[Peace-discuss] Air AWARE Comments - June 24

[David Green]

Colonization in Context from Palestine to Hawaii
   
  Sunday’s column in the News-Gazette by George Will 
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062002276_pf.html
  provoked me to consider not only crime rates and incarceration among African-Americans, but race, class, military occupation, colonization, and the prison-industrial complex. 
   
  (See this specific response to Will: http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_blog/2008/jun/23/george_wills_weak_defense_of_our
   
  A few months after the 1967 war, Golda Meir asked “What are we going to do with a millions Arabs. Levi Eshkol, then the Prime Minister of Israel, answered “I see you like the dowry, but not the bride.” She responded, “But, did you ever see anyone get a dowry without a bride? A bride without a dowry-we’ve seen. But a dowry without a bride—everybody wants that. He’d love the dowry and for someone else to get the bride—but the two are inseparable.”
   
  Because they’re inseparable, occupation and colonization become not only about the exploitation of resources (e.g., oil), but usually of indigenous labor, as well as the exploitation of a captive market, which is what Israel has now, by design, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
   
  As colonialists, the European settlers of this continent were unsuccessful at exploiting the labor of indigenous peoples. So they brought in black Africans in order to do that. Westward expansion through Mexico eventually brought the exploitation of laborers from across the Pacific Ocean, and ultimately the confiscation of territories in the Pacific Ocean.
   
  As expansionists, we also have acquired brides as well as dowries, including Hawaii, the history of which needs to be told in these contexts of invasion, occupation, colonization, class, and race, not those of Pearl Harbor, multiculturalism, and tourism.
   
  Given that Barack Obama is now being promoted as candidate beyond race, we might begin to take a closer look at his origins in these contexts. It’s certainly true and important that Obama’s success is an indication that our nation has become more civilized over the last two generations. Nevertheless, Obama’s birth in Hawaii from a white American mother and Kenyan father should not be quarantined from the contexts of colonization and race, capitalism and labor, from Africa to the Pacific to North America.
   
  The following example might cause us to think about what a genuine and contextualized “conversation about race” might begin with:
   
  Views from the Inside Out by Robert Taliaferro
News & Letters, July 2001  American colonialism continues  http://newsandletters.org/Issues/2001/July/1.07_vio.htm     We often hear various statistics on the incarceration of Blacks as compared to whites in the nation's prisons, and tend to forget that the statistics of "others" incarcerated are just as viable an argument against the prison-industrial complex.

In Hawaii, the prison-industrial complex takes on a new dimension that extends well beyond "just" the simple fact of incarcerating someone for a crime, especially when that individual is removed from the Hawaiian islands to a prison on the mainland. It should not be surprising then that one of the premier court cases that supports the transfer of prisoners just about anywhere in the country, away from family, friends and support networks, is a case with origins in Hawaii.

The 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Olim v. Wakinekona, in essence, stated that prisoners had no rights with regard to transfers from one prison to another, and that the states had all the right in the world to ship their prisoners anywhere in the United States.
Justice Thurgood Marshall, along with Justices Stevens and Brennan, filed a rather scathing dissent from the majority opinion, exemplifying the plight of Hawaiian prisoners, and the treatment of native Hawaiians in general. Of Wakinekona's transfer to a prison on the mainland in California, Justice Marshall wrote that it was synonymous with "banishment" from his homeland, "...a punishment historically considered to be 'among the severest'."

In the case of Hawaiians being shipped to the mainland, 2,000 miles of ocean would separate them from their home, family, friends, culture, and land. In essence, removing people from Hawaii and shipping them to the mainland is very similar to removing Blacks from the continent of Africa and moving them to the Americas.

Native Hawaiians are being incarcerated in such rampant numbers that Hawaii has the third fastest incarceration rate (per capita) in the country. As Healani Sonoda writes in COLORLINES (Summer 2001), "Though we were an independent nation, Hawaii was colonized because of American imperial, strategic interests in the Pacific and Asia. The United States overthrew our government and stole millions of acres of Native lands. Now a colonized people, we inhabit the islands' lowest socioeconomic strata." As with any colonial conquest, the indigenous peoples of the occupied territories--in essence--become slaves to the invading party, and anything that is not consistent with the ideas of the colonial power is criminalized.

On the mainland, the indigenous peoples of the Americas were exploited by virtue of Wild West shows. In Hawaii, indigenous peoples are exploited through tourism. Even with the amount of capital derived from such exploitation, it is only the corporate sponsors of those contemporized and encapsulated traditions that are allowed to continue and reap the benefit from the trade. The obvious result of such actions is poverty.

Poverty is always followed by laws which tend to criminalize the concept of being poor, laws that are designed to glamorize the traditions of capitalism by clearing the streets of alleged unwanted societal elements, and the prison-industrial complex, like a thief in the night, is quick to capitalize on such fears and prejudices.

Hawaii, like many states, has decided to utilize the services of corporations like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), claiming, as Sonoda writes, "to save $50 per inmate daily by sending prisoners to continental private prisons. In addition, CCA offered the state financial incentives to house all Hawaii inmates in CCA facilities at a discount."

And when prisoners are so far removed from their homes, the only profit derived is for the whole of the prison-industrial complex, which includes more than just the profits reaped by the keepers. Exorbitant overseas phone costs in order to maintain some semblance of familial and cultural contact, lower prison pay, extreme changes in diet and environment--all of these things are factors that play a role in the growing attempts to deculturalize and further colonize Hawaii.

Of course, if you remove so many men and women from the island, the children of those individuals will ultimately suffer, further fueling the self-perpetuated existence of the prison-industrial complex. "While Hawaiian children make up 35% of juvenile arrests," writes Sonoda, "they comprise 52% of Hawaii's youth correctional facility population."

As on the mainland with Black prisoners, Sonoda writes that most Hawaiians have family members, or friends, who were incarcerated. Hawaiians are twice as likely to be incarcerated after going through what she calls "the colonial legal process" as whites or Japanese on the islands.

We must be careful, when speaking of racism, discrimination, and prejudice, that we are inclusive with the dialogue. We must take care that we do not preclude the discrimination incurred by indigenous peoples when we discuss issues of Black and white in conjunction with the prison-industrial complex, for if we do, we lessen the universal struggle for freedom that is inclusive of all people.
   

       
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