Published on Jul 31, 2012Watch the 3 part discussion + Q&A here:Vincent Chin 30, SF Bay Area, 1/3 - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=...
In 1982, Vincent Chin was the victim of a hate crime murder in Detroit. Thirty years later, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders continue to face discrimination and bullying. In light of recent tragedies like the extreme hazing and subsequent death of Pvt. Danny Chen and the continuing effects of 9/11, what can Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders do to stand up against racism and discrimination?
Events took place around the country on June 23rd, 2012 in memory and in reflection of Vincent Chin. A national online townhall, coordinated by Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, was watched by viewers around the country: http://www.apaforprogress.org/vc30
6/23/2012: Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (SF Bay Area) and the Center for Asian American Media co-hosted the San Francisco event. APEX Express contributor R.J. Lozada moderated a panel with:
Angela Chan, Staff Attorney of the Asian Law Caucus
Vincent Pan, Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action
Ling Woo Liu, Executive Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute
Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter.
The panel delves into hate crimes, the short comings of recent legislation, and how each group is working together to change the culture of law and order.
Introductions by Helen Zia (Asian American activist/author), Norman Fong (Chinatown Community Development Center, Executive Director) and Ed Lee (Mayor of San Francisco)
1 hour podcast of event from APEX Express:http://apexexpress.wordpress.com/2012...
Storify: http://sfy.co/c0Vh
We are stronger when we speak up for each other within & across racial lines. #VincentChin #Truestory #neverforget pic.twitter.com/oiisZSHfMb
— PowerPAC+ (@PowerPAC_Plus) June 23, 2014SynopsisWho Killed Vincent Chin? | POV | PBS
On a hot summer night in Detroit, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed a young Chinese-American engineer with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder in the streets of Detroit, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.
"Frances,:) So let's keep working...
Thanks so much for all the links to the final mural art and such moving testaments to Vincent, his mother and the movement to bring him justice. It all speaks to the importance of ACJ's work in advocacy and as keepers of the legacy of both Vincent and the movement that ACJ started.
Thanks to you all,
Helen"
Just for the record, excuse the pun, all of the Asian American musicians who were on my recording ,Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?, not only became leaders and recorded their first recording after this recording and the only time the five of played together, but were the same or close to the age of Vincent Chin: Glenn Horiuchi was two months older than Vincent and not on the recording, Mark Izu and Jon Jang a year apart from Vincent, Francis Wong, Fred Ho and Anthony Brown two years. It revivifies a new meaning to the statement,"It could have been me." According to Emeritus Professor Olly Wilson, the nascent awareness of institutionalizing of African American music studies came forth during a conference after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968.What strikes me are the parallels between all those who were 27 at the time, and this new generation of young activists who are now 27. I'm honored and humbled to stand in between these conversations.
Tshirt designed by Ha-Hoa Hamano for 2002 Rededication to Justice: Vincent Chin 20th Year Remembrance, a 3-day Teach-In and Pilgrimage to the Gravesite in Detroit. The face includes names of hate crime victims. Rest in Peace, Vincent Chin (5/18/1955-6/23/1982).
What we can confidently say is this: nuance would not have saved Vincent Chin. The violence Ebens inflicted on Chin was a fatal performance of how racialization always works. Indeed, the tragedy of Chin’s death is not that Ebens was mistaken. On the contrary, Ebens and Nitz made Chin Japanese. The lesson of racialization that Chin’s murder makes so utterly clear is that race doesn’t exist outside the dynamics of power and violence.
This brings me to something that has always bothered me about narrations of Chin’s murder that has to do with this point about race and power. Nearly every account of the events of June 19 mentions Ebens’ misidentification of Chin’s ethnicity. This perplexes me not only because it is so dramatically beside the point, but also because it suggests that had Ebens known the truth of Chin’s race (whatever that would mean), things might have turned out differently. Chin might still be with us. He might have married his fiancée Vicki Wong, and he might have lived into ripe old age, as Ebens has. (Nitz was killed in a motorcycle accident.) The very premise of such a claim undermines the theories of racialization and power undergirding the Asian American movement.
And yet something about this narrative convention does make sense. The necessity of calling Ebens' attribution a mistake betrays a specific ideological desire. Lurking behind the coalitional power of the Asian American label is the promise that its efficacy will one day obsolesce, and on the heels of that glorious moment, the content of the ethnicities it strategically held together would be redeemed in a kind of multicultural Utopia.
It’s a beautiful idea. An inspirational one. But the fundamental question it poses is extremely difficult to contend with: Can we construct our own racial identity?
Because race never belongs exclusively to the oppressed or the oppressor, the answer can only be a brutish "no." I'd argue, however, that one of the central legacies of Chin’s murder is that sometimes impossibility must be forced into the realm of possibility. If Chin's death and Kaufman's decision gave birth to the impossible community of Asian America, then our task now is to use all the tools at our disposal -- cultural, legal, social -- to brutishly wrench that "no" into a determined "yes." If we owe Chin anything, we owe him that.
- See more at: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2012/06/vincent-chin-some-lessons-and-legacies#sthash.NOao4dKu.dpuf
In order to commemorate the legacy of Vincent Chin, Project Ava has partnered with Reappropriate and Fascianasians to gather stories of how Vincent Chin has impacted our friends, families, and communities.#IAmVincentChin: Never Forget - Project Ava
On this day in 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, died four days after a brutal baseball bat beating by two white men in Highland Park.
This took place during times of heightened tension due to the struggling U.S. auto industry at the time. Instead of going to his wedding, his friends and family attended his funeral. Asian Americans across ethnic lines came together and organized for justice when they realized his attackers never served a full day in jail. The incident galvanized a pan-Asian American movement.
Learning about the details of the Vincent Chin case when I was in high school spurred me to want to become more active on civil rights and social justice issues. I wanted to learn and do more, especially across ethnic and racial lines. Reading about the case was a catalytic moment for me as a young activist. Learning about the Chin case led me to learn more about and later work on issues such as affirmative action, voting rights, education equity, and more.
Fifty years ago, several young men lost their lives in the name of freedom and the right to vote. In 1962, less than 7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered in Mississippi. Freedom Summer activists made great personal sacrifices so that all people could have the right to vote, as they worked alongside local residents in Mississippi. Volunteers organized Freedom Schools, registered voters, and more. At least four activists were killed, more were wounded, and over a thousand were arrested. I know that the rights we have today are due to the blood and tears shed by many who came before us.
Making sure that everyone has access to our country's democratic process became one passion of mine. I have registered people to vote, organized Election Day efforts in the Asian American community to protect the right to vote, testified on voting rights issues and redistricting, and met with several local clerks about translating election materials so that everyone can accurately cast their vote.
As long as there are efforts to suppress the vote, we have more work to do. I will be a strong voice for voting rights when elected to the Michigan State House.
Will you encourage 10 of your friends to vote in the August 5th primary this year?To learn more about this Stephanie Chang's campaign, please check out stephaniechang.com.
With gratitude,
Stephanie Chang
Vincent Chin and I were both Asian Americans who grew up at the same time.Blog: Remembering Vincent Chin: The Passion and Agony of a Community - AALDEF
We were the same age. Even shared a hairstyle.
Key to this awareness and mobilization was education and media coverage--education of the Asian American community about their rights in America, education of the general public about what Asian Americans are really like, education of the legal community about whether or not Asian Americans are even covered by civil rights laws, education of elected officials about the impact of racially suggestive campaigns directed against Asian imports. Without this national mobilization, and national and international media attention, there never would have been a federal hate crime trial, and we would have been left with only Mrs. Chin's words:Published at Harvard Kennedy School Asian American Policy Review, 2010: isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic855678.files/2010 - AAPR.pdf"What kind of law is this? What kind of justice? This happened because my son is Chinese. If two Chinese killed a white person, they must go to jail, maybe for their whole lives & Some thing is wrong with this country."Since then, the history of the Vincent Chin case has become a staple in Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Cultures, and law courses around the country. The Academy Award winning documentary film by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena, Who Killed Vincent Chin? has been shown to generations of college students. There have been remembrance events--vigils, dinners, conferences, poetry slams--organized around the country on the 10th, 20th, and 25th year anniversaries of Vincent Chin's death. Now there is a new documentary film produced by Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, Vincent Who? about how too many college students--who at this point are all born after 1982--do not know about this case or its importance, even as they take being Asian American and being a part of Asian American clubs and communities for granted.
Jenn Fang Reappropriate Remember 32 years of Vincent Chin with #IAmVincentChin! Help trend it! | Reappropriate,on Twitter #IAmVincentChin
Vanessa Teck Project Ava #IAmVincentChin: Never Forget - Project Ava,
Juliet Shen Fascinasians
There is no way for me to make sense of this case. I try to write intelligently about it, and all I have is unbridled, bottomless anger. I feel provoked, to my core. That one of my earliest memories is that kids were calling me chink and I had to ask my dad what it meant. To have a lifetime of micro-aggressions and not-so-micro aggressions directed at you, stacked on top of people telling you your experience and insisting that racism doesn’t exist towards your people, and to top it all off, that people can murder you in the street in front of McDonalds and get a slap on the wrist for it. And though Vincent Chin’s tragic murder is relatively invisible, it’s horrifying to think his case is actually one of the more visible, known cases of anti-Asian violence. I feel that there is no room for love, or reason, in a world like this. I feel tired, and defeated. Stupid and useless.More voices at Vincent Chin: 30 Years Later | Bao Phi | StarTribune.com
Of course, if there is any bright side at all to this, it is that the memory of Chin and the blatant injustice has galvanized many Asian Americans to activism. I asked some respected Asian American activists and community workers to talk about this case for my blog.
I went to Vincent Chin's grave today, cleaned it, left fruit and incense at both his and his parents' headstones.
I've been thinking a lot about you lately, brother. I'm the same age now as you were when you died, and as I grow and change, I think a lot about the impact Detroit has had on my life, and on yours. You didn't expect to be an icon for a generation of struggle, and you certainly didn't deserve to become an icon like this. I just want you to know that we remember.
And to Lily Chin: thank you for your heart and your organizing. You are missed. I hope you see that we remember your son, and you, and everything you gave us. Rest in power. - CMCheck out the good work they do at 18MillionRising | Activating Asian America
On June 23, 1982, Vincent Chin died from wounds sustained in an attack from two racist working class white men who assaulted him, one holding him in a bear hug so the other could strike him in the head with a baseball bat, four times. As his brains leaked onto the sidewalk, Chin's last words were reportedly "it isn't fair." His wedding guests attended his funeral instead. The men who killed him to this day have not spent a day in jail nor paid any of the $3,700 fine. The judge presiding over the case said "These aren't the kind of men you send to jail."
.
Listen carefully: this is how white people tell you
"you can be anything you want as long as you work hard enough"
does not apply to you or your children.
If you forget, they will apply pressure
on the sidewalk, in front of witnesses.
Lily and David Chin, in laundries and restaurants, in a brush factory
worked all their lives to see their son murdered twice.
If ever I am to stand in front of a judge
to measure the dollar amount of my life
and he cannot decipher
what kind of man I am
and how I will haunt history
I will tell him
I am what I always have been:
I am a dead man.
#iamvincentchin As with so many at that time the killing of Vincent Chin and the absolution of his murderers hit close. I was 25 at the time just two years younger than Vincent. And while what seems a world away from the unemployment and challenging conditions of Detroit, I had faced many potentially violent confrontations with white male students on campus in my undergraduate years at Stanford, particularly as I was doing my political organizing around issues such as the defense of affirmative action and divestment in South Africa. Particularly scary was being accosted by a group of white men in a pick up truck as I posted flyers by myself on campus for Asian American Student Association activities. (I never did that again alone). I became acutely aware of my vulnerability and developed sensitivity for situations that could get out of hand leading to dire consequences. In the decades since, this sense of danger has not abated; facing blatant and hateful behavior on occasion in my travels as a musician in our country. Of course, while I try to be careful, this has not deterred my participation in efforts to assert our humanity in our society. The killing of Vincent Chin led to a very passionate and transformational movement that I am forever grateful to have been a part of. Especially important to me was the opportunity to have a direction in my early career as a musician playing in Jon Jang's ensembles as a means to participate in a watershed period of development in our community. Thanks for listening/reading, I know this is a little long.
My personal statement about the murder of Vincent Chin on my second recording Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? in 1983. This is the first and only recording that has Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Fred Ho, Mark Izu and Anthony Brown. After this recording, all of the Asian American musicians on this recording made their first recording as a leader: Fred (1985), Mark (1992), Francis (1993), Anthony (1996).The confluence of different struggles such as Redress & Reparations, Vincent Chin, Pilipino national movement (Marcos passing in 1986), anti-immigrant legislation, etcJon Jang & the Pan Asian Arkestra formed in 1988.
Still working through the first day on this piece for@grccdetroit . The primary focus of the piece is a memorial to #VincentChin who passed in 1982 in an altercation that possessed attributes of a hate crime and whose perpetrators who were given lenient sentencing in a plea bargain. Always dreamt of creating this piece, thankful to be able to finally produce it on Grand River and Rosa Parks in Detroit.Photo by gaiastreetart
Yet, there are still those who have forgotten about Vincent Chin. Earlier this year, a columnist for the Detroit News published an op-ed that defended Nitz and Ebens, and blamed Chin for his own death by racial hate crime. Although the Asian American community generated a powerful series of writing refuting the Detroit writer’s revisionist history of the Chin case (including this piece by Frank Wu), the fact that a writer would write such a fallacious article thinking it would not impact an entire community of Asian Americans is proof that we cannot let Vincent Chin’s death be forgotten.Check out her call for action at: Remember 32 years of Vincent Chin with #IAmVincentChin! Help trend it! | Reappropriate
We must remind the world that Vincent Chin was us, and we are him.