Hawaii is one of the most diverse states in the nation. But when Beth Fukumoto was a file clerk at the overwhelmingly Democratic Hawaii State Legislature, the conversations around her seemed pretty standard.
“Nobody pays attention to file clerks. You’re sort of in every room as people were talking, just filing things,” she says. “So, I spent a lot of time listening. And I did feel that it was often the same voice over and over again.”
Fukumoto liked the Republican message of fiscal conservatism and wanted to add political diversity to the state legislature. So, she ran for state representative as a Republican and soon became Hawaii's youngest-ever minority leader and a fast-rising star in the party. Republican leaders had her travel across the country to speak at party events.
Everything changed last month, after Fukumoto gave a speech at the local women's march. She called Trump a bully and his past remarks racist and sexist. The reaction from Fukumoto's colleagues was swift: They abruptly ousted her as minority leader.
"That message, when I delivered it, I knew it would be controversial. I didn't realize it would lose me the minority leadership," she says. "In retrospect, I would have done it anyway."
Other Republicans confirmed that, afterward, they asked her to tone down her remarks about the president or lose her position with the party. Fukumoto says she told them that, as a Japanese American, she couldn't keep quiet about a man who, in the past, has seemed to say that Japanese incarceration during World War II was acceptable. Other Republicans argued Fukumoto just wants to change Republicans into something closer to Democrats. And Fukumoto doesn't deny that she joined the party to change it. She wanted it to reflect Hawaii by including more women and minorities.
"But what my colleagues told me is that this is the party of Middle America. And it's our job to represent Middle America's values in the Hawaii State Legislature," she says. "To me, all I hear is a very colonial mindset there. It's an effort to bring essentially white, mainland values into what is our local diverse culture and force us to behave that way."
Fukumoto says she's concluded now that she can't change things as much as she'd once hoped. She thinks the national party is too powerful. But there's nothing wrong, necessarily, with a party that just happens to be made up of mostly white males, she says.
"The question is — is that something women and minority voters should reward?" Fukumoto says. "And I think that's the question that women and minorities should ask themselves about the Republican Party. And it's a question I'm asking myself."
She's been polling her constituents to learn whether they want her to continue as a Republican or switch parties. Fukumoto says they’ve mostly told her they don’t care what party she is. So now, she’s trying to make the decision.
"After all of this, I would still say if you don't put your voice in there, you can't complain," she says. "If you want to get involved in politics, you need to know who you are, and you need to be faithful, at the end of the day, to that."
From PRI's The World ©2017 PRI
