Last week, Edward Blum, a founder of Students For Fair Admissions, wrote his carefully worded justification for trying to end Kamehameha Schools’ 115-year-old policy of preferencing Native Hawaiian applicants (“Merit, need matter more than ancestry,” Star-Advertiser, Sept. 16) . Kamehameha was founded by Bernice Pauahi Bishop, resourced by her lands, and formulated under the laws of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1883.

Blum’s arguments sound reasonable enough from the perspective of an American society that continues to celebrate and justify the seizure of native lands while enslaving millions of Africans — and even after emancipation requiring Black Americans to live in an apartheid society that discriminated against them in almost every aspect for a hundred years.

For Hawaiians this per

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