grassroot Institute website was reorganized. But for more information see a new small "For Hawaiians Only", which provides some links to other lists of racial entitlements programs, at
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/ForHawaiiansOnly.html

Although the magic in "magic blood" is primarily spiritual, it also has a practical meaning in politics because of public perceptions related to mana, charisma, and feelings of racial guilt over historical grievances, instilled by the tactics of Critical Race Theory in public dialog and in the schools.

One well-known Hawaiian race-hustler activist who is a professor at the University of Hawaii is 5/8 Portuguese, 1/8 Chinese, 1/8 Dutch, and 1/8 Hawaiian; grew up in California until moving to Hawaii at age 31; and describes her heritage this way: "I was born on Oahu and am of Kanaka Maoli descent." That's it! She could lay claim to being an indigenous Chinese with just as much correctness as claiming to be "Kanaka Maoli"; but 3/4 of her ancestry is Caucasian, from two nations who sent explorers to discover, colonize, exploit and oppress native populations throughout the world. Yet she claims her primary affiliation to be indigenous Hawaiian!

When reason, logic, and common-sense all show that the sovereignty activists are factually wrong about history and morally wrong in their demands for racial separatism or ethnic nationalism, why do so many of Hawai'i's people still support their absurd demands? It is not rational. It is emotional. This essay explains such irrational support as being an example of a psychological reflex mechanism called the "mascot syndrome." By understanding how the syndrome works, we can hope to avoid falling prey to it. See webpage at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/hawnsasmascots.html

See also
Playing Favorites -- Da Punahele Race
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/punahelerace.html
Haole Collective Guilt for Hawaiian Grievances and Pain -- Major essay book review of "Then There Were None" by Martha H. Noyes (based on Elizabeth Lindsey Buyers TV docudrama)
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/lindseynoyesthennone.html
Pride and Prejudice -- What It Means To Be Proud of a Person, Group, Nation, or Race; Racial Profiling, Racial Prejudice, and Racial Supremacy
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/prideandprejudice.html

I use the phrase "magic blood" as a form of sarcasm to demean racial entitlement programs and the racialist leaders who zealously defend them, but not to demean most of the innocent individuals who benefit from them. Some racialist partisans aggressively assert that their racial group should have entitlements based solely on race, and they say it is racist of me to point out their racism. They try to score propaganda points by accusing me of using the phrase "magic blood" in a way that demeans or insults their entire racial group. But no.

The only group of people I am insulting are the racial partisans who make the claim that their race is entitled to supremacy over all others for no reason other than race. Most ethnic Hawaiians are not like that. I am confident that most ethnic Hawaiians are like most all the citizens of America, who believe we are all equal in the eyes of God and we should all be treated equally under the law by our federal, state, and local governments.

Hawaii does not have white nationalists. Hawaii does not have Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, or Korean nationalists. There is only one ethnic group in Hawaii which has SOME of its political or cultural leadership making race-nationalist demands, and that is ethnic Hawaiians. Some independence activists say their movement is purely about restoring Hawaii to its former status as an independent nation -- they acknowledge that people of all races were full-fledged subjects (citizens) of the Kingdom of Hawaii, including Caucasians and Asians who had no Hawaiian native blood; and they acknowledge that racial equality should be the rule for a restored nation of Hawaii. They agree that "Hawaiian" is the name of a nationality, not the name of a race.

But there are also many -- perhaps most -- in the independence movement who demand special rights for anyone who has a drop of the magic blood. They speak with forked tongue. They are happy to suck in well-meaning Caucasian or Asian liberals who hear the talk about how the Kingdom was multiracial with full equality for everyone; even while they rally the race-nationalists by engaging in ethnic cleansing of Hawaii's history by refusing to acknowledge the Caucasian heroes who helped establish the Kingdom and made it thrive (John Young, Isaac Davis, Hiram Bingham, Rev. Dr. Gerrit Judd, William Richards, Charles Bishop, Archibald Cleghorn, Jozef De Veuster [Saint Damien], Marianne Cope [Saint]; many others).

The concept of "magic blood" can be brutally ugly and racist when it is used as a basis for asserting intellectual property rights. Perhaps the nastiest example of that happened when it was announced that a movie was being produced which would have Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson playing the role of Kamehameha The Great. Johnson certainly looks perfect for that role: big, powerfully built, dark skin, high energy, sexy, able to portray fierceness in battle but also magnanimity and generosity in political statesmanship. The only trouble is: Johnson has none of the magic blood. He is half Samoan and half Black. The fact that he has Samoan as half his ancestry, and Samoans are Polynesians just like Hawaiians, does not rescue him from the fact that he lacks specifically-Hawaiian native blood.

Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 4, 2002 quoted Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa, director of the Gladys K. 'Ainoa Brandt Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, in a message to film director Greg Poirier, saying "For Hawaiians it is not acceptable that Hollywood should be allowed to misrepresent the history of our ancestors in any way. Nor do we want Hollywood's warped sense of 'Hawaiiana' portrayed to the world. The story of Kamehameha should wait for a culturally knowledgeable Hawaiian to write the screen play, for a Hawaiian movie company to make the film, and for a Hawaiian descendant of Kamehameha to play the role, ... you don't believe Hawaiians should have the final say over the telling of our history. You think you have the right to make money off of us, off of our culture and those things we hold sacred. You do not have this right. The saga of Kamehameha is Hawaiian intellectual property, guaranteed by the United Nations, and if you have any respect for Hawaiians you will stop your project now."

Another race-monger Anne Keala Kelly, who has also produced racialist propaganda films, wrote a bitterly sarcastic screenplay for the Kamehameha movie, published in Honolulu Weekly on July 10, 2002. Both the Star-Bulletin article and the Honolulu Weekly article are no longer available on the internet, but thank goodness they were saved in a webpage "Political claims to collective cultural “intellectual property” rights ..." at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/religcultproprts.html


=================

ASIAN SETTLER COLONIALISM
The book "Asian Settler Colonialism" published by University of Hawaii Press (subsidized by taxpayers) is triply insulting to Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry. The book tells them they are guilty of collaborating with Caucasians to oppress ethnic Hawaiians; then tells them that even if their families have lived in Hawaii for several generations, they are merely "settlers" in someone else's homeland and they have a duty to abandon their hard-won equal rights in order to accept a position of subservience to ethnic Hawaiians; and finally the book attempts to undermine their patriotism by telling them they have a moral duty to help Hawaiian sovereignty activists liberate Hawaii from American colonialism and rip the 50th star off the flag. Psychotherapy is based on a belief that a person can be cured of mental illness when he is able to see clearly the nature of his illness and the events in his life which brought it about. In 2020-2021 people are getting an injection of a small fraction of an ounce of vaccine to stave off a deadly pandemic disease. Thus it can be hoped that understanding the full depth of the spiritual sickness in this book will help to immunize Asians in Hawaii against attitudes fostered by Hawaiian sovereignty activists that would lead to politically disastrous and morally evil consequences.


A book published by the University of Hawaii Press (subsidized by taxpayers) is deeply insulting to Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry. The book is "Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai'i" edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Fujikane is currently Associate Professor of English at UH Manoa, in charge of that department's undergraduate program. Okamura was formerly on staff in the Ethnic Studies and Anthropology departments but currently is not listed in the UH faculty directory.

Although it was published in 2008 Fujikane's book continues to inspire a new generation of Hawaiian race-mongers more than a decade later. See for example several articles in Honolulu Civil Beat online newspaper citing Fujikane, including "Hawaii’s BLNR, Mauna Kea And Settler Colonialism: The Board of Land and Natural Resources “cultural expert” doesn’t have the authority to represent the interests of Native Hawaiians." by Sam Ikehara at
https://www.civilbeat.org/2017/11/hawaiis-blnr-mauna-kea-and-settler-colonialism/
and also, for example,
https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/07/tmt-should-be-evaluated-for-its-ethical-impacts/

The book's first insult comes by telling Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry that they are guilty of collaborating with Caucasians to oppress ethnic Hawaiians. The next insult comes by telling them that even if their families have lived in Hawaii for several generations, they are merely "settlers" in someone else's homeland and they have a duty to abandon their hard-won equal rights in order to accept a position of subservience to ethnic Hawaiians. Perhaps the deepest insult of all is the book's attempt to undermine the patriotism of Asian Americans by telling them they have a moral duty to help Hawaiian sovereignty activists liberate Hawaii from American colonialism and rip the 50th star off the flag. If anyone thinks this paragraph is an exaggeration, or a case of fear-mongering, then please read the entire book review, including the book's five-page celebratory explanation of the metaphors in a political cartoon showing Hawaii's first Filipino Governor, Ben Cayetano, lynching a Native Hawaiian in order to give pleasure to a Caucasian. The detailed book review also provides a summary of each chapter including extended quotes.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/AsianSettlerColonialism.html

There's a struggle underway for the hearts and minds of Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry regarding the issue of Hawaiian sovereignty. "Asian Settler Colonialism" is a piece of strident propaganda by zealous advocates for race-based political sovereignty for ethnic Hawaiians. The book tries to lay a guilt trip on Hawaii's Asian population in hopes of enlisting them to support an ethnic Hawaiian agenda of blood nationalism. The good thing about this book is that it brings brings to public awareness a truly frightening belief-system. People inclined to support Hawaiian sovereignty, but who lack native blood, will discover that they are actually supporting the destruction of their own hard-won freedoms and individual rights. The great majority of people of Asian descent will feel disgust and revulsion at the naked racism and anti-Americanism in this book.

Will Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry remain loyal to the United States, or will they join with ethnic Hawaiian nationalists seeking to kick the U.S. completely out of Hawaii and create a racial supremacist independent Hawaii? Will Hawaii citizens of Asian descent see themselves primarily as victims of historical domination and exploitation by Caucasians, and join the ethnic Hawaiian grievance industry expressing resentment and demanding group reparations for "people of color"? Or will they see themselves as individuals whose forebears freely came to Hawaii to work as sugar plantation laborers, nurses, and hotel maids to make a better life and who succeeded in harvesting a piece of the American dream for themselves, their families, and descendants?

There is no compromise possible. That's because Hawaiian sovereignty activists subscribe to a religious belief justifying racial supremacy in political control of Hawaii, thereby leading to fascism. The sovereignty activists (both those who support the Akaka bill and those demanding independence) call upon all persons lacking a drop of Hawaiian native blood to subordinate themselves to Hawaii's master race.

Every group in Hawaii is composed entirely of "settlers" and their descendants -- including "Native Hawaiians." Today we celebrate the rebirth of voyaging canoes navigating by the stars, which is how Polynesians first came to settle Hawaii. No ethnic group sprang forth from the sands of these islands; all came from somewhere else. Even someone who has 100% Hawaiian native blood has 99% of the bones of his ancestors buried somewhere else in the world, simply because no humans lived in Hawaii until less than 2000 years ago.

Nevertheless, ethnic Hawaiians claim they are distinguished from all other settler groups because they are "indigenous." [1] They claim that being indigenous is not merely about having arrived first. Ethnic Hawaiians have a beautiful creation legend which sovereignty activists misinterpret to mean there is a genealogical family relationship among the gods, the islands of Hawaii, and ethnic Hawaiians exclusively; so that any person lacking a drop of the magic blood is forever an outsider who must accept second-class citizenship as guests in the indigenous homeland of their ethnic Hawaiians hosts. This is a religious belief, which is the activists' only way to distinguish themselves from other settler groups. They say there's a fundamental and unbridgeable difference between ethnic Hawaiians and all others, which is not based merely on length of residency.

This religious belief is the basis for asserting a genealogical (i.e., racial) claim to an inherent right to political and legal dominance as the master race. It's a belief that the DNA of ethnic Hawaiians is mingled with the DNA of these islands as living beings so that, as Butch Helemano says in his Kau Inoa commercial, "being Hawaiian allows me to look at the world with a different perspective than others that aren't. In other words we can look at the sea and look at it as a place of sacredness and look at the sky as a place that we hear and look for messages."

This religion includes the concept that racial memory is transmitted through the DNA so that someone with native blood can pull up memories of how to navigate by the stars even though that skill was lost many generations ago. Ethnic Hawaiians have different DNA from everyone else, so their brains are hard-wired to see the world differently from everyone else and they require segregated schools to provide race-specific curriculum and instructional methods adapted to their unique needs.

To organize governmental structures and laws (political sovereignty, land ownership, and voting rights) on the basis of a religious belief violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits any governmental establishment of religion. That's why no compromise is possible.

On one side are Asians, Caucasians, and a probable majority of ethnic Hawaiians who believe in individual rights, unity and equality under the law, and are proud to be Americans in the 50th state. On the other side are some ethnic Hawaiians, and their allies among other ethnic groups, who believe in establishing by law the religious belief that ethnic Hawaiians are an indigenous people genealogically related to these islands and therefore entitled to exercise racial supremacy in a government based on group rights and blood nationalism.

The book "Asian Settler Colonialism" begins with a lengthy editor's essay explicitly setting forth this religious racial fascism, and calling upon Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry to kow-tow to ethnic Hawaiians. All the essays in the book support and expand this concept. It doesn't matter whether an Asian newcomer to Hawaii has just stepped off the plane from Japan, or whether his ancestors came here six generations ago -- everyone lacking a drop of the magic blood is merely a settler. Some Caucasian, Chinese, or Japanese citizens of Hawaii had an ancestor who was a subject (citizen) of the Hawaiian Kingdom by virtue of being born in Hawaii before 1893 or immigrating and taking the loyalty oath. Some such families now have as many as eight generations born and raised in Hawaii. There were thousands of Caucasians and Asians who were full partners in the Hawaiian Kingdom as cabinet ministers, heads of departments, members of the Legislature, and voters. But if they and their descendants living in Hawaii today lack the magic blood, they are classified in this book as merely "settlers" whose true homeland is England, Boston, China, Japan, etc.

Amazingly, there are Asian-Americans living in Hawaii who agree with racial supremacy and blood nationalism for ethnic Hawaiians (including all the Asian authors of essays in this book), and who are now trying to persuade other Asians to set aside their rights as Americans and to subordinate themselves to ethnic Hawaiians. It's a credit to the generosity and desire for "social justice" of the politically liberal, humble, and culturally self-effacing folks who feel that way; but it's a greater credit to their intelligence and American patriotism when they reject blood nationalism and Hawaiian religious fascism. There are psychological explanations for the fact that some people seem willing to adopt a favorite racial group as a sort of icon like a state bird or state flower, tolerating and irrationally supporting claims to racial supremacy that would actually be harmful to themselves. There are also historical reasons why Asians might be persuaded to side with ethnic Hawaiians as "locals" and "people of color" in solidarity against Caucasians.

Multiple-generation Japanese have commented that Hawaii is the only place in the world where they are truly at home. They cannot "go back" to a Japan they have never even visited; tourists from Japan poke fun at Hawaii's Japanese because they speak an archaic form of the language and do not know today's social customs; and Japanese born and raised in Hawaii cannot feel at home on the U.S. mainland because of racism and differences in local culture. Yet Hawaiian activists repeatedly tell those lacking Hawaiian blood that they have some other place in the world that is their true homeland. Vicky Holt Takamine spewed this racist concept into hundreds of thousands of living rooms in her repeatedly televised Kau Inoa commercial: "Every other people that come here to these islands have an ancestral homeland that they can go back to."

The question Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry must answer for themselves is this: Do I embrace my American citizenship and my rights as an individual to be fully equal with everyone else under the Constitution; or do I believe I have an obligation to subordinate myself as a second-class citizen under the communal authority of ethnic Hawaiians? The editors of the book "Asian Settler Colonialism," and the authors of the essays inside it, are trying to get Asians to feel guilty by labeling them as collaborators with Caucasians in oppressing the indigenous natives of Hawaii under an American colonial regime backed by a U.S. military occupation; just as race-mongers on the mainland, pushing Critical Race Theory, have been making today's Caucasians feel "white guilt" for slavery and Jim Crow laws in the America of 2-3 centuries ago.

Psychotherapy is based on a belief that a person can be cured of mental illness when he is able to see clearly the nature of his illness and the events in his life which brought it about. In 2020-2021 people are getting an injection of a small fraction of an ounce of vaccine to stave off a deadly pandemic disease. Thus it can be hoped that understanding the full depth of the spiritual sickness in this book will help to immunize Asians in Hawaii against attitudes fostered by Hawaiian sovereignty activists that would lead to politically disastrous and morally evil consequences.

As one might expect, the order of essays in the book reflects the commitment to racial supremacy. The editors write: "The essays in this volume are organized into two parts; 'Native' and 'Settler.' As we were making editorial decisions about the ordering of essays ... 'Native' comes first; 'Settler' follows it and supports it from behind." [page 31].

For each essay in the book, the review provides author's name, title of the essay, and a one-paragraph summary. One of the essays is especially repulsive. It includes five pages of detailed celebration of the metaphors in an artwork called "Benocide" depicting former Governor Ben Cayetano as lynching a Native Hawaiian (and by extension committing genocide). In the background are Honolulu, Diamond Head, and a mushroom cloud; while shadowy images of other suffering natives are being trampled underfoot. The artist is, of course, ethnic Hawaiian. But the author of the essay is a Filipino! Asians who see that artwork and read the explanation of its metaphors will surely feel strong revulsion at the way Hawaii's first Governor of Filipino ancestry is portrayed. That chapter of the book gets considerably more than one paragraph in the review.

The complete book review, including the cartoon "Benocide" and explanations of its metaphors, is at
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/AsianSettlerColonialism.html

Hawaii's people of Asian ancestry, especially those of Japanese ancestry, should be aware of the ongoing controversy over Hawaiian sovereignty activists seeking to force the removal of President McKinley's name and statue from McKinley High School -- a school with a proud history of more than a century named in honor of the President who succeeded in getting Congress to agree to the Treaty of Annexation offered by the Republic of Hawaii in 1898. Many -- perhaps most -- of McKinley High School's alumni are of Japanese ancestry; they and the Principal have strongly resisted the attempt to remove McKinley's name and statue. A resolution in the "Hawaiian Affairs" committee of the Hawaii House of Representatives was defeated in Spring 2021 after many dozens of people submitted testimony. Tactics of fear and intimidation used or threatened by sovereignty activists on this issue for more than a year have some similarities to the tactics used by Black Lives Matter, the advocates of Critical Race Theory, and the youth brigades during Mao's Cultural Revolution in China.

See webpage, which includes links to all written and oral testimony: "McKinley High School in Honolulu, regarding school name and statue -- Open letter to students, alumni, teachers, administrators, staff, community, and Board of Education explaining why the school's name and statue deserve to remain in place, and why a Hawaiian secessionist demand to remove them should be strongly rejected."
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/McKinleyHSNameStatue.html


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THE LARGE ETHNIC GROUPS IN HAWAII HAVE HISTORICAL GRIEVANCES AGAINST THE U.S. AND THEREFORE AGAINST WHITES (as the dominant group in the U.S., and historically dominant group of "colonists", in Hawaii). THESE GRIEVANCES MAKE IT EASY FOR ETHNIC HAWAIIAN RACE-NATIONALISTS TO BUILD ANTI-U.S. AND ANTI-WHITE SENTIMENT, HOLDING PREJUDICE AGAINST WHITES EVEN WHEN THEY ARE HAWAII-BORN AND RAISED.
How ethnic-group historical grievances can be used to poison Hawaii's multiracial solidarity
Hawaii ethnic population statistics
Ethnic Hawaiian historical grievances
Ethnic Filipino historical grievances
Ethnic Japanese historical grievances


It's important to emphasize that historical grievances by one group against another group should not be (ab)used as justifications for current or future discrimination against entire groups or individuals. Using historical grievances in that way invokes the worst sort of racial prejudice or stereotyping. It gives mentally unstable malcontents an incitement to violence.

Should a little ethnic Japanese girl today be hated by Whites in Hawaii because of Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941? Should a little White boy in Hawaii today be hated by ethnic Japanese who survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945, or be hated by their children or grandchildren? Anyone who thinks that way must logically defend the 1942-45 removal and internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were loyal to the U.S. but fell under prejudice merely because they were ethnic Japanese.

During a period of about 40 years Kamehameha waged brutal warfare on most of the Hawaiian islands using guns, cannons, and oceangoing ships against kings and their subordinate chiefs and civilian populations. He was responsible for killing tens of thousands of native Hawaiians, including women and children; and destroying villages and ecosystems; and ordering human sacrifices to dedicate his temples to his pagan gods in his ruthless campaign to "unify" all of Hawaii. Defeated enemies were shown no mercy; escapees were hunted down; surrender simply meant briefly postponing slaughter. The people he conquered surely hated him. Some hatreds lasted for generations, including the descendants of O'ahu King Kalanikupule and his warriors who got pushed off the high cliff in the Battle of Nu'uanu Pali (May 1795). See artist Herb Kane's famous painting at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles3/PaliBattleHerbKane.jpg

The descendants of Kekuaokalani and his allies hated Kamehameha's wives and his son Lihiliho Kamehameha II for abolishing the old religion and waging civil war at the Battle of Kuamo'o (December 1819). Yet even on the battlefield there Manono, wife of Kekuaokalani, in her dying breath, gasped "Malama ko aloha" [preserve your love]. Grievances from the past have been reconciled. In recent years there have been ceremonies and even an opera bringing together the descendants of former enemies. Kamehameha has become a symbol of Hawaiian unity, as people celebrate the Kamehameha Day holiday beneath his statue even as it brandishes a gut-ripping barbed spear reminding everyone how he "unified" the islands.

The remainder of this section identifies Hawaii's population percentages by ethnicity; and describes historical grievances by ethnic Hawaiians, ethnic Filipinos, and ethnic Japanese against the U.S., and against Whites. Hawaiian racial separatists and ethnic nationalists do not hesitate to remind Hawaii's ethnic groups about these grievances for the purpose of stirring hatred and political activism, using tactics copied from Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Forewarned is forearmed.

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Hawaii ethnic population statistics from OHA Databook
http://www.ohadatabook.com/T01-03-11u.pdf

In Census 2010 the total population of Hawaii was 1,360,301, some of whom are counted more than once if they are multiracial and checked more than one race-box. The largest ethnic groups in Hawaii were:
Caucasian 564,323
Filipino 342,095
Japanese 312,292
Native Hawaiian 289,970
Chinese 198,711
Korean 48,699
Note that these counts are for race alone or in combination with one or more other races. A significant number of individuals, including nearly all "Native Hawaiians", are multiracial and are counted as members of every race whose box they checked on the Census form. However, there are more than 80,000 people who checked only the one box for "Native Hawaiian", thus looking like "pure Hawaiians", even though virtually all of them are multiracial and probably around 3/4 of them each has perhaps 3/4 of their genetic heritage from Europe and/or Asia.

Filipinos and Japanese combined are 48% of Hawaii's total population, considerably outnumbering Caucasians who are 41%. "Native Hawaiians" are 21%. The three groups Filipinos, Japanese, and Hawaiians have the greatest historical grievances against Caucasians. Combined they outnumber Caucasians 70-41 (remembering the count is greater than 100 because of mixed-race heritage). So Caucasians are in trouble if simmering historical grievances explode into a race war. Two other Asian subgroups also have significant sizes although they tend to be neutral toward Whites: Chinese (15%) and Korean (4%). A huge percentage (perhaps most) of ethnic Hawaiians are also of Chinese ancestry, so the percentage of Chinese in Hawaii's population would show as considerably larger if those ethnic Hawaiians had bothered to additionally check the box for Chinese on their Census forms.

Let's briefly mention some of the main Native Hawaiian historical grievances, and then in greater detail identify some of the Filipino and Japanese grievances which are probably less well known among the general population but can be highly incendiary if agitators strike a match. Thus we will be reminded of some important historical grievances held against the U.S. and Caucasians by Hawaii's three largest non-White ethnic groups.

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Ethnic Hawaiian historical grievances: Anti-USA, anti-White

It must be noted that virtually all so-called Native Hawaiians are racially mixed; and most of them have most of their ethnic heritage from Europe, America, Asia, or Africa. So in some ways, historical grievances by "Native Hawaiians" against other ethnic groups are simply absurd or might be intentionally manufactured. There is no dialysis machine, or RotoRooter, which can cleanse the blood of a "Native Hawaiian" to remove "foreign" components. Should someone's White right-hand reach into the White pocket to get money to pay as reparations to the Hawaiian left-hand? Thinking about things this way is a recipe for self-loathing or even self-harm. Many Black Americans are also racially mixed because of White slave-owners who impregnated their Black slaves; thus complicating the issue of reparations to Black people. Possible voluntary love-matches between owner and slave, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson with Sally Hemmings, are rare but plausible, despite the question whether truly free consent can be given by a slave to her master. However, it seems likely that a far higher percentage of Native Hawaiians than Blacks are mixed; and of course there were no Hawaiian slaves owned by Whites or Asians although economic exploitation might sometimes make the issue of voluntary consent somewhat problematic. But there were well-known examples of wealthy, high-ranking native Hawaiian women whose choice of White men to marry was obviously voluntary (for example Queen Lili'uokalani, her sister Princess Likelike, Bernice Pauahi Bishop).

Ethnic Hawaiian grievances against the U.S. in general and against Caucasians in particular are well-known and are shouted in public so frequently and so loudly there is no need to compile them. A few of the major allegations include religious and cultural losses inflicted upon natives by the American missionaries who started coming in 1820 "to do good and who proceeded to do very well for themselves"; colonial exploitation through undue influence by the missionaries on the monarchs who were persuaded to adopt Western-style Constitutional government and rule of law; Great Mahele starting 1848 creating private ownership of land, land-grabbing and a plantation economy; Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 ceding control of Pearl Harbor to U.S. for military purposes in return for U.S. granting tariff favors when importing sugar from Hawaii; Bayonet Constitution in 1887 stripping King Kalakaua of most of his powers; U.S. "armed invasion in support of illegal" overthrow of monarchy in 1893; "Hawaiian language made illegal" in 1896; "illegal" annexation to U.S. 1898; "illegal" Statehood 1959; many other grievances along the way and continuing. Ethnic Hawaiians have become "strangers in our own land" with native culture subservient to tourist economy; unable to afford housing, healthcare, food; forced into a diaspora with half of Hawaiians living outside Hawaii. Native Hawaiians (allegedly) have the worst statistics among all of Hawaii's ethnic groups for heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, drug abuse, incarceration, etc. etc.

Here are a few of many webpages exploring some of these topics:

Forced assimilation may hurt Hawaiians -- Debunking a typical combination of junk history and junk science fueling the Hawaiian grievance industry, and protesting the use of so-called news reports as vehicles for propaganda
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles3/ForcedAssimHurtsHawnHealth.html

Haole Collective Guilt for Hawaiian Grievances and Pain -- A book review of "Then There Were None" by Martha H. Noyes (based on Elizabeth Lindsey Buyers TV docudrama)
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/lindseynoyesthennone.html

U.S. apology resolution 20th anniversary -- A resolution was introduced in the Hawaii legislature to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the U.S. apology resolution; and testimony was offered to the Hawaii legislature in the form of a substitute resolution documenting that the apology resolution is filled with falsehoods, has produced bad consequences, and should be repealed.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/ApologyReso20thAnniv.html

Native Hawaiian victimhood -- malpractice in the gathering and statistical analysis of data allegedly showing disproportionate Native Hawaiian victimhood for disease and social dysfunction. How and why the Hawaiian grievance industry uses bogus statistics to scam government and philanthropic organizations, politicians, and public opinion.
https://big11a.angelfire.com/NatHwnVictimhoodStatScam.html

Abusive disparate treatment of ethnic Hawaiians by the judiciary and the criminal justice system? Rebuttal to a report by the Hawaiian grievance industry released September 28, 2010.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/DisparateTreatmentCriminal.html

The Hawaiian Grievance Industry -- Panhandling for Race-Based Handouts and Political Power
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles3/grievanceindustry.html

Hawaii Statehood -- straightening out the history-twisters. A historical narrative defending the legitimacy of the revolution of 1893, the annexation of 1898, and the statehood vote of 1959
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/StatehoodHistUntwistedFull.html

On Friday August 9, 2019 a lengthy commentary authored by retired Judge Bill Fernandez was published in "The Garden Island" newspaper on Kaua'i. The commentary was a litany of victimhood grievances regarding the alleged destruction of Native Hawaiian culture and political power caused by the arrival of newcomers. Mr. Fernandez' conclusion is that the construction of the 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea would be a desecration of a sacred place that would worsen the long history of destruction and oppression of Native Hawaiians. Conklin wrote a point-by point rebuttal of Mr. Fernandez' assertions about Hawaiian history, showing that most of them are outright false or else badly twisted. It is important to debunk these particular claims because they are so often asserted as reasons why Native Hawaiians are entitled to sympathy, racial entitlement programs, restitution, and political sovereignty.
https://big11a.angelfire.com/DialogConklinFernandezHistoricalGrievances.html

Was Hawaiian Language Illegal? Did the Evil Haoles Suppress Hawaiian Language As A Way of Oppressing Kanaka Maoli and Destroying Their Culture?
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/hawlangillegal.html
See also:
Holding the State of Hawaii Department of Education accountable for propagating the lie that Hawaiian language was banned.
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/DOEHawnLangBan.html

Book review of Kim Hunter (author) and Patti Carol (illustrator), Ka Puuwai Hamama -- Volunteer Spirit (Waianae, HI: One Voice Publications, May 2010). Numerous historical falsehoods are quoted and disproved. The author/publisher is urged to recall the book as a defective product poisonous to the souls of innocent readers.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/VolunteerSpiritBookReview.html

Book Review of: Noenoe Silva, "Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism."
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/noenoealohabetrayed.html

Book review of: Robert H. Stauffer, "Kahana: How the Land Was Lost"
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/staufferkahana.html

Book review of: Aran Alton Ardaiz, "Hawaii -- The Fake State (A Manifesto and Expose of a Nation in Captivity)." Hawaiian Islands, Truth Of God Ministry, 2008.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/FakeStateBookReview.html

Racism in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement (with special focus on anti-White racism)
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles3/racismhawsov.html

Anti-Caucasian Racial Hate Crimes in Hawaii -- Southern Poverty Law Center brings the issue to national awareness in a flawed but valuable Intelligence Report article.
https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/RacialHateCrimesHawSPLC.html

Road Rage or Racial Hate Crime? An actual incident of racial violence in a Honolulu parking lot was highly publicized, including news reports and commentaries.
https://www.angelfire.com/planet/bigfiles40/RoadRageVsRacialHateCrime.html

** ETHNIC HAWAIIAN ELDER AL GONZALES TRIED TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT IN 2015 ABOUT HAWAIIAN HISTORICAL GRIEVANCES, TO FIGHT WHAT WOULD NOW BE RECOGNIZED AS CRITICAL RACE THEORY HAWAIIAN-STYLE. Here is what he wrote:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trying-to-set-the-record-_b_8353554
Huffington Post October 21, 2015

Trying to Set the Record Straight on Hawaii’s History

by Al Gonzales, Retired fireman and commercial ahi fisherman in Hawaii

** Excerpts relevant to Critical Race Theory

Usually, I mind my own business ... it was my son, Alapai, at 16, who finally opened my eyes. One day, while we were talking about his future, he started spouting the usual “Hawaiian activist” rhetoric. I couldn’t believe it. I then asked him if his friends and peers felt the same way. He said yes.

If Alapai’s generation and younger feel the way they do, we are in deep trouble. There will be major confrontations, in the future, based on their slanted perception created by the misinformation, wishful thinking, naiveté and downright ignorance of some of our present-day “Hawaiian leaders.” We should all be educated enough to pick up and read the numerous books and publications that are available and get our history right. ... The foundation for our protests is often based on half-truths, innuendo, naiveté, hate, hysteria and ignorance of our Hawaiian history. ... Most Hawaiians that I speak to feel that we are “owed” what was “taken away” from us. The White Man, with the help of the U.S. government, they feel, “stole” our land. ... However, we still need to get the facts straight before we make claims that aren’t based on the truth.

The White Man and the U.S. government were just another conquering entity that took control. This happened all over the world; the early Hawaiians were no different.

When the first Hawaiians arrived in these islands, there was another race of people living here, already. These people were, probably, what are now known as the “Menehune,” the “little people.” These people coexisted in peace and harmony for decades. Then the Tahitian migration came to these Islands. The existing people were enslaved, killed, tortured and abused for almost a thousand years by the first “Hawaiians” from Tahiti.

Before the White Man came, who else tried to take control of these islands and finally prevailed? Kamehameha I, of course. For years, he tried to conquer Kahekili to become the sole ruler of the Hawaiian Islands. He only succeeded after the White Man came. Kamehameha I captured two Englishman and appropriated muskets and cannon. We all know what happened then.

Why doesn’t anyone say how terrible Kamehameha I was? If he was white and did what he did, he would be the most hated figure in our history. Why is Kamehameha I, who killed more Hawaiians than anything else — excluding disease — now known as the “conqueror of the islands” who became a famous hero?

Back in those days, the people living here did not consider themselves as one entity. They were one race of “Hawaiians.” There were three distinct groups. There were the people from the Big Island led by Kamehameha I. There were the people from Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Oahu and Molokai who were under the rule of Kahekili. Meanwhile, Kauai had its own king and the people there were very different from people on the other islands, especially in physical stature and language. These islands were not dis-united. Everyone was living, as they had for generations, separately.

Can we believe that the other “Hawaiians,” not under Kamehameha I, really wanted to be “united” and brought under one rule? Of course not. Especially, when they all knew that the price for this “unity” would be paid for with their own blood.

Remember, Kamehameha and his army had tried, previously, on several occasions to conquer Kahekili who, along with his people, knew very well from past experience how brutal and ferocious Kamehameha I, his war chief Kekuhaupio and their warriors were. They already knew first hand the price of “unity.”

Let’s quit trying to glorify the slaughter of thousands of Hawaiians and turn it around as though it was a “good thing.” It happened because Kamehameha I was just doing his thing as the “Warrior King” that he was. Kamehameha I was a remarkable man of “his time” and should not be judged, revered or immortalized using present day parameters of reason, justice, ethics, morals, and that sort of thing. Think about this: Did you know that Kamehameha made John Young, Ali`i Nui and gave him rule over most of the Big Island? He remained Ali`i Nui until he died after a long, long life. And what if, during the battles involved in Kamehameha’s quest to “unite” these Islands, the king had been severely wounded? On his death bed, would he have gathered all his war chiefs and made them swear allegiance to Ali`i Nui John Young? Imagine the invasion that would have continued after Kamehameha’s death with Ali`i Nui Young as the supreme commander! Remember, John Young and Isaac Davis were a very integral part of Kamehameha’s success in defeating the chiefs of Maui and Oahu.) Would we be celebrating “John Young Day” instead of Kamehameha Day? I don’t think so, do you?

We should all be thankful that it was the Americans who made us a territory and not some of the other powers. Russia, Japan, France, Spain, England and others had their eyes on these islands. Under the Americans, we Hawaiians have prospered more than any other Pacific Islanders. Plus, the Americans didn’t kill us and take everything like they did with the American Indian. (Remember, only Kamehameha I did that.)

Another thought to consider: We want the U.S. government to pay repatriations to us Hawaiians. What about the descendants of Kahekili? Shouldn’t the descendants of Kamehameha I reimburse those displaced descendants of Kahekili and the other Hawaiians not from Kamehameha I and his legacy? Who gets paid reparations, first, and from whom? Forget about it, move on!

Before the White Man came, there was a very strict caste system in place. Do you know from whom you are descended? Where would you be now if we were still a monarchy? Look around, you can see for yourself who the descendants of Kamehameha are — Campbell Estate, Bishop Estate, Parker Ranch and others. How big are your land holdings? Most of us are, probably, descendants of (lower castes).

The “aloha spirit” is not a solely Hawaiian thing. It was born after the missionaries came. Since then, over the years, it has been developed and nurtured by all of the different races and cultures that make up the fabric of the wonderful tapestry that is Hawaii.

All present-day efforts toward Hawaiian “self determination” have created several splits in our island community. It is “us” against the “others,” the non-Hawaiians. Most of these non-Hawaiian groups are the ones that have made Hawaii what it is today. Now, they are being ignored by some of us with Hawaiian blood. Personally, I am Hawaiian, Chinese by my mother, Spanish, Portuguese and Filipino by my father. My wife is Caucasian and all our children are all of these things. How many of “Hawaiians” are just like us? I am proud of what I am and what my ancestors have contributed to our society. How could I even possibly exclude my “non-Hawaiian” ancestors and their contribution to what Hawaii is today?

Most of what we Hawaiians have contributed, unfortunately, has been very detrimental to the economic, spiritual and environmental growth of these islands. We’ve done a great job of populating the prisons, as well as filling lists of the unemployed, homeless, drug-addicts, alcoholics, high school drop-outs and more. We also have the highest rate of health and social problems here, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, communicable diseases, mental illness, single-parent households, domestic abuse and more.

We Hawaiians need to quit living in the past and feeling sorry for ourselves. We all need to “be Hawaiian” but also to live and take advantage of all that is offered to us as Americans.

Stop blaming our failures on others! This mentality has become an anchor around our neck that continues to drag us down. Our leaders need to educate all Hawaiians to “forget about the past and move forward into the future!” Let us rid ourselves of the hate and hysteria-based rhetoric on our march towards “self determination.”

I really believe that if King Kamehameha were alive today, he would support the telescopes on Mauna Kea and Haleakala. After all, Hawaiians at one time were the best “naked-eye” astronomers in the world. Also, King Kamehameha conquered these islands by embracing “modern” technology — using muskets and cannon, under the supervision of English sailors.

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Ethnic Filipino historical grievances

Filipinos are the largest non-White ethnic group in Hawaii. Their historical grievances are the least-known and therefore the most deserving of attention.

In Census 2010 ethnic Filipinos for the first time became the largest non-White ethnic group in Hawaii, finally more numerous than ethnic Japanese (including Okinawans who often wish they were not classified as Japanese).

The main historical grievance held by Filipinos against the USA is the way the U.S. brutally waged war against them immediately following the Spanish-American War that lasted from April to December 1898. Probably most non-Filipinos (and even many locally-born Filipinos) in Hawaii are unaware of this history.

Spain had been colonial master of the Philippines for centuries. When Spain was accused of blowing up an American ship in Havana harbor (Cuba) in 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain. As part of that war the U.S. joined Philippine revolutionaries and together they were successful in pushing out Spain. The Filipinos naturally thought they were now free to become an independent nation; but the U.S. decided to replace Spain as the colonial master [the "spoils of war"]. The Treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War included Spain transferring ownership of the Philippines to the U.S. The result was a new war in which Filipino nationalists tried to push out the Americans; but the Americans kept control not only by "legitimate" military force but also excessive brutality, political oppression, and economic exploitation.

The U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian says "The ensuing Philippine-American War lasted three years and resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants. As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease. ... U.S. forces at times burned villages, implemented civilian reconcentration policies, and employed torture on suspected guerrillas, while Filipino fighters also tortured captured soldiers and terrorized civilians who cooperated with American forces. Many civilians died during the conflict as a result of the fighting, cholera and malaria epidemics, and food shortages caused by several agricultural catastrophes." Eventually the U.S. began allowing increasing local autonomy and elections. "In 1907, the Philippines convened its first elected assembly, and in 1916, the Jones Act promised the nation eventual independence. The archipelago became an autonomous commonwealth in 1935, and [after Japan occupied the Philippines during World War 2 from 1942 to 1945] the U.S. granted independence in 1946."
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war

Filipinos first began immigrating to Hawaii in large organized groups in 1906 to work on the sugar plantations. Later more Filipinos came as gardeners, maintenance men, nursing assistants, domestic and hotel maids, and nannies. By 1920 there were 21,000 Filipinos in Hawaii. More-educated Filipinos came as professional nurses, pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, and business owners, all the way up to numerous state legislators, Supreme Court Justices Mario Ramil and Simeon Acoba Jr., and Governor Ben Cayetano.

Perhaps the most bitterly resented event between Filipinos and Whites in Hawaii occurred in a labor dispute in 1924. Hank Soboleski of the Garden Island [Kaua'i] newspaper recounted the story on May 17, 2020: "On the morning of Sept. 9, 1924, a brief-but-furious, hand-to-hand fight broke out at Hanapepe, between as many as 200 striking Visayan sugar workers and 40 policemen that left 16 strikers killed and nine wounded, with four policemen also killed and two wounded. Called the 'Hanapepe Massacre,' it was the bloodiest confrontation in all of Hawai‘i’s labor history. As a result, 130 strikers and their leaders were arrested and tried, and of these 56 were found guilty of riot and imprisoned, with many later being deported to the Philippines."
https://www.thegardenisland.com/2020/05/17/lifestyles/eyewitnesses-to-the-hanapepe-massacre-of-1924/

Resentment against the U.S. in general, and Whites in particular, was certainly well-justified in the early years of Filipino immigration to Hawaii while bitterness from the Philippine-American War was fresh in mind. Filipinos laboring on the sugar plantations were paid the lowest hourly rates, lived in small dilapidated plantation housing and were sometimes whipped by white lunas (bosses) riding on horseback. But by 1945, after America liberated the Philippines from an even more brutal occupation by Japan, and the U.S. then granted independence, feelings were much more friendly. Nevertheless Filipinos often had (and continue to feel) individual grievances against Whites who dominated and abused them culturally, financially, and personally in the workplace and in community life.

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Ethnic Japanese historical grievances

The history of Japanese immigration to Hawaii is well known, along with their great success in Hawaii's current cultural and economic life.

A good summary is:
"The Japanese in Hawaii: a historical and demographic perspective"
by Eleanor C. Nordyke and Y. Scott Matsumoto
https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10524/528/2/JL11174.pdf

Another good, updated summary, with numerous clickable links to webpages and citations to printed books, is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_in_Hawaii

Although a few individual Japanese men came to Hawaii as early as 1806 (from a shipwreck), the government of Japan had a law prohibiting anyone from leaving Japan to go anywhere else. A single shipload violated the law and came to Hawaii in 1868. King Kalakaua took a cruise around the world starting in January 1881 for many reasons: self-aggrandizement; a desire to cement Hawaii's independence by cultivating relations with other nations; and a need to recruit immigrants to increase Hawaii's population, including laborers, in light of the steep decline among native Hawaiians due to foreign diseases. Kalakaua met with Emperor Meiji and offered Princess Ka'iulani to the Emperor as a bride for a high-ranking Japanese prince (the offer was made without the knowledge of herself or her father Archibald Cleghorn or her mother Princess Likelike [Kalakaua's sister]; but the offer was rejected [after a delay of a few days to avoid giving insult]). The Emperor finally removed the prohibition on emigration in 1885, and large-scale organized immigration of Japanese into Hawaii began. By 1900 there were already 51,000 Japanese in Hawaii out of a total population of 154,000. In the 1920 Census 43% of Hawaii's people were ethnic Japanese (109,000 out of 256,000).

The first well-publicized historical grievance by ethnic Japanese against Whites in Hawaii was caused in 1889 when Japanese labor organizer Katsu Goto was murdered by a group of White men, including lynching either after death or as cause of death. Although the murder and initial stages of prosecution happened during the Hawaiian Kingdom when Lili'uokalani and Kalakaua were reigning monarchs, all the major actors in the prosecution were White men, and under rules of the Kingdom the jurors were required to be White men because the defendants were White. Prosecution, conviction, and eventual pardon continued through the period of the Provisional Government ending in the Republic. A very detailed summary of events, including newspaper articles, is at
https://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/home/KatsuGoto.html
The fact that the Goto event remains concerning to ethnic Japanese and other civil rights activists today is shown in a play and film whose production began in 2014 at University of Hawaii in Hilo; see the story in the UH Hilo student newspaper of October 10, 2016 at
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/news/kekalahea/KG-Murder
Ethnic Hawaiian activists today love to keep inflaming racial hatred by reminding people about the Massie case resulting from the murder of Joseph Kahahawai​​​ by White men on January 8, 1932, and the subsequent prosecution, guilty verdict, and one-hour genteel "sentence" served by the the men. See
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/island-murder-joseph-kahahawais-murder/
The Goto case from four decades previously has never been forgotten, as shown by the recent college production of a play and film about it; although it is rarely mentioned and does not raise manufactured outrage nowadays, perhaps because ethnic Japanese are not making demands for racial supremacy or reparations.

Another historic grievance among Japanese in Hawaii against Whites unfolded from 1897 to 1900. The best detailed documentation is found in this book, with lengthy quotes on Conklin's webpage:
Book Review of William M. Morgan Ph.D., PACIFIC GIBRALTAR: U.S. - JAPANESE RIVALRY OVER THE ANNEXATION OF HAWAII, 1885-1898 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2011)
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/PacificGibraltarBookReview.html
Before 1897 Asian men who had lived in Hawaii for a long enough time, and who took the oath of loyalty to become naturalized subjects of the Kingdom, were eligible to vote. But the Bayonet Constitution of 1897, forced upon Kalakaua by White men from America and Europe, stripped all Asians of voting rights. (Kalakaua and the ethnic Hawaiians were probably not unhappy about that particular aspect of the new Constitution because Asians were coming to vastly outnumber ethnic Hawaiians.) The Japanese government, and local Japanese in Hawaii, were unhappy about the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Many of the plantation laborers had prior military experience in Japan. "Back in Honolulu, stories circulated that royalists offered Japanese laborers full citizenship if they helped restore the monarchy. Instigators apparently told laborers on one plantation that annexation would permanently extend their contracts. Armed with their long cane knives, four hundred Japanese marched on Honolulu to protest. Consul-General Fijii Saburo rushed to the city's outskirts and dispersed the mob.... The arrival of the armored corvette Kongo on January 28 gave Fujii more leverage. Stevens worried that Japan would try to extract political concessions, perhaps even the vote for Japanese" (Morgan, Gibraltar p.111) "On February 23 the Japanese cruiser Naniwa appeared off the reef. ... [It] far outclassed any U.S. vessel, including the Boston. The Naniwa carried instructions for Fujii to press the suffrage issue. British commissioner Wodehouse attached 'considerable importance' to the added leverage provided by the two Japanese warships." (p.113) These chapter titles from Morgan's book accurately identify their content:
Chapter 13: Japanese Immigration: From Lifeline to Threat, pp. 188-197
Chapter 14: The U.S.-Japan Crisis of 1897, pp. 198-217

"The Japanese-American clash produced the 1897 annexation treaty. The confrontation dramatized Hawai'i's vulnerability and its strategic value in case of war in the Pacific. Japan's assertion of significant national interests in Hawai'i and its attempt to block annexation surprised everyone. American worries about Japanese subversion or even coercion of Hawai'i mounted substantially, hardening annexationist sentiment in the administration and the Congress. The confrontation gave the Hawaiian issue an urgency and credibility that made annexation in 1898 a near certainty." (page 217)

Another long-simmering historic grievance by ethnic Japanese against the U.S. in general and Whites in particular concerns the establishment of English as the mandatory language of instruction in every subject in every "school" in Hawaii, both government and private, which wanted certification that they satisfied the law that every child must attend "school." The law was passed by the Republic of Hawaii in 1896, to prepare for annexation to the U.S. by ensuring that all children regardless of ethnicity would grow up able to speak English; and it had little practical effect on Hawaiian kids because, by 1892 (still in the Kingdom), 95% of all the government schools in the Kingdom were already using English. The 1896 law primarily affected the private schools on the plantations which were using Japanese as their language of instruction. To make sure their kids would grow up able to speak Japanese as well as English, The Japanese promptly responded by setting up after-school and weekend academies where Japanese language was perpetuated by teaching all the subjects in Japanese. Japanese ethnic pride and loyalty are shown by the fact that over the decades there have been hundreds of these Japanese academies, including some still operating today. Hawaiians could have done the same thing but chose not to. The government of the Territory of Hawaii continued trying to discourage or forbid these Japanese-language academies, resulting in litigation continuously through 1927 rising all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. See documentation by Ken Conklin about 35% of the way down on webpage
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/hawlangillegal.html
The fact that the attempt to suppress Japanese language schools remains a sore point even until recently is seen in the title of this book
Noriko Asato, "Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language Schools in Hawaii, California, and Washington, 1919-1927" University of Hawaii Press, July 2005, 192 pages. See the UH Press description of the book, which is still in print to this day, at
https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/teaching-mikadoism-the-attack-on-japanese-language-schools-in-hawaii-california-and-washington-1919-1927/

A major historical grievance against the U.S. in general and Whites in particular, spanning many decades, is immigration policy. Today the greatest controversies concern illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America through the U.S. southern border, and immigration from Muslim and Arabic nations. But in the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s the big controversy concerned banning of immigration from China, expanded later to include all of Asia. The topic is so huge that readers are advised to simply use internet search engines, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and expanding to exclude Japanese and Filipinos and all other Asians from coming to reside in the U.S. (therefore including Hawaii) in the Immigration act of 1924. But even before annexation in 1898 and the Organic Act of 1900, the Republic of Hawaii, still an independent nation and not yet subject to U.S. laws, but anticipating annexation, began restricting Chinese immigration in light of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The Act of 1924 eliminated immigration from Japan, violating the so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” that had previously protected Japanese immigration from legal restrictions.

Here is an interesting illustration of how the Chinese Exclusion Act was circumvented by one very exceptional man who used subterfuge to change world history. Readers of this webpage might be shocked to learn that Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who led the overthrow of the monarchy in China and founding of the Republic of China, was born in Hawaii. WHAT!!! Yes, he had a birth certificate to prove it. See Ken Conklin's webpage
"Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his views about Hawaiian sovereignty"
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/sunyatsen.html
Of course his Hawaiian birth was a falsehood documented by a very real, official birth certificate signed on March 14, 1904 by Mr. A. L. C. Atkinson, the Secretary of the Territory of Hawai‘i -- the highest civil servant after the Governor of Hawaii. It showed Dr. Sun had been born in Hawaii on March 24, 1870; and therefore, under terms of the 1896 Constitution of the Republic of Hawaii and the 1898 Treaty of Annexation Dr. Sun was a U.S. citizen entitled to enter the U.S. despite the Chinese Exclusion Act. Sun's friends in Hawaii persuaded the Territorial government to issue the birth certificate so that Dr. Sun would be able to enter the mainland U.S. to raise money and recruit Chinese men for his revolution to overthrow the Emperor. See detailed research "A Re-Investigation of the Mystery of Sun Yatsen’s Hawaiian Birth Certificate" by Patrick Anderson, Hawaiian Journal of History, University of Hawai'i Press, Volume 52, 2018 pp. 57-87.
https://doi.org/10.1353/hjh.2018.0002
A photo of the birth certificate is at
http://imagesofoldhawaii.com/certificate-of-hawaiian-birth/
and accompanying documents enabling Dr. Sun to enter the U.S., are at
https://i1.wp.com/imagesofoldhawaii.com/wp-content/uploads/Sun_Yat-sen_Hawaii_Birth_Certificate-Issued_by_the_US_to_allow_Sun-s_travel_in_Us.jpg

The two most emotional historical grievances felt by Japanese-Americans happened in the first half of the 1940s, and continue to resonate even now 80 years later. Both of them stem from U.S. response to December 7, 1941, "a day that shall live in infamy", when the Empire of Japan staged a "sneak" bombing attack on Pearl Harbor (with small side attacks on other O'ahu targets) resulting in about 2400 Americans killed (including some civilians) and about 1100 wounded, with 18 Navy ships sunk or run aground.

(1) On February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 calling for the forced removal of ethnic Japanese from coastal areas to detention camps hundreds of miles away, for fear they might be disloyal to America and assist Japanese forces in case of any Japanese attempt to invade America following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Some reports say there were as many as 120,000 ethnic Japanese impacted by this order, thousands of whom were American-born citizens of the U.S. Those who were removed and interned, some for several years in deplorable conditions, and their children and grandchildren, have never forgotten. Many years later the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its original decision to uphold this clear violation of Constitutional rights; and restitution of $20,000 per person was paid. It wasn't until 1988 that the U.S. President (Reagan) finally issued a formal apology, which in Japanese culture was more important than the money, and long overdue. In 2020 the California legislature finally issued a formal apology for its role in the forced removals and property confiscations of the 1940s. The Japanese internment history continues to be the focus of not only historical grievance but also is cited both pro and con regarding current U.S. immigration policy and asylum for people from nations where terrorism runs rampant and even has government approval. The Battle of Ni'ihau was a focus of attention in Honolulu on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese American Citizens League -- a book by Michelle Malkin defending the Japanese internment policy had dueling commentaries in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin by author Malkin and JACL spokesman Dave Forman -- further information about the Battle of Ni'ihau, and full text of the two commentaries, is provided at the end of this section.

(2) The United States is the only nation that has ever dropped atomic bombs on another nation. That nation was Japan. It happened twice in 1945, first incinerating Hiroshima on August 6 and then, on August 9 after Japan had once again refused to surrender, Nagasaki was incinerated. The death tolls of innocent civilians were staggering (perhaps 100,000 in each city), not only from the initial blasts but also from lingering radiation poisoning which caused slow, agonizing deaths of men, women, and children of all ages, some of whom are still living and all of whom are remembered in prayers and ceremonies by their children and grandchildren (including some in Hawaii). Anti-U.S. and anti-White activists like to say dropping those bombs was immoral despite Japan's refusal to surrender and the likelihood of horrendous American casualties if an invasion was needed -- and they say the main reason why the bombs were dropped was that the victims were Asians, not Whites.

On Monday August 9, 2004 the Honolulu Star-Bulletin published side-by-side commentaries on the occasion of a convention in Waikiki celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Japanese-American Citizens League. One commentary was authored by Michelle Malkin, touting her book. The other was authored by JACL spokesman and Hawaii civil rights activist David Forman. The original URL, which seems to be no longer working, was
http://starbulletin.com/2004/08/09/editorial/commentary.html

Right from the Start

Michelle Malkin

Monday, August 9, 2004

Rethinking the wisdom of Japanese-American internment

Almost everything you'll hear this week from the Japanese American Citizens League about the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II is false. It's time to correct the record. Why now? Because so many critics of the current war on terror cite the dangers of repeating this World War II "mistake." Getting the history right is vital to informed debate about the proper balance between civil liberties and national security.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the internment of Japanese, German, Italian and other enemy aliens, the relocation and evacuation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast and the detainment of hundreds of suspected subversive Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not the result of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry.

It might seem hard to imagine today, but 60 years ago, both Hawaii and the West Coast were extremely vulnerable to Japanese attack. With Japanese submarines roaming free up and down our coastlines, the U.S. government's national security concerns -- in particular, the threat of espionage by ethnic Japanese in support of the Japanese emperor's war effort -- were real and urgent.

More than any other source of intelligence, it was the "MAGIC" messages -- Japan's diplomatic communications that were decoded by American signal intelligence officers -- that influenced top decision-makers within the Roosevelt administration.

Beginning in December 1940, with the possibility of war looming, a series of MAGIC messages revealed Japan's intent to establish an espionage network in the Western Hemisphere. Within months, West Coast consulates reported to Tokyo on their progress in setting up the spy network's surveillance of military posts and bases, shipyards, airfields and ports.

A message from Japan's Los Angeles consulate stated, "We have already established contacts with absolutely reliable Japanese in the San Pedro and San Diego area, who will keep a close watch on all shipments of airplanes and other war materials, and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments. The same steps have been taken with regard to traffic across the U.S.-Mexican border." The message also stated that the network had U.S.-born Japanese-American spies in the U.S. Army.

A message from Japan's Seattle consulate stated that Japanese spies were "securing intelligences concerning the concentration of warships with-in the Bremerton Naval Yard, information with regard to mercantile shipping and airplane manufacturer, movements of military forces, as well as that which concerns troop maneuvers." The same message said that Japanese consular officials had "made arrangements to collect intelligences from second generation Japanese draftees on matters dealing with the troops, as well as troop speech and behavior."

The most detailed MAGIC messages were those sent by Japan's Honolulu consulate. With increasing frequency leading up to December 1941, these messages provided meticulous reports on ship locations and movements within Pearl Harbor. Coupled with other information, the Honolulu-Tokyo messages were, as author James Gannon put it, "a smoking gun" signaling an impending attack on Oahu -- but due to decryption backlogs, courier delays, petty rivalries and bureaucratic bungling, not a single one of them reached Hawaii before Dec. 7.

The information sent by Honolulu consular officials was obtained by an espionage cell that included at least two ethnic Japanese local residents, one of whom was a U.S. citizen. The spy ring monitored ship movements, water currents and made note of military routines on installations and at airfields. Among the agents' observations: that no American warships were stationed off the west coast of Maui, so that attacking Japanese fighter-bombers could concentrate exclusively on Oahu; that the American battleships moored in pairs, so that the inshore ship could not be struck by a torpedo; that a large number of ships were always in the port on Saturdays and Sundays; and that the Americans conducted hardly any patrols at all north of Oahu. This information was critical to the planning of the Pearl Harbor raid.

Local law enforcement officials knew about the Honolulu spies, but before Pearl Harbor there was nothing they could do to stop them since observing ship movements from public locations was legal. On the day of the Pearl Harbor raid, the governor of Hawaii declared martial law. The writ of habeas corpus was suspended, and hundreds of ethnic Japanese considered potentially subversive, including the two ethnic Japanese who participated in the Honolulu espionage ring, were confined without trial -- an option that was unavailable to military and law enforcement officials on the mainland where civilian courts were still operative.

Years later, after the MAGIC cables were declassified, the architect of the West Coast evacuation, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, stated that MAGIC was instrumental in shaping the administration's homeland security policies. President Roosevelt himself was an avid reader of the MAGIC messages. Yet virtually every popular account of the ethnic Japanese experience during World War II has ignored MAGIC and its vital importance. Leading high school textbooks condemn evacuation, relocation and internment as shameful injustices -- without informing students of the vast amount of communications intelligence that informed FDR's decisions.

The effort by Japanese-American activists and their media allies to minimize the importance of the intelligence that supported President Roosevelt's wartime decisions amounts to educational malpractice. In order to fairly judge present homeland security measures, all Americans -- especially our students -- deserve an accurate account of the past.

Michelle Malkin, a Filipino American, is a syndicated columnist and author of the new book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror." Her column appears regularly in MidWeek.

Michelle Malkin
www.michellemalkin.com

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Author Another view

David Forman

Never again should the U.S. deny individual rights based on ethnicity

Michelle Malkin knows that the Japanese American Citizen League's 75th Anniversary National Convention is being held this week -- tomorrow through Saturday -- here in Honolulu. Malkin's use of this event to promote her new book, although opportunistic, is a civil right protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, I find her accusation that "almost everything you'll hear this week from the Japanese American Citizens League about the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II is false" to be offensive.

Nothing Malkin writes will ever erase the painful memories of Japanese-American businesses and homes lost and families uprooted because of their ethnicity. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who was interned with her family at the age of 7 and later co-authored "Farewell to Manzanar," has educated many people about these facts. She will be presented with a Japanese American of the Biennium award during the JACL's Sayonara Banquet on Saturday evening at the Hawai'i Convention Center.

Nor can Malkin's words detract from the stories of Japanese-American soldiers who fought valiantly in Europe and elsewhere while their families remained incarcerated in the United States. A tribute to World War II veterans -- including representatives of the Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo Code Breakers, Filipino veterans, Rosie the Riveters, the Women's Army Auxiliary, the Women Air Force Service Pilots, in addition to Japanese Americans who served in the 442nd Infantry, 100th Battalion, 1399 Engineering Battalion and the Military Intelligence Service -- will be held from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Friday at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

Nevertheless, I do agree with one observation made by Malkin: "All Americans -- especially our students -- deserve an accurate account of the past." However, her baseless accusation that "Japanese-American activists and their media allies" have engaged in "educational malpractice" rings hollow for several reasons.

>> First, Malkin relies entirely upon the so-called MAGIC messages/cables, which respected historians, academics, government commissions and courts of law have decisively rejected as grounds for the purported military necessity of relocating and interning Japanese Americans during World War II. (See, e.g., John Herzig, "Japanese Americans and MAGIC," Amerasia Journal 11:2 [1984]; Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, "Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians 475" [1983].)

Nothing in these documents justified the mass incarceration, without trial or hearing, of more than 100,000 people chosen strictly on the basis of race. In fact, the government raised the "Magic Cables" defense without success during litigation in the 1980s that resulted in an order vacating the 40-year-old conviction of a Japanese American for violating the wartime exclusion and curfew orders. (See Hirabayashi v. United States, 828 F.2d 591 [9th Circuit 1987].)

>> Second, Malkin appears to have based her argument on a false premise. She seems to suggest that if one person of Japanese ancestry were involved in espionage (in fact, no Japanese American was charged or convicted), then the entire racial group could rightly be imprisoned indefinitely without charges of disloyalty or trial. Moreover, Malkin's misleading reference to "the internment of Japanese, German, Italian and other enemy aliens" blatantly obscures the disparate treatment of these ethnic groups. Despite the demonstrable disloyalty of those German Americans and Italian Americans, who were clearly identified with the Nazi Bund and Mussolini's groups prior to the war, these European descendants received individual hearings while Japanese Americans were interned en masse without due process of law.

>> Third, Malkin's dismissive statement that our government's shameful actions "were not the result of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry" ignores the meticulously documented history of racism (among other complex factors) that undeniably contributed to these events. A person truly interested in providing an "accurate account of the past" surely would not gloss over the context provided by the virulent racism and the organized anti-Japanese movement that relegated Japanese immigrants and their families to second-class status. It should also be noted that those who lived through martial law in Hawaii have a much less nostalgic perspective on the experience, which Malkin does not appear to consider or comprehend.

I have had the pleasure of working with many people of good conscience, including Japanese-American activists like JACL National Executive Director John Tateishi and countless others from diverse backgrounds, who successfully obtained redress for the injustices of the internment. Since then the JACL has used its experiences to advocate equal justice for all.

As a Filipino American, I have been welcomed by the JACL and learned a great deal while volunteering my time on a wide variety of civil rights issues that affect all Americans. I heartily encourage others, whether Japanese American or not, to learn more about the principled efforts of the JACL by registering for the JACL Convention at the Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort & Spa. Call 921-5036 for more information on the convention, or 523-8464 to join the local chapter.

David M. Forman is a graduate of Harvard College and the William S. Richardson School of Law. Although he serves as public relations chairman for the 75th Anniversary JACL National Convention, this op-ed was written in his individual capacity.

JACL Hawaii
www.jaclhawaii.org

** Inset box explanation by Mary Poole, Star-Bulletin editorial page editor

About the emotional issues raised by these columns

There are few historical dilemmas that strike closer to the heart of the Japanese-American experience than the relocation and internment of otherwise loyal AJAs during the Second World War. The subject always comes up during conventions of the Japanese-American Citizens League, the 2004 edition of which begins tomorrow in Honolulu.

Columnist Michelle Malkin's new book, "In Defense of Internment," questions the conventional attitudes about the event in the past half-century, and her conclusions have been derided by a number of scholars.

Malkin submitted a column to the Star-Bulletin on Friday advancing her argument that the internment was justified. Because of Hawaii sensitivities on the issue and because of time constraints, we asked David Forman, a member of the Hawaii JACL chapter, to read Malkin's column before publication and write a response, which is printed below. This is a departure from normal Star-Bulletin practice, but necessary, we felt, given the imminent convention.

Also, Malkin relied heavily on original research by Star-Bulletin writer Burl Burlingame, both from his book "Advance Force -- Pearl Harbor" and a series of articles by Burlingame printed in the Star-Bulletin in 1986 about an Imperial Navy aviator who crashed on Niihau on Dec. 7, 1941. Given the same facts, Malkin came to different conclusions than Burlingame.

Mary Poole
Star-Bulletin editorial page editor


===============

(c) Copyright July 4, 2021 by Kenneth R. Conklin, Ph.D.
All rights reserved

In honor of July 4 being a quadruple holiday for Hawaii:

July 4, 1776: U.S. created by proclamation of its Declaration of Independence.

July 4, 1894: Republic of Hawaii created by proclamation of its Constitution. Thanks to President Sanford Dole.

July 6, 1898: U.S. Senate, returning from holiday, passes joint resolution by vote of 42-21 accepting the Treaty of Annexation offered by Hawaii and previously passed by U.S. House by vote of 290-91. Thanks to President William McKinley.

July 4, 1960: 50th star officially added to U.S. flag. Thanks to President Dwight Eisenhower. (A star gets added on the first July 4 after the new State's Admission Act is passed and signed.)

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