From the Honolulu Advertiser:
A lawsuit filed by five Hawaiians claims that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs is illegally spending dollars reserved for the benefit of those with 50 percent Hawaiian blood or more.
All nine OHA trustees as well as two former trustees are named in the suit, which states that they “expended trust funds without regard to the blood quantum contained in the definition of native Hawaiians” as spelled out in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920.
The lawsuit was filed yesterday in U.S. District Court.
OHA administrator Clyde Namu’o said he wanted to discuss the points of the litigation with attorneys to determine whether the case has merit. He declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit until then.
The trustees, the lawsuit said, have spent trust funds in lobbying Congress for passage of the Akaka bill, which seeks to create a government entity that would represent all with Hawaiian blood regardless of their quantum.
Not surprisingly—but certainly ironically—our institutional obsession with keeping alive “race” and identity politics has led us to the point where race is being used by certain purportedly aggrieved groups as a way to beat back race-neutrality in favor of group identity entitlements based around the idea of essentialism (which I’ve argued necessarily underlies notions of “race)”. That is, we’ve returned to the thinking that animated the One Drop Rule—only now we’ve managed to flip the terms so that the formerly aggrieved are assuming the position of power over determining identity designations.
How anyone can argue that this is not the natural (structural) offshoot of a culture that continues to support legally sanctioned race-based “discrimination” (in the strictest sense) is beyond me. In fact, this kind of lawsuit should act as a direct rebuke against identity politics, the superficial color-fetishizing of the “diversity” movement, and—in particular—the kind of results-based judicial pragmatism that allows us to persist with the anti-individualist program of group-based politics that has turned our democracy into a calculus of warring voting blocs pandered to by necessarily opportunistic politicians.
Notes Roger Clegg at the Corner, in his review of the thinking behind this 1920 Act:
Compare First Regulation to the Reichs Citzenship Law of November 14, 1935: “1. A Jew is anyone who descended from at least three grandparents who were racially full Jews. … 2. A Jew is also one who descended from two full Jewish parents ….â€Â
Indeed. This is a goosestep backward in our country’s racialist past—and it makes perfect sense, given the way we persistently (and “progressively”) seek to redress wrongs in wayw that fliy in the face of our own Constitution, leaving us vulnerable to the erosion of individual liberties through the law of unintended consequences.
Shouldn’t that be quanta as quantum is the smallest amount and they seem to be objecting to small amounts
Correct me if I’m wrong; but, isn’t it unconstitutional to make laws that use race, creed, etc. as their base?
Just asking.
I agree with the post, but the large words made my brain hurt.
Excuse me if I am wrong on this one, but didn’t the constitution read “All men are created equal”.
And where is the MSM and the ACLU? This is a racist issue isn’t it?
“Excuse me if I am wrong on this one, but didn’t the constitution read “All men are created equalâ€Â.”
Sorry bud, wrong document.
“Correct me if I’m wrong; but, isn’t it unconstitutional to make laws that use race, creed, etc. as their base? Just asking.”
Yes and no. If you’re going to make a law based on race, that ostensibly hurts members of the targeted race, then you need to pass “strict scrutiny” by the Supreme Court. Only once in U.S. history has that been done, in the Korematsu case upholding U.S. detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII. That case has been almost universally excoriated.
If you’re making what are termed “benign racial classifications,” a.k.a. affirmative action, then you still need to pass strict scrutiny, but O’Connor held in the Michigan law school case that strict scrutiny is somehow less strict for benign classifications. There are several SCOTUS cases upholding affirmative action programs, even though strict scrutiny is supposedly the rule.
IMO (and, I gather, in Goldstein’s opinion as well), the double standard is stupid. But stupidity, it seems, is no bar to Constitutional rule-making.
There’s enough mud at the bottom of the hill to suggest a mudslide has already taken place.
Harrison, I suspect the law is headed the way of
RICE V. CAYETANO , in which the Supreme Court ruled the Fifteenth Amendment invalidates the electoral qualification (to vote on trustees composing the governing authority of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs) based on ancestry.
FWIW, anyone unfamiliar with OHA and “blood quantum” issues can get a cliff notes version in Justice Kennedy’s opinion at the above link.
They’d be better off spending the money banning poi. That shit just plain sucks.
This was a big deal when I lived in Hawaii almost eight years ago. There is a significant number of “Native Hawaiians” (and I use quotes because, really, there are no more true Native Hawaiians other then those, regardless of race, who are born on the islands) who feel that all non-Hawaiians have no claim to live on the islands and should leave.
I once got into a heated Usenet debate over the issue. My point was that setting aside benefits and special privileges, including schools (such as the Native-Hawaiian only Kamehameha Schools) was by its very definition racist. Of course, they vehemently disagreed with me, and when they couldn’t argue their case logically, they resulted to calling me names.
Hmm, the US Constitution’s 15th amendment says,
You’d think that this would be clear enough.
Yeah
What he said
It’s time for Jesse to add macadamia brown to his rainbow, so that he can approach Planters and Mauna Loa for
exhortionracial harmony money.And for native-American-in-spirit Professor Churchill to start beginning and ending his lectures with “aloha”.
I meant “extortion” above, but “exhortation” sorta works for Jesse and the pay-us-off-or-we’ll-loudly-denounce-you-as-racists “non-profit” enrichment industry.
T/W “zebra”, as in, Can’t we all get along?
Checking out the school’s website, turns out that a “John Doe” filed a lawsuit against the school and it’s racist admission policies. Their take on the lawsuit is here.
Short version:
Lawsuit went in front of the 9th Circuit which, not surprisingly, had no problems with race-restricted schools as long as it didn’t benefit whites and/or conservatives.
“Joe Doe” appealed to the Federal Court of Appeals who then overturned the 9th Circuit (surprise!) saying, essentially, “Um, no, this is pretty unconstitutional”.
The school is appealing the Federal Court of Appeals. That is where it stands now.
TW: “schools”. Heh, funny.
My in-laws are Oglala Lakota, and most live on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. With respect to Native tribes (excluding Hawaiians), the US government cooked up the blood quantum tests in treaties as a sneaky way to LIMIT the sovereignty of tribes. In effect, native people abdicated the definition of “who was an Indian” to the US government. The last thing the US wanted was to contain sovereign tribal nations who could increase their political power by adding to their membership rolls.
But with the government entitlement culture that was born in the Johnson Administration, the issue of blood quantum met the Law of Unintended Consequences; and you end up with ugly, racist pork legislation like the bill proposed by the appropriately-named Senator Akaka.
Xoxotl,
The lawsuit originally went before a District Court, not the Ninth Circuit. The District Court ruled in favor of the school, and thus in favor of racial preferences. The Ninth Circuit overruled that decision, effectively denying racial preferences (but, interestingly, not under a strict scrutiny standard).
So as much as I like to paint the 9th Circuit as the villains, in this case they got it right.
But after any federal appeal, a party can ask for en banc review, meaning every 9th Circuit judge gets together and looks at the case. Because it’s the Ninth Circuit, there’s a good chance they will reverse the original appellate decision, but that remains to be seen.
I take pains to point this out because when you said “appealed to the Federal Court of Appeals,” you gave the impression that someone appealed a 9th Circuit decision to the Circuit court that does patent law stuff.
TR: “record,” as in, Sobek the Anal-Retentive has arrived to set the record straight!
I stand corrected.
TW: “sound”, as in this sounds pretty fishy to me.
The point is that race based preferences are unconstitutional, regardless of what the Supreme Court says. They got it wrong once, and now it’s become common law. Race based preferences plainly violate the 14th amendment, but the courts refuse to see that.
If you want to argue that race based preferences are Constitutional, then you might try opening a business that only caters to whites. You’ll be able to measure the life of that business with a stopwatch.
The judge in the Hopwood Case got it right. Thank God I live in the Circuit where sanity prevails (5th Circuit).
The debates. I have followed w/r to affirmative action generally fall back upon statistical comparisons of ethnic/sex based groups to white males. Statistically disproportionate results are taken as evidence of systemic, institutionalized racism. Affirmative action is seen as the cure for this.
Any attempt to suggest that disproportionate results are caused by something other than systemic, institutionalized racism/sexism is immediately labeled as racist, thereby ending the discussion in most public and institutional forums. This mindset is pervasive throughout the media, the academy, the courts, and many other institutions. Ironically the end result appears to be polarization of society into feuding groups separated by race and sex. Things are getting worse.
Identity politics applies a skin deep solution to a problem that has deep socio-economic roots. It should come as no surprise that the problems have not gone away. Rather than admit failure and regroup we continue with the same failed policy and expect different results.
This is nuts.
TW: makes This just makes things worse.
TW: made
How can the link thingy be made to work???
“The point is that race based preferences are unconstitutional, regardless of what the Supreme Court says.”
My turn to stand corrected, if I suggested otherwise. And no one, not even my Lefty Con Law professors, can read O’Connor’s opinions in the U.Michigan cases and argue that she wasn’t totally making crap up without giggling uncontrollably.
When I worked at Interior, they had a number of, ahem, genetic preferences to defend, including a hiring preference for Indians at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
They got around that one by arguing that they preferred enrolled members of Indian tribes, that membership was a political status, and the US had treaty relationships with the tribes. Hence it was a political differentiation/discrimination, not one based on race.
This statute, tho, seems to make it straight out racial status, down to defining the degree of DNA required.
If the native Hawaiians don’t like the idea of getting ahead on merit instead of race, let ‘em go back where they came from!
Turing = earth, as in, Make up your own fuuny, this time.
The primordial stew? Japan? Microbes from space?
Some additional info:
Hate America Professor (A “Hawaiian supremacist” who, IIRC, opposes Akaka because it doesn’t go far enough. But, gives a bit of background on the separatist movement. I added that link to her wikipedia entry, and someone has since changed the intro a bit. Perhaps someone could make sure WP is telling the truth about Trask, Akaka, etc.)
WSJ readers learn about “reconquista” in anti-Akaka editorial (Even the open borders loons at the WSJ admit that the Akaka bill could lead to Mexico reclaiming the U.S. southwest, although don’t expect to hear too much about that from either Dems or Repubs)
And, surprise!, there appears to be money somewhere near the bottom of this issue.
Hmmm.
Ok. Follow me on this.
I’m South Korean, therefore asian. My ancestors were the ones that migrated all over the place in the Pacific Islands, North America and South America. That means I’m significantly one up on you all “Johnny come latelys”.
Now. I demand a Whopper with extra cheese and a side order of chicken fries from each one of you or else I’ll evict you off my continent and/or Pacific islands.
And make it snappy!
Capiche?
Thanks for fixing my links. I was doing some experimenting trying to figure out what went wrong. Looks like embedded spaces in the wrong places are the kiss of death.
Is there a HTML for dummies type of book that lays out the format/syntax for doing this stuff so I don’t burn down your time fixing my mistakes?
thanks
As someone who’s got a couple of injun great grandparents (and one black great great grandparent) I’ve got to say .. yo! Guys! You think this is a NEW thing?
TW: recently as in “when did you think it changed?”
There have been plenty of instances of people suing to get SBA funds, Pell Grants and the like based on racial set asides. I even recall a case from the late 1980’s of a transexual who was still legally male suing to be allowed to bid on a federal contract where 10% of subcontractors had to be women.
It is only going to get worse. The stealth issue here is that the set aside programs have morphed into matters of “justice” and the states have bought into it so that now their programs reflect this kind of racialism.
So true. Caucasians are now a minority in my county (where non-white business groups openly thrive), yet I have received no offers to pick up free government choose nor have I read one pouty article about my “hardships” in the daily newspaper.
A colleague from Argentina teaches her baby Spanish as a way of sticking it to The Man (America), but didn’t the Spaniards kill and conquer the indigenous people there??
It’s enough to make a reasonable person’s head spin. We are living an Orwellian lunacy.
Oops…free government cheese.
Jeff,
Perhaps this arrives too late or too tangentially, but I’ve just gone back and read your argument that essentialism underlies the notion of race, and frankly, it’s a mess.
It’s a mess because you seem to be confused about the cultural construction of race. Nobody is trying to “redescribe ‘race’ as ‘culture.’” Nobody is arguing that blackness, for example, is the product of an essentialist black culture.
Rather, the argument is that “race,” as we understand it, is the product of American or Western culture. (And other cultures will understand it or recognize it differently)
That there is no scientific – or even phenotypical – basic for race, does not change the fact that it exists as a social construction and it is transmitted through culture. Attitutes toward black people may have changed in the past century, but we still recognize that there are black people. And though we may not be able to even define what makes them black, we know them when we seem them.
At least in the everyday world, we make racial distinctions and are able to understand those distinctions. Dave Chappelle has a skit called “The Racial Draft” in which white people take Colin Powell in the first round, Jews pick up Lenny Kravitz and Asians are crushed to learn that African-Americans have beat them to Tiger Woods. (To which Chappelle replies, “He’s been discriminated against, had death threats and dates white women. Sounds like a black man to me.”)
The skit is funny because we all “know” that Powell, Kravitz and Woods are black. And if it seems like I’m stating the obvious here, you’re right, I am. All three of them are black. Not because there is any essential similarity between them, but because our cultural construction of race defines them as such, regardless, even, of how they define themselves.
So no Jeff, “shedding your racial identity is not as simple as removing a hat.” In our culture there is no such thing as racial colorblindess, everybody has to be something, not because of any “heritage” mumbo-jumbo, but because there already is a “singular American” culture, with all its attendant social constructions, including “race.”
Hmmm.
Ok. So if one drop of native Hawaiian blood is required *and* you don’t have to live in a geographical area *then* can you claim native Hawaiian status with a blood transfusion?
So if I pay someone $20 for a 1cc syringe of O+ blood, which is more than 1 drop, and injected into my arm, does that mean I’m now a native Hawaiian?
Just call me the Big Ass Kahuna!
Whats4lunch —
While I won’t be so presumptuous as to call your response a “mess”—because that would be unnecessarily rude—I will say that I find it both poorly articulated and unpersuasive.
Oh, what the hell. It’s a mess.
You write,
Uh, except when we don’t. Which is how we have famed instances of “passing”—which enabled certain lightskinned blacks to escape blood laws. Are you going to tell people who insist that they are black but don’t happen to look black that they aren’t, in fact, black? And if they are, what makes them such?
Your argument is entirely circular: because we believe race to exist, it exists, and you can show it to me. Fine. Is race a function of pigmentation? Blood? How? Why? To what end?
Jeff,
Race is a function of cultural knowledge and the social construction of reality. The fact that it has little or no basis, doesn’t change anything.
You say circular; I say dialectic: culture defines race, people born into the culture are slotted into races, people of various races recreate the culture.
As for this notion of insisting that black people are black regardless of their personal definitions, wasn’t that the whole point of passing? People being defined as black regardless of phenotype? If they weren’t black, why would they need to “pass” for white? They’d be white.
But, as you say Jeff, “certain lightskinned blacks” could pass for whites. Regardless of what they appear to be, you’re the one defining them as black.
And, really, how is this all that different from today? Do we hear a lot of talk about Tiger Woods in the context of Asians in golf? Is Lenny Kravitz black, or half-white and, if so, which half? Colin Powell speaks Yiddish, does that make him a Jew?
Maybe we should take him in the second round?
Huh? The fact that it doesn’t have any scientific basis is precisely the point. Because it allows us to decide what to do with an empty construct that relies for its coherence on a debunked essentialist notion.
I really don’t follow your point—but that could be in part attributable to your formatting, which is a mess.
I’m not defining these people as black. I’m showing how they try to define themselves as black, and how the social construct idea both permits it and relies on bankrupt notion of essentialism to do so. That is, people who don’t “look” black can claim a racial heritage regardless of what YOU see when you look at them.
I think you’ve completely missed the point, frankly.
Jeff,
The social construct requires neither science nor essentialism. The social construct exists simply because we assent to it and repeat it, as you do through the cultural institution of language.
When you say “certain black people” do you mean people “indicative of condemnation or discredit?” Do you mean “very sad, gloomy or calamitous” people? Or how about people “relating to covert intelligence operations?”
According to my dictionary, all of those are definitions of “black.”
But that’s not what you mean is it? What you mean when you say “black people” are members of a certain race or people “of various population groups having dark pigmentation of the skin.”
Even if you’re not “defining these people as black,” you’re assenting to someone else’s definition of it.
There is no more reason to distinguish between people based on their knowlege of covert intelligence operations than the color of their skin, so why do we do it?
I just want to remind folks that the 50% blood quantum definition was created by Congress when it passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act in 1920. It wasn’t created by Native Hawaiians, or Hawaiian nationals, or the government of the Hawaiian kingdom. It was created by the United States Congress.
And BTW, Congress was controlled by Republicans at the time! (House: 240 Republicans, 192 Democrats; Senate 49 Republicans, 47 Democrats)
Oh, come on. The logic that allows us to keep believing in race—which today means the logic behind the social construct theory—is based on essentialism. That’s just how it operates. If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and insist it is alogical, fine. But that doesn’t make it so.
The rest of your comment is simply silly.
And the fact that you conclude by arguing my original point in the essay you termed “a mess” is further evidence that you really haven’t understood any of what is being argued here or there.
Scott —
So what? This country has passed a number of bad laws based on now discredited racial essentialism arguments.
Who it is that is doing the suing here—now, today —is the point, not who made the law in the 1920s.
Jeff,
Alright, I get it. After three “mess” references, I get it.
I’m sorry I called your essay a mess. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I apologize.
(But seriously, I thought a guy who called his female critics – what was it? “a clatch of cunts?” – would be able to take it. Or is that your definition of the female essence? Biology and destiny and all that?
No, I called Chris Clarke and his commenters a clatch of cunts. I engaged with Jill in a manner that was quite civil. I happen to think highly of the Feministe ladies, even though I disagree with them on many issues.
So again, you failed to read and understand. Is this a point of pride with you?
I don’t need your apology, honestly. You didn’t hurt my feelings, you were just rude and made an ass out of yourself. And you continue to do so.
Why? Beats me. But have at it.
We are also driving the Iraqis mad with our race obsesssion, as Hitchens points out. Slate article
Let’s hope the Iraqis are smarter than all that.