Can We All Get Our Own Nations? Considering the Akaka Bill
02/15/2008
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The Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that manages to attract some of the biggest names in mainstream conservatism for its presentations, is pretty good about making sure that liberals—strong, thoughtful ones—share the dais with the home team. It makes for open, honest, invigorating debate.

But at a recent presentation on the Akaka Bill at the National Press Club, [Audio and Video here]it came up short. Despite repeated attempts to get a defender of the bill to, well, defend the bill, the best they could do was Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, an opponent, and a staffer for Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who also... opposes the bill.

Where were the Akaka people? Not concerned about the bill, in any event, which has passed the House and is expected to pass the Senate.

But as Joe Matal, the Kyl staffer, said, the implications of the bill—outright racial separatism—are amazing to behold. Sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the bill would create what amounts to a sovereign nation of up to 400,000 "Native Hawaiians," in much the same way Native Americans have sovereignty inside the United States. It would set up governing bodies that would oversee money and land and go so far to allow Native Hawaiians to create their own criminal and civil law.

The true motivation of the bills' supporters, Matal said, is to get the non-Native Hawaiians, presumably whites, out of Hawaii. "This is secession," he said.

Prompting the Akaka bill is the series of equal protection challenges to set-asides and special privileges for Native Hawaiians, most of which, like Rice v. Cayetano, have come up losers for the haole-hating set. The Akaka bill would create "Constitutional kryptonite" to ward off those challenges, Matal said.

For Rep. King, the Akaka bill is sailing through without objection because of runaway multiculturalism. And the implications for the illegal invasion of America were not lost on him, as he reminded the attendees of Aztlan in the southwestern United States.

"It's dangerous to the unity of America," King said.

And indeed, it may well be. Though to a person who, say, might be in attendance at the upcoming "American Renaissance" conference, the Akaka bill is a double-edged sword. Yes, its passage would essentially be a slap in the face to American whites and a rejection of the settling power of their having conquered American land (and later, Hawaii). On the other, is paving the way for recognition of racial rights such a bad thing, especially for whites, who are projected to be minorities by 2050?

If we are to concede that true nations are based more on "blood and soil" than arbitrary lines on maps, should we be more accepting of the idea of racial sovereignty? No doubt Akaka bill supporters would be highly unlikely to approve of such a thing for whites, but they will be robbed of their objections if the bill passes. If an exploding immigrant population and shrinking white population do mean the end of a meaningful America, why not consider it? What if it actually led to greater peace and prosperity for the groups involved, instead of the laborious fiction that anyone standing on American soil is as "American" as any other?

These questions seem big, but they are not so far off. For both believers in and deniers of racial and ethnic difference, a nation created by the Akaka bill will be something to watch.

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