Official denies
racial accusations
He calls them an effort to get him
off Kauai's police commission
LIHUE » Leon Gonsalves says he has no racial prejudices and did not intend to malign Kauai Police Chief K.C. Lum when he referred to the chief as "Hop Sing" in an e-mail.
"It's not about prejudice," said Gonsalves, the only member of the police commission to vote against Lum's appointment as chief in September.
"This is an effort to get me off the commission because I was the only one who didn't vote for Lum," Gonsalves said. "I didn't think he was the right man for the job, but I don't hate him. I had a right to vote against him, and I did."
On Oct. 14, the day before Lum was sworn in as chief and Ron Venneman was sworn in as deputy chief, Gonsalves sent an e-mail to a friend at the Kauai Police Department.
"Tomorrow is the swearing in for Hop Sing and Little Joe. I wouldn't be there, thank Good (sic). I might throw up," he wrote.
Hop Sing was the stereotyped Chinese cook for the Cartwright family on the popular "Bonanza" television series. Chinese Americans consider the name a racial slur.
Gonsalves said the message was never intended to be distributed, but it was forwarded many times.
"I don't like it. It's just turned into something that it was not supposed to be," said Gonsalves, who is Hawaiian and Portuguese.
"I have daughters-in-law who are haole, Japanese, Filipino. My grandchildren are all mixed up like chop suey, and I love every one of them," he said.
Gonsalves denied more recent accusations that his reference to Venneman as Little Joe, the youngest of the Cartwright brothers on the television series, was anti-Semitic. Michael Landon, the actor who played Little Joe, was Jewish, as is Venneman.
"To me, Ron looks like Little Joe. I don't know what religion he is," Gonsalves said. "I look at a Caucasian and to me he's a haole. I don't distinguish between German or Irish or whatever. As long as you don't add any adjectives to the term, haole just means he's a foreigner. There's nothing wrong with being a haole."
Gonsalves retired from the Kauai Police Department and later worked as an investigator for the Kauai Prosecutor's Office. He is Kauai Mayor Bryan Baptiste's only appointee on the police commission.
Other than a brief statement saying Gonsalves' comments were "inappropriate," the mayor has made no public statement on the issue since it boiled up last weekend. The Chinese-American community on Kauai has been critical of his silence on the subject.
"I've met with the mayor once," Gonsalves said. "I guess he wants to get all of us in a room and hash it out.
"I've already apologized. There isn't anything else I can do."
