BY KENNETH R. CONKLIN – On Sept. 28, 2010 the state of Hawaii Office of Hawaiian Affairs issued a press release about a new report it created entitled “The Disparate Treatment of Native Hawaiians in the Criminal Justice System.” The Honolulu Star-Advertiser published an article about it the following day. The complete report, filled with many beautiful photos of taro, is at
https://tinyurl.com/2aweono
There are important scholarly/statistical issues raised by the report, and equally important political issues. It’s clear that the OHA report is an exercise in political propaganda rather than a serious scholarly analysis or civil rights inquiry. The present essay is an effort to counteract the propaganda in the report and to identify serious scientific issues that need further study.
The OHA report is part of a long-term political strategy attacking the very existence of the state of Hawaii by undermining our confidence in equality under the law and our unity as a multiracial society under the sovereignty of the United States. That long-term strategy will not be further discussed in the present rebuttal, but readers who want to understand it should read the book “Hawaiian Apartheid: Racial Separatism and Ethnic Nationalism in the Aloha State.” Twenty-seven copies are available in the Hawaii Public Library system. Portions are free on the internet, with a link to the publisher’s website where the print-on-demand book can be ordered; see
https://tinyurl.com/2a9fqa
The OHA report alleging disparate treatment of ethnic Hawaiians by the judiciary and criminal justice system appears to describe a rigorous scientific analysis of data. But in fact the data were collected and analyzed by a small group of project insiders who worked in secret, in a locked room at the University of Hawaii, always under direct supervision by their OHA sponsors, and who later destroyed their collected data to protect the privacy rights of the criminals. Real scientific studies are peer-reviewed before publication to make sure the data are reliable, the analysis is done in accord with generally accepted scientific standards, and the conclusions are valid. But in this case the data were collected and interpreted in secret, and then destroyed. The report was rushed into publication without peer review in a splashy format designed for propaganda value. Publication was timed to coincide with the political effort to pass the Akaka bill whose purpose is to create a government for ethnic Hawaiians including jurisdiction over their own criminal justice system. OHA and the group who produced this “study” should be embarrassed if their methods are compared with legitimate work done by scientists developing new drugs or reporting experiments in physics, biology, etc.
One major concern for analyzing a claim of disparate outcomes for ethnic Hawaiians is the fact that their median age is only 25, which is 14 years younger than the median age of 39 for the rest of the population. Of course people who are younger have lower incomes, and are more likely to engage in drug abuse which is a crime in itself and also leads to more crime. Young men’s higher testosterone levels are likely to make their crimes not only more frequent but far more violent than the older criminal population. Women’s young ages make them more likely to be unwed mothers, while the teenage children spawned by unwed mothers and living in unstable families are more likely to engage in criminal behavior. Ethnic Hawaiians have the highest rate of illegitimacy, perhaps because they have racial partisans, most notably Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, calling upon them to make babies as fast as possible to accelerate acquisition of majority status. Ethnic Hawaiian girls might also feel encouraged to make illegitimate babies more than other racial groups do on account of numerous government health programs and welfare handouts that are racially exclusive to ethnic Hawaiians.
A major difficulty in analyzing claims of racially disparate outcomes is to correctly identify a person’s race in the data when he has two or more racial heritages. Nearly all ethnic Hawaiians are of mixed race. Many have three or more races. Perhaps 3/4 of all so-called “Native Hawaiians” have more than 3/4 of their ancestry being other than Hawaiian – nobody knows because nobody wants to collect such data. Yet anyone with one drop of native blood is labeled “Native Hawaiian” not only in this new OHA report but also in hundreds of racial disparity victimhood “studies” (i.e., data-mining analyses of reports from the Census Bureau, National Institutes of Health, etc.) done by Kamehameha Schools over a period of many years and widely publicized in the media to solicit public sympathy and political support. Classifying anyone with one drop of native blood as “Native Hawaiian” is clearly a very bad way to analyze data when studying alleged racial disparity. This report made absolutely no effort to identify the percentage of native blood quantum for each criminal; and of course there was also no desire to allocate only a fraction of a tally mark to “Native Hawaiian” corresponding to each criminal’s fraction of native blood.
To see the full article, go to https://www.angelfire.com/big09a/DisparateTreatmentCriminal.html
This guest editorial is by Hawaii resident and author Kenneth Conklin, Ph.D. To see more articles by him, go to: https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/