It is not in keeping with the spirit of Aloha for the government to give citizens of one ancestry land or money or special privileges denied to all other citizens of Hawaii.
Yet some of our Hawaiian neighbors support exactly this sort of preference, and to a degree, they have had it written into the state’s constitution and laws.
They say that many Hawaiians are poor or disadvantaged, and they try to link this to the land division (Mahele) of 1848-1853 or to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 or to annexation by the United States in 1898.
They claim the solution is to build racial preferences (i.e., programs that give land or money or special privileges or status or sovereignty to those of Hawaiian ancestry) into the fundamental law of the state.