Haoles and Friends

[punafish]

In regard to the issue of being politically correct...as someone who grew up on the north side of Chicago where my Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Nicaraguan and Japanese friends routinely called each other "racist names" and made brutal fun of each other, it's kind of endearing to see Hawaii folks tease each other about their ethnic backgrounds, including when the pasty white haole-boy is the target. (Um, that would be me.) Even my hapa-haole kids make fun of me and call me names. And when I call them racists they laugh even harder. The haole is outnumbered in my house.

Can those same words be used to hurt? Of course. But with friends, in context, it's fun, and transports me back to a less pc time (sometimes known as "the good old days"). Take this with a grain of salt and 2 aspirin, but my take is that locals don't "play according to Hoyle" when it comes to pc correctness, so probably best to downplay any pc baggage a transplant brings with them. (But if any locals on this forum disagree with me, then please believe THEM because they know better...this is just an opinion based on my personal, limited observations over the last 8 years.)

To Delta9r's point on "race," here's a related video a business associate put together: Race Off http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2KJWKGPA9A