I finally watched Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union“, which some are hailing as one of the most important speeches on race in America in recent years.

Having spent some time studying both politics and public relations, the thing I found most surprising about the speech was its honesty, and Obama’s willingness to just come right out and talk about race — and “the racial stalemate we have been stuck in for years.”

Here’s why: It’s a huge challenge to explain to people the subtleties of a situation where it seems to nearly everyone watching that you are in the wrong. Campaigns have become political horseraces — see CNN’s “Ballot Bowl” — and as a result, multi-faceted situations are all-too-often boiled down to black and white. In that case, sometimes there is an apology from the candidate, sometimes, there is a choice to completely ignore the accusations, move on and pray that everyone forgets.

Rarely is there an instance where the person targeted appears to explain himself in a thoughtful and detailed manner, addressing people as intelligent beings, and not simply stepping over the issue, following the oft-used elitist philosophy: “the masses are asses.”

That said, the speech was not only important in the way it was delivered and how it directly addressed the issue of race, but in what it said.

The topic, race relations, certainly has implications for Hawaii and its “melting pot” image. In Friday’s Advertiser, columnist Lee Cataluna writes that Obama’s comments on race resonated here in the Islands, where not everything is hunky dory:

Here in our Islands, we stubbornly repeat the hopeful delusion of the melting pot where everybody gets along. But this fiction has worn thin, and there is evidence every day that racial tension exists here. No matter what your ethnic heritage may be, somebody out there will hold it against you.

I know many people share her viewpoint. I offer, though, that while this may be an accurate picture of attitudes towards race in Hawaii, it is certainly a bleak one. True, Hawaii may be “less of a melting pot than a tossed salad.” But Obama’s speech wasn’t ONLY about pointing out that race relations in this country aren’t perfect.

I’ve mentioned in past posts that I really struggled with my Hawaii/Asian/Caucasian/mixed-race identity perhaps for the first time when I went to school on the mainland. I also noted an attitude among Asian and other minority groups at my school that I had not experienced in Hawaii. It was a feeling of victimization that I believe caused many of them to be suspicious of others and self-segregate themselves from the larger community.

It scares me when I see echoes of that in the Advertiser blogs and online forums.

Yes, Obama’s talk about race should resonate in the Islands. But it should resonate for the message of hope it expressed about acknowledging and moving past racial differences, not acknowledging them and stewing in a climate of suspicion and fear.

In the years ahead, Americans, as well as those of us in Hawaii, are going to have to ask some difficult questions about race. The 2008 campaign has kicked open the door. Hawaii may not exactly have achieved racial harmony, but we are certainly in a position to start a dialogue.

That might include questions like those Peggy Orenstein asks in a New York Times piece yesterday. Orenstein, who is Jewish, whose husband is Japanese American, and whose daughter is hapa, writes:

I sometimes wonder what will happen in another 50 years. Will my grandchildren “feel” Jewish? Japanese? Latino? African-American? Will they be pluralists? “Pass” as Anglo? Refuse categorization? Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes. Regardless, watching Senator Obama campaigning with his black wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and all of their multiculti kids, it seems clear that the binary, black-and-white — not to mention black-or-white — days are already behind us.

Perhaps that discussion can be started by our youngest citizens, people like my friends, who grew up in an increasingly racially-mixed environment where half or more of our high school classmates were of mixed ethnicities.

Do I have an unbelievably sunny outlook on race relations in Hawaii? Probably.

Can that attitude be more useful than believing that somewhere, someone will always hold my ethnic heritage against me? Absolutely.

In celebration of Easter weekend, check out the slideshow of the finalists in the Washington Post’s second annual “Peeps Show,” a diorama contest inspired by those tasty, sugary, florescent-colored marshmallow chicks and bunnies that creep into the supermarket candy isle each year at the beginning of March.

The winning entry this year was titled “The Tomb of King Peepankhamun,” and was designed by a 22-year-old Princeton student a mere two days before the contest deadline. The cardboard diorama depicts a tomb with hieroglyphics filled with Peeps imagery.

PHOTO: “Peep Art,” one creation that made it to the finals. Here is the creators’ description: “‘Peep Art’ — a reinterpretation of the Pop Art movement and homage to Andy Warhol and his muse Edie Sedgwick — is a revolutionary concept taking the Peeps Diorama Contest to an entirely different level.”

Wow.

Today is Good Friday, which is a state holiday, but not a federal holiday. (And unfortunately, it is not an Advertiser holiday, either.)

Hawaii is one of a handful of states that recognize Good Friday as a state holiday.

I was interested in the history behind this, so I looked it up.

In the late 1980s, a group of local residents sued Gov. John Waihee, Mayor Frank Fasi, other government officials and public employee organizations. They alleged that the Hawaii statute that sets aside Good Friday as a state holiday violates the establishment clause of the first amendment, which prevents government from affiliating itself with any religious doctrine or organization.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the observance of Good Friday as a state holiday on April 30, 1991, saying that the purpose of establishing Good Friday as a holiday in Hawaii wasn’t religious, but simply “to provide Hawaiians with another holiday.” Essentially, our government just wanted to give workers a day off.

At that time, 11 other states recognized Good Friday as a legal holiday. As the AP/NYT reported in 1991, the Ninth Circuit became the first Federal appellate court ever to rule on the issue.

Hope you’re enjoying your day, if you have the day off. Have a nice weekend!

Have you had a chance to check out the new Advertiser site yet? It’s pretty cool.

The new site promises to be much more interactive and personalized than our current site. The idea the Advertiser has begun by encouraging citizen journalists to post stories on MyAdvertiser.com is furthered by features on the new site that encourage readers to sign up, create profiles and even start their own blogs.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk to a Journalism class at my high school about getting into the industry and about where journalism is headed. One of the things we did was weigh the pros and cons of incorporating more and more people who AREN’T journalists into news writing and reporting.

We discussed whether it matters where and from whom you’re getting your news. And we talked about the question of Wikipedia, an encyclopedia basically created by people like you and me.

On blogging: there is definitely a blurred line between being a blogger and being a journalist, whether you’re a concerned citizen trying to tackle injustice from your living room couch or an employed reporter trying to maintain a blog while still sticking to the principles of objectivity.

If you haven’t yet, check out this 10-minute video, called “Epic 2015.” It’s an intriguing and more than slightly disturbing tale of the history and future of the news industry. Essentially, the New York Times is going to disappear in 2014 and become an elite newsletter read only by government leaders and the elderly. Meanwhile, Google is going to eat the world. No kidding.

Anyway, it got the wheels turning in my head. I’m actually just coming off the first of three consecutive overnight shifts (midnight to 7:30 a.m.), so I apologize if this entry sounds a little delirious. But do check out the new Advertiser site, if you haven’t already. I’m curious to know what you think.

If people think we Quarterlifers are narcissistic, fickle and totally naive about splashing our personal information all over the internet, Ashley Alexandra Dupre is not helping our cause.

The 22-year-old aspiring singer, better known as “Kristen,” whose alleged encounters with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer led to his resignation last week, is the fifth most-searched subject on Google and an internet sensation whose songs are apparently among the hottest downloads on MySpace.

This may be either the best or worst thing that has ever happened to her.

As of this evening, about a dozen Facebook groups have been created and dedicated to discussing Dupre, many of them defending her, including the Ashley Alexandra Dupre Fan Club, and one that has apparently been created by people who went to school with her. The group description says: “For all of us who went to school with the now famous Ashley Youmans. (hey, someone had to start a group)”.

She also (even before last week) had a sizeable internet footprint through online social networking sites, where she posted pictures of herself and samples of her music. When news of her involvement with Spitzer broke, she did what any 22-year-old might do. She jumped on her Facebook and MySpace accounts and started deleting information.

What interests me is the apparent way in which she selectively deleted information from her accounts. According to CNN, time stamps on her profile show that she was up all night altering information on her profile page.

She removed most of the photos, but not all of them, and left up a clip of one of her songs and several links to it, as if trying to select what journalists and others trying to find her could see.

She also apparently confronted the people who called herself her high school classmates: “Do me a favor and don’t try to cash out… thanks,” she wrote on the Facebook group wall.

According to CNN, on Thursday morning she wrote: “Sneaking out the back door” under her “current status.”

What amazes me about Dupre’s actions is that this was less like a woman caught at the center of a national headline-making sex scandal and more like a teenager changing her profile to mess with her boyfriend’s head.

Most of us within our lifetimes probably won’t be similarly caught at the center of national attention. But the example does serve as another lesson to Quarterlifers about why we have to start thinking differently about posting personal information online, especially as we enter the working world. This isn’t high school anymore.

Someday, some of us will be making headlines, but I hope for different reasons. And when that happens, hopefully there won’t be a MySpace page lurking somewhere in the background. Unless you want to launch your budding music career, of course.