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Racial Discrimination or Reparations?
“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?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Wages of DEI at Thomas Jefferson High School
The results are in for one school — after four years of DEI-driven, basically race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., in Alexandria, Virginia has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semi-finalists cut nearly in half. And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school and under Federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.’s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security.
Until four years ago the only way into T.J. was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” including “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.
In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court found T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply.
The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. T.J. was free to not really/but really discriminate in its admissions process.
One factor T.J. would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax county. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like T.J. may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.) It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Justice Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of T.J.] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency.
Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that number nearly halved for the 2025 scholarship competition (the school says the data may also reflect problems during Covid.)
“The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner, on his blog Fairfax Schools Monitor. “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this ‘social justice’ initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.”
Spooner went on to write “We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.”
Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia Attorney General’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the Attorney General, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 60 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.” The Attorney General referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into T.J.’s admissions policy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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