Netroots Nation 2014 NN14 Screening of "Vincent Who?" - and Discussion of Race in Detroit- Eventbrite

from Curtis Chin: VINCENT WHO? screening and panel on race in Detroit (aka Race and the City) Friday, July 18, 2014, 6:30 - 8:00 pm, Cobo Hall, Room #142 C. Attendance is free, but if you're not attending the Netroots Nation 2014 conference, you must REGISTER HERE.
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/nn14-screening-of-vincent-who-and-discussion-of-race-in-detroit-tickets-12013820661

NN14 Screening of "Vincent Who?" - and Discussion of Race in Detroit- Eventbrite

18MillionRising | | In Search of Justice: Another Way to Remember Vincent Chin

beautiful reflection from 18 Million Rising New Media Director Cayden Mak on the legacy of Vincent Chin--and how it could change how we define "justice." http://bit.ly/1lpw1Zt

18MillionRising | | In Search of Justice: Another Way to Remember Vincent Chin

from PowerPAC+

From Washington D.C. · powerpacplus.org:

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, 2014

Who Killed Vincent Chin? | POV | PBS

And if you haven't seen Renee Tajima-Pena and Christine Choy's Academy Award nominated documentary film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" that is where you should start.

Synopsis

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.

Who Killed Vincent Chin? | POV | PBS

more from Jon Jang:

more from jazz musician Jon Jang, reprinted with permission:

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.

Blacklava V Chin (Vincent Chin) T Shirts

Do you have your Blacklava.net V Chin T-shirt? Sure fire conversation starter. Keep telling the story throughout the year. Thanks Ryan Suda!



V Chin (Vincent Chin) Women's T Shirt

V Chin (Vincent Chin) T Shirt

V Chin (Vincent Chin) 1 inch Pin Back Button

Vincent Chin: Some Lessons and Legacies | Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

From Chris Fan at Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics, 2012:

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

Vincent Chin: Some Lessons and Legacies | Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

#IAmVincentChin: Never Forget - Project Ava

From Vanessa Teck at Project Ava:

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

letter from Stephanie Chang

Excerpted from a June 23, 2014 letter from Stephanie Chang who is running for State Representative in Michigan House District 6 (Detroit, River Rouge, Ecorse), reprinted with permission:

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?

With gratitude,

Stephanie Chang

To learn more about this Stephanie Chang's campaign, please check out stephaniechang.com.

Remembering the significance of the Vincent Chin case and how we keep carrying it forward:

Remembering the significance of the Vincent Chin case and how we keep carrying it forward, by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang at the State Bar of Michigan Legal 34th Milestone, 2009:

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:

"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.

Published at Harvard Kennedy School Asian American Policy Review, 2010: isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic855678.files/2010 - AAPR.pdf

Also here at 5:48 mark Frances Kai-Hwa Wang on Role of the Media in Vincent Chin Case State Bar of Michigan Legal Milestone - YouTube At 5:48 Mark

Vincent Chin: 30 Years Later | Bao Phi | StarTribune.com

from Bao Phi in Star Tribune, 2012:

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.

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.

More voices at Vincent Chin: 30 Years Later | Bao Phi | StarTribune.com