From the AP:

“In a federal lawsuit filed in 2005, Native Hawaiians with at least 50 percent islander blood want exclusive control over state programs currently open to everyone with at least some Native Hawaiian blood. In a separate dispute that could also be headed for court, state residents with no Native Hawaiian ancestry are questioning why they can’t join a Hawaiians-only voter registry.The two cases are just the latest in a string of challenges over the special treatment accorded Native Hawaiians.”

As usual, typical reportage of a very complicated and important issue — boiling down a complex question about minority rights and government programs designed to remedy a very long history of racism, discrimination, political violence, and government-sponsored privileging of non-minority people to a code word: “special treatment.” And everyone knows that code word means simply this — it’s wrong. So the AP (like virtually every other news agency) has adopted the code words of those opposing programs designed to remedy the effects of historical and ongoing race discrimination.

A serious and thoughtful discussion of these complicated issues would exclude such terms as “special treatment” or “special rights.” The reason, of course, that Congress took the action it did in the case of the Native Hawaiians is because non-Hawaiians accorded themselves “special treatment” and “special rights” ever since 1896.