"Haole" in Hawaiian originally meant "foreigner," e.g. Tahitians. Now it usually means "Anglos" or "mainlanders" (cf. Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary, University of Hawaii Press, 1973, p. 55)
A folk etymology interprets the word as meaning "without" ['ole] "force or energy" [hao], which was applied as a disparating reference to Protestant missionaries. However, the form of the word would have to be "hao'ole," not "haole"; and its use antedates the period when Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawaii. In fact, Protestant missionaries were welcomed, not disparaged, since King Kamehameha II had already absolished the kapu system and disestablished the old religion before the missionaries had even been heard of.
Return to Ethnic Prejudice, Stereotypes, Discrimination, and the Free Market
Return to Vita
For instance, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines a "bigot" as "one obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his own church, party, belief, or opinion."
That particular avenue of advancement for ethnic communities, through political patronage, eventually was closed off. As patronage jobs were regarded as a kind of corruption, civil service systems removed most municipal employees from the sphere of political reward and punishment. While the abuses of political patronage were monumental, it did have the virtue of being responsive to political power, which the civil service bureaucracy often is not, and of providing opportunities for groups, like the Irish, that did better at politics that at other things.
In economics these are called "knowledge costs." To know what an individual is like, as an individual, takes a great investment of time and effort. Sometimes even people who are married to each other can be surprised about what the other is "really like." In business it is impossible to make that kind of investment in judging an individual who is a job prospect. Some general features must be used to judge individuals, whether these are college degrees, training certificates, grooming, dress, or ethnicity. Even degrees and certificates provide no certainty about prospective employees. Our question is whether ethnicity provides relevant information as much as other things.
The classic Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which established that "separate but equal" treatment would satisfy the 14th Amendment and was overturned by the equally classic Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was not about schools or education. It was about a Louisiana Law that required the railroads to provide separate cars for black and white passengers. The railroads didn't like that, because it would waste a lot of space and cost a lot more. Segregation had to be instituted by law against the desires of the opportunistic capitalists.
Another aspect of this was the predicament of Rosa Parks, who decided not to sit in the back of the bus, leading to Martin Luther King's Montgomery Bus Boycott and the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Why did she have to take a segregated bus in the first place? Because there was a government instituted monopoly in public transportation. In a free transportation market there are always cheap private taxi services that spring up (usually called "jitneys"). But those compete with municipal bus companies, which rarely can cover their expenses anyway; so such competition is almost always outlawed. Not only would black people not have been left without transportation during the bus boycott, but they wouldn't have needed to use those buses in the first place. In the free market, if you don't like the goods or services you are offered, you can go get them somewhere else; and if you don't like how they are offered anywhere, then you can see about providing them for yourself. Government monopolies are the only thing that can permanently close off those opportunities.