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Technically, the two White men who killed Vincent Chin on a summer night in the Detroit area were plea bargained down to manslaughter, according to Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, curator of The Emancipator “JustUs” series commemorating 40 years since Chin’s death.
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But we all know it was murder.
For the uninitiated, Chin was a 27-year-old Chinese American beaten to death with a baseball bat by two autoworkers who blamed the Japanese for the U.S. auto industry’s decline. Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz reportedly called Chin racial slurs at a club where he arrived for his bachelor party.
They never served a day in prison.
In sentencing the men to three years’ probation and a $3,780 fine, Michigan Third Circuit Judge Charles Kaufman said: “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 appalling lack of justice, however, sparked a pan-ethnic civil rights movement among Asian Americans in the ’80s. And it worked because the system was forced to see discrimination aimed at the community and address it. The U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit ruled that Asian Americans are protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, previously thought to only apply to Black people, according to Harvard Law Today.
Chin’s death and the reaction to it inform current conversations on anti-Asian violence, Wang writes in the series introduction. She highlights reports of hate crimes and incidents against Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic through December 2021.
The Emancipator invites you to absorb and share the essays and poems lovingly crafted and illustrated by Asian American artists about what this 40th anniversary observance means for a deeper sense of intersectional and interracial solidarity and allyship.
Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
May-lee Chai
Curtis Chin
Mika Kennedy
Bryan Thao Worra
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Sam Johnson and Cristal Balis
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We celebrated Juneteenth properly last weekend with The Emancipator’s first-ever live community event at Slade’s Bar & Grill in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. If you were there, it was great to see you.
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ICYMI: What’s your resistance style? A quiz
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Larysa/Adobe
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Love to see it,
Deborah D. Douglas and Amber Payne
Co-Editors in Chief
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