Our islands are not a playground for your little “intrepid soul search”. Pull up or fuck off
1. Tourism is good for the economy.
2. Do you really want a tourist or someone “who just got here” interfering with the local politics? You’re also assuming she never tried to help the people of Hawaii.
3. Our culture involves soul searching. Poc are all about respecting culture until it’s White Culture.
4. Imagine if every country was this possessive and territorial. What an awful world it would be.
Poc kept mad when we try to help by getting involved in their government and accuse White People of “colonialism”, and now they’re getting mad that we’re not getting involved and solving their problems.
Oh Jesus Christ I literally can’t let this go.
1) Tourism AT BEST creates dependency between a local population and its wealthy visitors. To act as though it is a positive thing for any culture to completely rely on outsiders for income is embarrassingly ignorant and again that’s AT BEST because AT WORST tourism benefits only the people who have created that tourist attraction AKA also wealthy white people who at one point saw an opportunity to exploit a region and it’s culture for money.
2) This white woman’s decision to gentrify Hawaii IS political. There is no separation between her immigration there and Native Hawai’ians politics. She is already interfering and that is also why it’s safe to assume she has never tried to “help” native Hawai’ians because if she was interested in doing that she would have never moved there since moving there is directly harmful to them. Gentrifying Hawaii and “helping” native Hawai’ians are mutually exclusive.
3) There is no such thing as “white culture.” To think such a thing exists is racist because the only thing, the ONLY thing, that unites all white people is white privilege and white supremacy. “White” is not a region, nor a nationality, nor a heritage. There are cultures that belong to peoples who are predominantly white but it is not their whiteness that defines that culture. There is Italian culture and Irish culture and Nordic, etc etc etc but all of these cultures are vastly different from one another. Never mind that “soul-searching” isn’t what this woman is doing. Going to another place and taking a million pictures of yourself there because the land and the people are foreign and exotic to you and showing off your wealth and privilege and entitlement on the internet for clout is not “soul-searching.” It’s exotifying normal people doing normal things in a normal place and it’s gross. The very concept that a person can move to another location they’ve never even been to and have no ties to in order to “soul-search” makes literally no sense.
4) What do you mean “imagine” if every country was this possessive and territorial? I was born in the USA and can promise you there is no country more possessive and territorial than the USA except other countries that have colonized Indigenous land, like England and Spain, which are predominantly populated by white people. Nevermind that all Native Hawai’ians wish to “possess” is their own God damn land that was invaded and colonized against their fucking will. But THEY’RE the possessive and territorial ones, right? Not the white people in England who took over majority of the free world at one point, so much so that the most common holiday shared around the world is independence from the British? Nevermind that England has yet to grant independence to every country they invaded and claimed for themselves? For fuck’s sake WAKE UP. Indigenous people are NOT the possessive and territorial ones! The world is already the awful place you speak of for indigenous people and it is due to your white privilege that you can only imagine how “awful” the world would be without the right to colonize and gentrify land that doesn’t fucking belong to you.
Your ignorance is appalling. Colonialism doesn’t belong in quotation marks. It is not a matter of opinion, it is objective fact that white people have colonized Hawaii and if you paid attention to the video you’d know that Indigenous person on the right never wanted our “help” to begin with and has every right to still not want it and the fact that you believe white people can “help” when white people are the problem is enormously entitled and racist of you.
(via as-warm-as-choco)
