The latest challenge to Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policy is not at all about trying to integrate a single-race school in the name of anti-racism.

It’s about money.

Of course, it’s also about the current political climate in America that emboldens non-minority groups in this country to use cries of “racism” to their advantage, in many cases, to further disenfranchise people of color.

But first and foremost, it’s about money.

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The lawsuit mentions money right off the top:

“Kamehameha Schools – the wealthiest, elite, prestigious private school in Hawaii – admits to giving a ‘preference’ to ‘applicants of Hawaiian ancestry,’” it says in the first sentence. It goes on to note that: “Kamehameha Schools is the largest private landowner in Hawaii, with holdings spanning 364,000 acres. Kamehameha is also the largest educational trust in the country with an endowment worth over $15 billion.”

There are some in this country who cannot abide a group of non-white people having access to that kind of wealth. If the school didn’t have that kind of money, attorneys in a Virginia-based law firm with MAGA values would not even notice.

In 2021, Kamehameha Schools was included on the Department of the Interior list of Federal Indian Boarding Schools. It seemed out of place on the list of institutions like Waiale‘e Boys School, where children, predominantly those of Hawaiian ancestry, were forcibly detained in a labor camp on the north shore of Oʻahu, or the hundreds of other schools for native children across the continental U.S. that committed horrible acts against their students. However, Kamehameha fit the description of a school established before 1969 where native students were housed on campus, made to learn a trade, and were put to work on campus.

It is doubtful there is any other school among the hundreds on that list that anyone would sue to gain admittance.

Because this is about money. There is not another school on that list that has such a grand endowment through the trust of a princess.

It is also about power and status.

Students for Fair Admissions, the group suing Kamehameha Schools, was formed in 2014 when a student named Abigail Fisher didn’t get into University of Texas at Austin and her dad called his friend Ed Blum, who led the charge of racism against the university. Fisher’s grades (3.59 GPA) and SAT score (1180) were good but not top-tier, but she decided the only reason she wasn’t accepted was because she is white.

Never mind that 168 black and Latino students from Texas with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s were also denied entry into the university that year. Fisher lost that case and subsequent appeals, though now, in her 30s, she hasn’t let it go and has built, with other like-minded individuals, an organization whose business model is to find clients to serve as the “face” of lawsuits to sue universities for affirmative action policies. Imagine fighting a case you were wrong about at 18 well into your adulthood.

Are there many non-Hawaiian “clients” crying their eyes out because they can’t go to Kamehameha and thus face diminished prospects for their future? Where are they? No one is holding signs and demonstrating en masse outside the gates at Kapālama. There are only two unnamed clients in the lawsuit. If this was a righteous cause of theirs, there would be hundreds of names and they would stand up and hold their heads high.

In contrast, we all know Native Hawaiian students and their families who cried their eyes out because they didn’t get into Kamehameha and don’t have better options.

Even the lawsuit quotes numbers that make that point:

“Today, Kamehameha educates around 6% of the island’s native Hawaiians – 5,400 K-12 students, (100% of whom are Native Hawaiian) out of 86,000 school-aged native Hawaiians. When its policy was last challenged, Kamehameha educated around 7% of the island’s native Hawaiians – 4,800 K-12 students out of 70,000 school-aged native Hawaiians.”

The truth about Kamehameha Schools is that the system serves people of all races. The commonality among the students is that they can prove some degree of lineage showing descendancy of the people who lived in Hawaiʻi prior to 1778, but the reality is that students who are Black, White, Asian, Hispanic and whatever go to that school.

As the camera pans across the faces of students at the annual Song Contest, it looks like a league of nations, not a singular race. A Hawaiian in 2025 is not a single, uniform entity. That school has beautiful diversity.

The lawsuit itself devotes page after page of documenting filthy emails and comments directed at Blum and the organization over this case and others they have pursued. You’ve never seen so many F-words in a legal document. All that stuff is included almost as though a badge of honor, as though they are proud of the anger they endure. OK, nobody should be posting threats because that does no good, but why reproduce it all in a legal document as though it’s salient reading and a source of pride? Strange.

The whole thing is strange. But we are living through such a strange time when people in the majority feel so righteous in proclaiming racism against themselves and there is money and political power to be gained in taking on programs that support people of color.