Submitted by shaktinah on Fri, 05/02/2008 - 18:23
Whenever the subject of Tibetan independence from China comes up, my father almost invariably says that if Americans think that China should free Tibet, then the U.S. should free Hawaii. The first time I heard him say it, I laughed. "But Dad," I protested, "Hawaiians don't want to be independent from the U.S." I very soon found out that asumption was not necessarily true.
A little history about our 50th state that you may or may not know (summarized from the mighty wiki):
American missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820. In 1887, a group of primarily American and European businessmen forced King Kalakaua to sign the "Bayonet Constitution," which stripped the king of administrative authority, eliminated voting rights for Asians and essentially limited the electorate to wealthy elite Americans, Europeans and native Hawaiians.