The reaction to reports of Friday's vicious assault in a Waikele parking lot speaks as loudly about social tensions in Hawai'i as the incident itself.

The assault of a couple over a collision with a parked car has ignited anger among residents, many of whom have expressed that anger in letters and other statements to The Advertiser.

The description of the extreme attack — a woman knocked to the ground, her husband punched in the throat and kicked repeatedly, all in front of their young child — was enough to draw outrage. The fact that the husband was military, returned from service in Iraq, makes the case even uglier.

But the addition of a racial slur, allegedly shouted by the teenage son of the adult suspect, has doused the situation with gasoline and thrown a match to the whole mess.

Prosecutors are discussing whether the "hate crime" statute applies. It's at least debatable: The law requires intent to commit the crime because of the victim's race.

What should matter most to the community is not the legal classification of the case. Assaults such as this are hateful, regardless. The facts of the assault itself, once fully laid out, should provide sufficient basis for the appropriate penalty.

Most residents will agree that the Waikele case is not emblematic of race relations in Hawai'i but is an extreme case. Racial epithets can be incidental to violence, inflaming it further but not the root cause. In a society that's become increasingly dehumanized, other stresses — making ends meet, for starters — can further alienate people from each other.

However, the discussion that erupted from this incident almost instantaneously highlights a reality too often suppressed here: Racial tension exists in Hawai'i.

It's a complex and nuanced tension, sometimes expressed as a Hawaiian vs. non-Hawaiian divide, sometimes as a split among other ethnic groups, sometimes as a distinction between kama'aina residents and newcomers.

This reality needs to be acknowledged and dealt with, in schools and all public places where it's encountered. An incident such as the one in Waikele forces us to reflect on the need to build community where it's broken down, and on the potential for doing so that still exists here in abundance.