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.