Politics Hawaiian Reparations Face a Serious Test The dysfunctions of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act are coming home to roost. “This is not a race issue,” said even Hawaiian Republican party leaders as they denounced a local white resident’s actions. But race is indeed the issue, and a new lawsuit seeks to challenge it. Hawaii, one of the most expensive states in America, basically gives away land, but only to people of the designated ethnicity—in this case those with at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian blood. This scheme functions as reparations. For those sidelined, it looks like the kind of reverse discrimination prohibited by the 14th Amendment. How does Hawaii get away with this? The 18th and 19th centuries were a pretty solid time for powerful white men. They could write a Constitution granting themselves inalienable rights while ensuring a grotesque global system of slavery prospered. They could march west taking whatever land they wanted, killing Native Americans or dumping them on reservations. They could use Chinese immigrants to do dangerous work building railroads and then exclude them from the U.S. by law. And in 1893, white sugarcane plantation owners from the mainland U.S., aided by U.S. Marines, forcibly took over the Hawaiian kingdom, granting themselves the rights to land and power as they saw fit. They later persuaded the U.S. government to annex Hawaii and then later make it a territory ruled by Washington, all without the input of the Hawaiian people. Locals were by and large impoverished in the process. Then in 1921 the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was passed by the U.S. Congress as a form of reparations. The law set aside roughly 200,000 acres of Hawaiian land taken by the federal government to offer via 99-year, one-dollar-per-year leases to Native Hawaiians. It was the act’s goal to preserve the land for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries in perpetuity; you cannot even inherit the land from a Native Hawaiian leaseholder unless you also qualify racially. So the children of a 50-percent Hawaiian lease holder (i.e., perhaps 25 percent Native blood) get to keep the land, and whatever home, farm or factory the parent built on it, while their children at, say, 12.5 percent Native blood have to give the land back to the government after the parent’s death. The system is so designed to make sure that, while extended relatives of Native Hawaiians are cut off, the land eventually circulates back to whatever 50 percent Natives are left. It is possible Hawaiians will intermarry with other races in sufficient numbers that someday no 50-percenters will be left. No one has fully decided what happens then. The next problem came from the land itself. A complex bureaucracy was set up to administer the program, slowing any transfer to Native Hawaiians. In addition, in the early days, much of the land was not desirable. It was mostly far away from the few towns on the islands, and usually lacked water, sewer, electricity, and paved road access. As cities grew out to meet the once rural land, it became valuable to those who were interested in more than subsistence farming. The current waiting list for a piece of land has over 29,000 names. The person at the top of the list for Oahu has been waiting since 1979 for his chance to come up, according to a report from 2024. Worse yet, if someone on the list has children with the right amount of Native blood, they inherit his place on the list, meaning you can stay buried numerically on the list even after people once in front of you are literally dead. Meanwhile, new people continue to add their names. As to the value of the land as reparations for what the white people did to Hawaii in 1893—it’s questionable. Many of the Native Hawaiians on the list are poor. Native Hawaiians experience poverty at rates higher than many other groups in the state; they use SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps) at disproportionately high rates compared with their share of Hawaii’s population, such that about 29 percent of SNAP recipients in Hawaii are Native Hawaiian. At least 28 percent of the homeless population is Native Hawaiian. Poverty is also linked to forced, overcrowded, over-priced, rented multi-generational living conditions. The very people the land program were to make historical amends with cannot afford mortgages or to build houses on their nearly-free land. Lots of government programs have had to be created to try and make up for all this, but the end result is, despite good and generous albeit discriminatory intentions, a large number of Native Hawaiians have not been made right since 1893. Now comes a new challenge to the idea of reparations. A lawsuit filed in Honolulu questions the system, claiming the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act is unconstitutional. It was filed this year on behalf of a white man who is not Native Hawaiian but is described in the lawsuit as a lifelong Hawaii resident. It’s the latest challenge to Native Hawaiian entitlements amid the Trump administration’s push-back against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.  “We are not just a race; we are beyond race,” one advocate said. “Like American Indians and Alaska Natives, we are political bodies with a trust relationship with the federal government.”  “We do not seek to take anything from anyone,” countered one lawyer who helped file the suit. “All we seek to do is to make sure that this program is available to everyone on equal footing, regardless of their blood quantum. So whether you are 100 percent Native Hawaiian or zero percent, a successful lawsuit would result in everyone having the same chance of qualifying.” The lawyer continued that he is confident the Supreme Court will ultimately agree government classifications based on ancestry or race are unconstitutional. The suit says, “This explicitly ancestry-based requirement establishes a permanent government mandate for state officials to engage in outright racial discrimination, perpetuates stereotypes, and limits housing opportunities for most Hawaii residents.” And with that we’re back to all the problems of modern reparations. Some 130 years after wrongdoing by the white plantation owners in Hawaii, the make-right things are going to people with no direct ties to past injustices, controlled by some discriminatory standard because one does have to draw a cut-off line somewhere. Likewise, current taxpayers and officials had no personal involvement in historical injustices such as slavery, segregation, or the overthrow of governments. Some argue reparations just end up deepening racial divisions by emphasizing historical grievances and assigning collective guilt based on at times dubious ancestry. They argue public policy should focus on building a shared future rather than trying to compensate for long past injustices. In the case of Hawaii, basically giving land to people who cannot really afford the costs of making a life out of it creates new problems. Modern discrimination just replaces past discrimination. How long should a government continue using racial classifications to remedy historical injustices when the intended beneficiaries still struggle and the promised benefits often remain out of reach? The post Hawaiian Reparations Face a Serious Test appeared first on The American Conservative.