Look to Hawaii for hard lessons on U.S. oligarchy, apartheid

Trump fan driving around Honolulu. Photo: Gerald Farinas.

Being born and raised in Hawaii, I couldn’t escape the fact that I was born in the waning shadows of a very American brand of apartheid.

In the not-so-distant past, the Hawaiian Islands were controlled not by its Native people, but by a handful of white sugar barons known as the “Big Five”—Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer & Co., American Factors (Amfac), and Theo H. Davies.

These firms weren’t just economic powerhouses; they ran the entire Territory of Hawaii like an oligarchy.

And that oligarchy functioned, in practice, as a form of apartheid.

The Big Five controlled land, labor, and law.

My great grandfather, grandfather, great uncles, and uncles after them all worked for the Big Five.

This oligarchy secured favorable legislation through their grip on territorial governors, judges, and lawmakers—most of them white and mainland-born.

Native Hawaiians, once a sovereign people with their own monarchy and vibrant culture, were pushed to the margins of both power and prosperity.

Alongside them were tens of thousands of indentured laborers imported from Japan, China, Portugal, the Philippines, and even Puerto Rico—forced into racial and economic caste systems that ensured division, dependency, and disenfranchisement.

Workers were segregated by ethnicity in plantation camps to prevent collective action.

Language barriers were exploited.

Voting rights were manipulated or withheld.

All the while, these same sugar barons wrapped themselves in the American flag, profiting from colonial status while denying true democratic participation.

Today, Native Hawaiians are still reckoning with the intergenerational trauma of stolen sovereignty, cultural suppression, and economic exclusion.

Many remain priced out of ancestral lands, trapped in cycles of poverty, and fighting for basic recognition of their history and rights.

And this history casts a long, dangerous shadow into today’s politics—especially in Trump’s America.

Just as Hawaii’s white-run sugar oligarchy exploited division, sowed disinformation, and clung to power through racial hierarchy, today’s MAGA movement is building its own oligarchic future.

Under the guise of “making America great again,” we see Christian nationalism merged with corporate greed, minority rule protected by gerrymandering and voter suppression, and whole swaths of the population—Black, Brown, Indigenous, LGBTQ, poor—written off as threats rather than citizens.

Trump’s America, like sugar-plantation Hawaii, is not just about policy; it’s about constructing a system where power remains in the hands of the few while the majority suffers under a tailored blend of fear, obedience, and manufactured division.

And just like the legacy of Hawaii’s plantation-era oligarchy, the damage being done today will linger for generations unless we rise to challenge it.

What we do now, how we resist now, will determine whether our descendants inherit liberty or live under the shadow of a gilded past repackaged as progress.

We cannot afford to repeat the silence that let sugar kings reign.