ALL THOSE YEARS AGO

Bias against blacks cited here

Pastor says, 'melting pot' fails many

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

Ever feel invisible?Like people don't really look at you, but around you or over you even through you, never admittingyou are there?Or you feel all too visible - identified, and negatively, just by what you look like? Well, one of Hawaii's leading black citizens said yesterday, that's a little bit of what it's like to
be black in Hawaii.

The Rev. Stanley E. Amos, pastor of the state's largest Afri-
can American Baptist curch, took time out from the speeches and rhetoric of the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday yesterday to talk about the nitty - gritty of everyday racism in Paradise Amos, chair of the sate's Martin luther King Jr. Commission, was one of several speakers before hundreds who gath-
ered a Kapiolani Park yesterday for a unity rally fol-lowing the annual King Day
parade through Waikiki.

Many blacks come to Hawaii thinking they will escape racism
in this so-called melting pot of the Pacific, Amos said in an interview with The Advertiser. And many "have been sorely dissapointed." Amos said that as a pastor at
Trinity Missionary Bapist Church he is in a position to hear complaints of racism.

There may be some blacks who do not know the extent of the problem here, he said.
"Some still perpetuate the myth and try to live the myth that this place of paradise is a place where we can escape racism and discrimination and prejudice," Amos said.

"The fact of the matter is that we cannot. It still exists, and so painfully."It
exists in the school counselor who, Amos claimed, recently told a group of African
American students that "all blacks are stupid," Amos said.

It exists when the black job applicant, turned aside in the '60s because he was
"underqualified," is rejected in the '90s because he is "overqualified". Amos said he knows of instances in which blacks have come to Hawaii to try to start businesses and, "because of certain elements in place, whether it was the old-boy network or
nepotism in play, they wer not able to get into the market and get a grip on things and they had to call it quits and go back to the Mainland."

Because blacks represent only about 2 percent of the population of te stat(compared to 12percent of the nation's population), "the issues of the African American
community get lost easily and perhaps are not considered" very seriously, he said.

Blacks may also find themselves compared negatively to other minority groups, such as the recent immigrants from Asia who have distinguished themselves by bootstrap success stories and can't understand why blacks "can't do it too."

'To hold that view is to fail to understand the full history ofAfrican Americans, Amos said. "We are, after all, the one group that came to this country involun-
tarilly. The Indians and the Hawaiians were already here, and all the other groups
came under the rubric of immigrants.

"But we came here as an enslaved people, and beyond slavery, after the Emancipation
Proclamation went forth to free us from that, we still found ourselves victimized by Jim Crow laws."

Amos said he was not aware of any patterns of clear race discrimination in housing in Hawaii, although he said there have been instances of people taking racist actions against individual black families in their neighborhoods. But the economics of living in Hawaii magnify the historic impoverishment of blacks due to racism, he said.

Amos said blacks may repre-sent only 2 percent of the population, but nevertheless should be represented at least proportionally "when it comes to receiving fair and equitable distribution of goods and power in this state."





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