If you are not a descendent of Norwegians, President Donald Trump, whom I consider a racist and white nationalist, might not want you in the United States.

432nd. I learned on a trip back to my hometown, New Orleans, just a couple of years ago, that we are 1/432nd Black. My maternal side is of French descent — and one of our European cousins urged our cousin in New Orleans to do an extensive ancestor search. She learned that our great-great-great grandmother was a free slave. When she told me this, I started laughing! Why? Because so many in my family are racists. My cousin also learned that we were 1/28th Jewish. We are clearly all one.

What’s with the percentages? It’s an old Deep South tradition and now becoming a Washington one: one drop of Black blood and you are Black. And what does this mean in Hawaii anyway, more importantly, because it has been my home since 1968?

Fortunately, I would not be discriminated against in Hawaii, because I clearly “pull” Caucasian. But for those who do not “pull” Caucasian, Hawaii has had a tradition of racism and classism.

For example, as told in a March 2008 Honolulu Advertiser article, Hawaiian Airlines, for years after its 1929 launch, wouldn’t hire local pilots, local flight attendants and local counter workers. Its discriminatory history was one of the major reasons why Aloha Airlines was founded in 1946 by Ruddy Tongg.

As we all know, one definite way to stay in control and keep a race of people down is to not loan them any money to buy a home or start a business.

“Bishop Bank — now First Hawaiian Bank — and Bank of Hawaii controlled the money supply and it was difficult for those without financial clout or credit to secure a loan,” wrote Kelli Y. Nakamura for Densho Encyclopedia. “To address this problem, (Sakae) Takahashi along with several Japanese Americans including former veterans, raised approximately $2 million in 1953 to establish Central Pacific Bank.”

After passage of Hawaii’s civil rights law in 1963, the Hawaii constitutional provisions for Anti-Discrimination and Title VII in 1964, is Hawaii now the promised land as hoped for by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.?

We would like to think so, but I, along with my law partner, Joseph Rosenbaum, have now been doing race discrimination cases here for the past 30 years. All races. Blacks against Caucasians. Filipinos against Blacks. Japanese against Caucasians. Hawaiians against Japanese. Samoans against Caucasians. You get the picture. This racism has permeated every sector here.

The most horrific local cases have been against Blacks — the threats of lynching: the Deep South legacy of racial terror.

In the first decade of this 21st century, Charles Daniels, an African-American electrician, had worked at Lockheed Martin on the mainland and here. He reported racial harassment. Lockheed refused to discipline the harassers, but instead, retaliated against Daniels, endangering his life and setting him up for further harassment and threats by racist coworkers.

In 2008, Lockheed Martin settled the lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in Hawaii for $2.5 million. The overt harassment to which Daniels was subjected while working here was some of the most severe misconduct the EEOC’s Honolulu office had come across, said former EEOC Director Timothy Riera.

Sadly, in this decade another workplace terroristic death threat of being lynched is going to trial at the end of this month. The one we just filed will go to trial before the next decade.

Many of our clients, especially Blacks, agonize over whether to file a complaint about harassment because of fear of retaliation. Yet many courageously stand up because they want to — they must — confront this racial terror.

Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara is a Honolulu civil rights attorney and former senior trial attorney for the Honolulu-EEOC.