2/29/10

I always turned my eyes from racism. I had a clean, white ticket of passage through the South, and I figured race issues were something other people could solve when I was sound asleep or far away. I was almost bored with the whole tedious talk- talks in artwork, in school, on streets and stores. I was one of those apathetic civilians on the fringe of an old battlefield. People loved to make panic for themselves, but I knew the war would never come.

And now in Hawaii I see the flipside of the coin. I am on the battlefield now, and whether I want to care or not, others watch me with heedful eyes. I am the same color as the colonists who shackled this land and domesticated its people like pets, the same color as the sugar can chieftans of so many families away, and I am the color that others now love to hate. 'Haole' is the Hawaiian word for white person, no different from 'nigger.'

Today I rode to the ancient coastline at Honau'pu, where picnic areas and fire pits littered with beer cans overlook crumbling stone piers and white coral sands. A crowd of Hawaiians watched me pass, behind folded arms and smug grins. i did not look them in the eyes and I did not say anything, and I felt what the black people I had casually ignored must have felt. I felt the generations of hate being unearthed and loaded on my back.