Vincent Chin
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| Racism and racists |
Vincent Jen Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese-American draftsman from Detroit, Michigan who died on 23 June 1982, following a beating by former Chrysler plant supervisor Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz four days earlier.
At the time of the assault, many autoworkers in the city (including Ebens and Nitz themselves) were out of work, the result of Detroit's automakers facing stiff competition from Japanese automakers. This led to prejudice against anybody who looked "Japanese", i.e. anybody of East Asian descent whether or not they were actually Japanese American. Chin was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip club, when Ebens and Nitz came in, got drunk, mistook Chin for Japanese, and got into a fight with Chin and his friends, stating: "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work!" Both parties were thrown out. Later, Ebens and Nitz searched around for Chin, found him at a McDonald's, and beat him into a coma with a baseball bat. "It's not fair..." were his last words. Ebens and Nitz were arrested by two off-duty police officers who witnessed the assault.[1]
In court, a plea-bargain brought the charges against Ebens and Nitz down from second-degree murder to manslaughter. They were both sentenced to three years probation and a $3000 fine. Neither served any jail time as punishment (though Ebens did after his arrest, for a the rest of the weekend). Judge Charles Kaufman justified the light sentence on the grounds that: "These weren't the kind of men you send to jail... You don't make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal." The Judge had such a sterling record up until that point, such as imprisoning school teachers for refusing to work and imprisoning a town board for doing their jobs. Suffice to say, many Asian Americans were appalled by these trivial penalties, and groups coalesced to demand a retrial. A federal civil right case was brought against them, but they were acquitted. To do this day, Ebens and Nitz have not served a single day in prison. Chin's mother, disgusted by these proceedings, moved back to China.
The case is nowadays best-remembered for being the first time in which Asian Americans viewed themselves as a unified (not really...), cohesive group and collectively fought against discrimination against them, to the point that Chin is sometimes regarded as the Asian Rodney King. It's also one of the big reasons why Asian Americans absolutely hate it whenever anybody tells them "you all look the same" — an attitude that led to a Chinese man being victimized by an anti-Japanese hate crime. For those that weren't aware, China and Japan have a bit of... history, and attacking a Chinese person for being "Japanese" would be attacking a Greek person for being "Turkish".
[edit] References
- ↑ Wu, Frank H. "Why Vincent Chin Matters." The New York Times, 22 June 2012 (recovered 14 November 2014).