Kill Haole Day

In my childhood neighborhood many of my friends and their brothers and sisters when to public schools. One day when I was eight or nine they mentioned that "Kill Haole Day" was coming up. That didn't sound very good for someone like me.

They said it was something that happened on the last day at their school. The local Hawaiian kids would seek out and beat up the Caucasian kids, usually in a bathroom. Boys beat up boys while girls beat up girls. Over time, anyone who was not a haole could join in on the fun.

Since the haoles caught on fast they would skip the last day of school. The locals responded by changing it to a random day in the last week.

Fortunately for me, this did not happen at a nice school like Punahou.

For a long time I thought that it was just a local tradition in my neighborhood. Even after I graduated from college on the mainland I would mention Kill Haole Day to friends and they wouldn't believe me. Years later, a Caucasian acquaintance of mine who was about my age and had gone to a public school in Honolulu said they remembered it happening at their high school.

If you don't believe me, read what someone else wrote about about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Haole_Day

I wonder how this would have changed the public's reception of Obama's book "Dreams" had he included his views about Kill Haole Day in Hawaii.