Today, my latest editorial has been posted on www.hawaiireporter.com on the ignored conflict between immigrant Asians and Polynesians at many Honolulu high schools.
If you have any comments, please dont hesitate to contact me at madtiger99@yahoo.com
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?288cd50e-90e7-4f02-a858-413e44584dfa
The Ignored Inter-Racial Conflict
A Fresh Perspective - Aug. 6, 2004
By Pablo Wegesend, 8/6/2004 1:41:11 AM
Whenever there is a discussion about race relations in Hawaii, it is about either 1) Hawaii as a melting pot, where every gets along and inter-racial marriages are common, 2) the white landowners stole Native Hawaiian land and later exploited Japanese and Filipino plantation workers or 3) Caucasians getting harassed, mocked, bullied and even assaulted by Native Hawaiians.
But there is a rarely discussed inter-racial conflict in Hawaii. It is the conflict between immigrant Asians and Polynesians.
This has greater significance in Honolulu schools than non-Honolulu schools.
You see, in most of Hawaii, most Asians are local and have adapted to local culture. In suburban Oahu and in the Neighbor Islands, a lot of Asians and Native Hawaiians speak pidgin, wear surf shorts, tank tops, and love the beach. They share a common local culture.
I ask my fellow UH students who come from suburban/rural Oahu and the Neighbor Islands about ethnic relations at their high school, they told me everyone gets along.
In many Honolulu high schools, however, things are different. At McKinley High School (my alma mater) as well as Farrington, and Kaimuki, a large portion of Asians there are recent immigrants from Vietnam, Philippines, China and Korea. Also in those schools are recent immigrants from Micronesia as well Samoans and Tongans, many of whom are living in public housing like Kuhio Park Terrace, Mayor Wright Housing Palolo Valley Housing, Kalihi Valley Housing, etc.
In the 1990s', there were fights between Filipinos and Samoans at Farrington High School, and fights between Vietnamese and Samoans at McKinley. The specific incidents that started the fight, I don't know.
But I have witnessed other evidence of this racial conflict. Being that I'm neither Asian nor Polynesian, I get to hear what Asians think of Polynesians and vice versa.
When riding the School Street bus, I heard some Polynesian kids from public housing mocking the Filipino and Chinese languages. There were elderly Asian people in those buses who ignored the mockery.
I heard Asians from my high school express hatred of Polynesians. They said they were bullied by Polynesian kids. They made racist jokes about Polynesian culture. They view Polynesians as ignorant bullies. Most of the Asians expressing these thoughts were either immigrants or from immigrant families.
This is a very serious issue that can lead to bigger conflicts if they are not addressed. Yet it is almost never discussed in the major newspapers, nor are they widely discussed in academic circles.
I am assuming that most in the mainstream Hawaii media are clueless on this issue. After all, there do not seem to be many Vietnamese, Micronesians, Samoans, Tongans or immigrant Filipinos working in the local newspapers. It seems that most of the people in the local media are either 1) Caucasians from the mainland, 2)Local Caucasians from middle class areas like Hawaii Kai or Kailua or 3) local Asians from suburban Oahu! Most likely, they went to private school. If they went to public school, it's probably not McKinley, Farrington or Kaimuki.
With those circumstances, it's likely that the media people have not witnessed any race conflicts that I have been discussing, and therefore is not something on their mind.
As for academia, in the one ethnic studies course I took at UH, NOTHING was mentioned about conflicts between Polynesians and immigrant Asians! Same with that one sociology course on ethnicity. All that those classes discussed were the hardships Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Hawaiians faced from the White Man!
Nothing about how much people from those groups accomplish! Nothing about European immigrants. Almost nothing about blacks looting Korean stores in the LA riots, and NOTHING about Samoans fighting with immigrant Asians in Hawaii! Too many professors teach ethnic relations courses with the assumption that the only race conflict worth analyzing is white persecution of the non-white. They forget that their job is to look at the whole picture.
It is time for all, including professors and news people, to address the facts and the truth.
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