Keep your chin up...
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
It’s a strange world.
Asian Americans do not have a Martin Luther King (or a Malcolm X) or a Caesar Chavez. Asian Americans are conspicuously absent from the civil rights movements of the sixties. The Filipino involvement in the farm worker movement is largely overlooked. And the general public at the time still had memories of fighting the Japanese in World War Two while at the same time engaging the Vietnamese in their own country. The Asian Americans were largely content to just looking after their own and being, as many refer to them still, the model minority happy in their whatever-towns.
So I came across this morning to an article at http://www.asianweek.com/061397/feature.html about the case of Vincent Chin. I believe it is an older article that I was made aware of during my daily browsing of the Angry Asian Man site. It has been 24 years since the guy was murdered and pretty much how the guys who did it pretty much got off without so much as a slap on the wrist.
This is how it went: Vincent Chin lived in Detroit. He goes to his bachelor party. Two guys who work in the auto factories are there. They are mad at him and they trade insults. The auto guys hate him because the Japanese auto industry is killing the American auto industry. Therefore all Japanese people are bad. Vincent Chin is of Chinese descent. They cannot tell the difference. They get into a bar fight. Fight in bar get broken up. The auto guys later confront Vincent outside. They bash his head in with a baseball bat. They were charged with and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. For this, they each received a sentence of three years probation and a $3,000 fine.
Now imagine the same scenario but make Vincent Chin a black guy or any other guy but a white guy. It will still be a hate crime. But do you think the dudes would get away with just probation and a fine? And by, the way, Vincent Chin died. Is that all you get for murder?
There is a lot more to the tale for sure, like how unprepared the community was to deal with the race issue (no translator for Vincent Chin’s mother?) and why did the prosecutor not even show up to the trial? And how one of the civil rights cases was moved to a city where only 19 out of a 200 people interviewed to be jurors have even encountered a person of Asian descent.
But the thing is, it was a murderous hate crime and they got away with it.
So, by the way, if I get beaten up because my people took down the flags at UT Arlington (but hey, I am not Vietnamese) or if my other people are testing missiles (I am nowhere near looking like a Korean) or my yet another other people are stealing our valuable resources (maybe I am Chinese?), it is okay. Looks like you are going to get away with it.
________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myspace.com/catterpillarboy
http://catterpillarboy.blogspot.com/
It’s a strange world.
Asian Americans do not have a Martin Luther King (or a Malcolm X) or a Caesar Chavez. Asian Americans are conspicuously absent from the civil rights movements of the sixties. The Filipino involvement in the farm worker movement is largely overlooked. And the general public at the time still had memories of fighting the Japanese in World War Two while at the same time engaging the Vietnamese in their own country. The Asian Americans were largely content to just looking after their own and being, as many refer to them still, the model minority happy in their whatever-towns.
So I came across this morning to an article at http://www.asianweek.com/061397/feature.html about the case of Vincent Chin. I believe it is an older article that I was made aware of during my daily browsing of the Angry Asian Man site. It has been 24 years since the guy was murdered and pretty much how the guys who did it pretty much got off without so much as a slap on the wrist.
This is how it went: Vincent Chin lived in Detroit. He goes to his bachelor party. Two guys who work in the auto factories are there. They are mad at him and they trade insults. The auto guys hate him because the Japanese auto industry is killing the American auto industry. Therefore all Japanese people are bad. Vincent Chin is of Chinese descent. They cannot tell the difference. They get into a bar fight. Fight in bar get broken up. The auto guys later confront Vincent outside. They bash his head in with a baseball bat. They were charged with and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. For this, they each received a sentence of three years probation and a $3,000 fine.
Now imagine the same scenario but make Vincent Chin a black guy or any other guy but a white guy. It will still be a hate crime. But do you think the dudes would get away with just probation and a fine? And by, the way, Vincent Chin died. Is that all you get for murder?
There is a lot more to the tale for sure, like how unprepared the community was to deal with the race issue (no translator for Vincent Chin’s mother?) and why did the prosecutor not even show up to the trial? And how one of the civil rights cases was moved to a city where only 19 out of a 200 people interviewed to be jurors have even encountered a person of Asian descent.
But the thing is, it was a murderous hate crime and they got away with it.
So, by the way, if I get beaten up because my people took down the flags at UT Arlington (but hey, I am not Vietnamese) or if my other people are testing missiles (I am nowhere near looking like a Korean) or my yet another other people are stealing our valuable resources (maybe I am Chinese?), it is okay. Looks like you are going to get away with it.
________________________________________________________________________
http://www.myspace.com/catterpillarboy
http://catterpillarboy.blogspot.com/
posted by Catterpillarboy at 9:56 AM
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