• Racial Discrimination or Reparations?

    August 4, 2026 // 6 Comments »

    “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 basically gives away land, in one of the most expensive states in America, but only to people of the designated ethnicity, in this case those with at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian blood. It functions like 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 sugar cane 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 voice of the Hawaiian people represented. 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 at one dollar per year leases to Native Hawaiians. It was the Act’s goal of preserving 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 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 and 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. 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, that is 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. Some 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 pushback 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?

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    Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

    Posted in Democracy, Economy

    Why the Ben Franklin Fellowship at State?

    May 19, 2026 // 7 Comments »

    The New York Times claims “a private conservative group’s involvement at the State Department has alarmed veteran diplomats and congressional Democrats who say it has established a worrisome degree of influence.” Eric Rubin, a retired diplomat of more than 40 years who recently led the mainstream State Department American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), wrote it “functions as the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries.” Some are even trying to out and doxx members who wish to remain anonymous. It’s the controversial Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF).

    The Fellowship is a D.C.-based nonprofit founded by former U.S. diplomats that brings together active officials (including Fellow Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State), academics, and legislators to force reform at the U.S. State Department. The group says it is nonpartisan in not supporting any political party, but its aims and think pieces promote support for Secretary of State Marco Rubio in dismantling policies that have undermined diplomacy and left the Department less influential than it should be in major national security decisions. State has failed to reform itself, so something like BFF is badly needed.

    That’s why I am a public member of Ben Franklin Fellows.

    I speak only for myself about BFF. I have long believed (well before my whistleblower book about Iraq and subsequent forced retirement from State) that the 18th century institution was structurally resistant to change. The Trump administration changes have been sharp and quick, but I wonder if any less Draconian process would have produced any results at all — over my own 24-year-career at State I watched blue ribbon panels come and go alongside outside studies and white papers, all full of ideas that were ignored. To me, BFF is a public way of supporting change, even when it hurts and even when it sometimes hurts good people. It is a lot of weight to throw on to BFF. But you have to start somewhere.
    Since the end of WWII, when the task of nation-building across Europe and Japan was largely handed to the military even after it was first proposed by the Secretary of State, reform efforts at the Department have focused less on grand strategy and more on tweaks to the internal personnel systems and bureaucratic culture. Critics from Congress, presidential administrations, and diplomats themselves have long argued State is too hierarchical, slow-moving, insular, and constrained by outdated personnel practices. Despite repeated reform initiatives, many of the same complaints of rigid promotion systems, weak leadership accountability, poor technological modernization, and resistance to change, have persisted.

    One of the first major internal reform efforts to fail near completely followed the frustrations of the Vietnam War, which exposed weaknesses not only in policymaking but also in how diplomats were recruited, managed, used in the field (the CORDS program), and promoted. Yet the 1975 Murphy Commission ended up recommending only minor changes. The most significant reform came with the Foreign Service Act of 1980, some 200 years after the Department’s founding and the last big change in the past 46 years. The Act modernized hiring and promotion procedures, solidified the “up-or-out” promotion model, and attempted to make assignments more equitable. Yet critics argued it reinforced excessive careerism and encouraged risk-averse behavior among officers seeking promotion.

    The post-Cold War period saw Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attempt and fail at management reforms focused on improving workplace efficiency and modernizing outdated information systems. It wasn’t until even later Secretary of State Colin Powell decreed desktop Internet for State based on his experience in the Army, replacing spotty stand-alone dial-up service, as the rest of the world experienced an information revolution.

    After the September 11 attacks, failed internal reforms centered on Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy,” which required large-scale diplomatic deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the expense of literally every other embassy and issue in the world, all despite the earlier failure of the similar CORDS program in Vietnam. The moves decimated State Department personnel and promotional systems for years afterwards. Secretary Hillary Clinton emphasized without effect workplace modernization through her “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review,” which sought improved talent management. She also unsuccessfully pushed for greater recruitment of specialists in tech and economics to keep pace with the modern world.

    Over nearly five decades, State Department reform played at modernizing personnel systems and bureaucracy, while institutional inertia and passive disruption limited any lasting change. The organization and systems in place when I was sworn in were more or less the same ones there when the door hit me on the way out 24 years later.

    I was witness, and participant. I spent most of my career in the Consular field, for many years issuing visas to foreigners and later managing new-hire Foreign Service Officers to do the same. I spent years of Prozac-tinged cognitive dissonance blithely being told to ignore or overlook the clear letter of immigration law and issue, issue, issue visas no matter what the obvious truth about illegal stays was. There are whole ethnic neighborhoods in California and New York that should have a statue of me as one of their founders because I issued thousands of visas under policies that prioritized volume over enforcement credibility. I was a good soldier and did what I was told to do about visas, and helped many young officers make their professional peace with the hypocrisy. BFF has since helped several people who feel much this same way as I did into new positions of authority over the visa process, and championed many changes to an immigration system that ran steadily in contrast to the law for decades. I am glad someone has surfaced some of it all and maybe even will do some more things to change it all.
    I also grew weary of State’s 19th century model of country “desks” and stove-piped embassies organized more or less the same way in every nation no matter the on-the-ground truth and with basically the same personnel wire diagram since the American Civil war. It was worse at the Mothership in Washington, where every decision, however minor, had to pass through layers of “clearances,” basically negotiated agreements through the layers of bureaucracy above and around you. For awhile I wrote the first drafts of State’s “travel advice” for multiple countries and then would spend weeks cajoling signs-off from dozens of offices who claimed a bureaucratic stake in the bland copy I churned out.
    Even AFSA, the Foreign Service’s professional association (full-disclosure, I was a dues-paying member for most of my career and benefited from their legal advice) wrote “As much as members of the Foreign Service in the Department of State embrace calls for reform of broken and ineffective systems, most of them have figured out how to navigate those systems and are concerned that changes would negatively affect their ability to advance. Changes were met with resistance. Within the Foreign Service, I found a strong culture of ‘putting in the time.’ At State risk intolerance extends beyond concerns for physical danger. While policy successes are celebrated, failures are feared to be career-ending; and this can lead to knee-jerk reactions that discourage innovative thinking.” And she was writing about State under Secretary Antony Blinken, in the Biden era, way before Trump II.
    The Red versus Blue controversy around BFF misses the larger, more important story: the State Department has resisted meaningful reform for decades, through administrations of both parties. If internal reform repeatedly fails, outside pressure becomes inevitable. The real last change, the Foreign Service Act, put some 20th century makeup on an 18th century organization best positioned to conduct diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. What is left to do is a dirty job, long ignored, that now someone has to do if America is to have a diplomatic service capable of working across multiple administrations instead of just trying to wait out leaders it does not like while championing those it does. It is now necessary for an organization like Ben Franklin Fellows to step in and take on the fight.

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    Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

    Posted in Democracy, Economy