"What's so great about having a school where everybody you meet is just like you?"

It's the kind of statement that, if made by the jerk sitting next to you on a plane, would make you put on your earbuds and pretend to sleep the rest of the flight.

It's the sort of comment that would make conversations come to a halt at a cocktail party. It's the kind of thing that, if said in a speech by a politician, would become an indelible mark denoting the beginning of the end of his or her public favor.

What a thing for a federal judge to say from the bench!

Judge Alex Kozinski, one of 15 judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who heard arguments in Doe v. Kamehameha Schools, asked that question in court last week. Of all the arguments made and points argued, it is the one quote that continues to echo like a tin can rolling down a long street.

It's not like you can roll your eyes, mutter under your breath and move away to more enlightened conversation. This man is in a position of decision-making power over something he clearly doesn't understand.

Isn't that at the heart of racism — the belief that, while I'm an individual with my own complex, carefully shaped and self-directed attributes, all of YOU PEOPLE look just alike, think just alike, act just alike?

He didn't say "like." He said "just like." Auwe.

Kozinski, born in Romania to survivors of the Holocaust, raised in California, educated at UCLA, would, one could assume, have enough worldly experience and intercultural awareness not to make such a small-minded assumption.

Maybe he didn't mean it that way. Maybe it just came out sounding weird.

There are as many ways to be Hawaiian as there are to be human. That is certainly true of contemporary Hawaiians, but even if you look back to our ancestors, our kupuna had different traditions and cultural practices that varied by island, by village, even by family.

Of course there are the commonalities of culture and the sharing of deeply held beliefs and experiences that link a people of a certain heritage, and Kamehameha Schools offers one of the last opportunities for preserving and perpetuating that heritage.

But to assume that all students of Kamehameha or that all people with Hawaiian blood are "just alike" is like saying that all Romania-born descendants of Holocaust survivors are "just alike."

Is there any school where everyone you meet is just like you? In preschool, in med school, even in karate school or an alternative high school, there are never any "just likes." That's part of what you're supposed to learn in school, along with when "no question is a dumb question" applies and when it is better to keep your not-so-smart queries to yourself.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.