The Maori came to NZ by waka (canoe) and boats are measured by displacement.
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Saying his actions do not depend on race is astoundingly ignorant.
Yes, his intent is clearly to secure a perimeter around his compound to protect himself from everyone. It’s not racist because it doesn’t depend on race, you say. However, the method he is seeking to do so is one that has been used overwhelmingly to repossess native Hawaiians’ ancestral land due to the differences in the traditional Hawaiian concept of land ownership and the Western drive for individual land ownership, the seizures of land ‘owned’ by the Crown but owned by the people during the revolution, and subsequent transfer of them to the US, and the difficulty of proving ancestral ties to the places for formal ownership caused by those events. The method he is going about it is racist because the law implicitly favours Western ownership concepts over traditional Native ownership concepts rather than accommodating for them, which is why it’s used so much to claim those “unowned” lands for which “ownership” is difficult to prove - it’s not that the owners can’t be found, it’s that they can’t prove it was theirs because it was legally stolen.
You say it doesn’t depend on race as he’s not targeting Hawaiians specifically - ask yourself, would a native Hawaiian exploit loopholes in Western law to steal traditional lands from their whānau?
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I feel like he is a rich white bully, so the racism is institutionalized because that’s who rich white bullies target for their personal gains and don’t even come close to empathizong with any affected.
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Conflating racist effects of law and history (aka institutionalized racism) with personal racism is not particularly helpful or useful to those of us actually trying to do something about either one, or both.
I believe it is very helpful to those who care nothing about racism except as a platform for personal self-aggrandizement, though. It seems to me that an end to racism would disempower those people, so I am distrustful of their motives and methods.
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It isn’t a theoretical thing here in Hawaii. The discussion of land disposition and how it relates to Native Hawaiians, and more generally the discussion of access and easements, is a matter of everyday conversation. Once you are aware of the effects of your actions on the local people, and that these effects are exacerbated because of an historical artifact of their culture, the racism is no longer an abstraction, it is personal.
If someone comes from the outside and willfully shuts themselves out to all local discussions of civic affairs then they might not be aware of this, though that’s a problem in and of itself. We’ve seen it before, especially on Kauai, where George Harrison and Neil Young famously tried to block public rights-of-way because they thought their money bought them special exemptions from the rules. From the outside Hawaii might look like some kind of fantasy populated by cartoon characters, but it is a real place populated for eons by real people with real lives, and the fact that you can play the sitar adequately or have created a popular app does not give you any moral authority over these people.
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Well, I agree with all that and I think you misunderstood me.
Where I am, there are people practicing economic discrimination, targeting the poor, completely openly and legally. The initiatives which enable this, despite not being motivated by race hatred on the part of the proponents, are part and parcel with institutionalized racism, and because of the local history (race riots and military occupation are a recent memory for us here in northern Delaware) they play out in racially disproportionate ways.
We have institutions and laws that disproportionately impact non-white people. Even more are being proposed.
We also have citizens who are motivated by a hatred for non-whites (although thankfully they are currently a minority, smaller than those who are motivated by hatred of non-Christians).
Confusing these two groups and/or claiming that they are a single group that requires a single response is counterproductive.
To illustrate this, suppose I want to change the local school system. Calling wealthy dark-skinned citizens a bunch of racists will work to discredit me and impair my ability to effect change. Because they aren’t racists, in fact; neither the whites nor the non-whites. I’ve met them. And I doubt Zuckerberg is strongly racist, although I certainly don’t know him so I can’t really say. His actions having racially charged impact is not the same as him being a person who hates native Hawaiians.
Which is what I was saying, perhaps poorly.
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He probably isn’t strongly so, but…if you engage in behavior that disproportionately impacts disadvantaged minorities, and you know that your behavior has this impact but don’t care enough to stop it, and also know that it is generally viewed as racist by others, I would say that your actions go beyond just structural racism.
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Hmm, you know, you’re right! What’s that address again? I think I might want to look through your stuff, see if anything needs displacing over to my place.
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He may be in enough of a bubble that he lacks such knowledge.
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He’s finally out of his bubble:
http://thegardenisland.com/news/opinion/guest/mark-zuckerberg-and-priscilla-chan-we-are-dropping-our-quiet/article_e80fc17c-e4b1-11e6-bc5c-9308d8f880f4.html
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