The legacy of Vincent Chin

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit, at his own bachelor party. His killers were white American autoworkers who hunted him down outside a bar and yelled, “It’s because of you <bleep> that we’re out of work.” He was Chinese, not Japanese, as if that should have mattered.
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/533977175/534056823

What does matter is that the killers admitted to the murder, yet they served no jail time and were sentenced to three years probation. “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” the judge said. The case was a rallying point for the Asian-American community to advocate for protecting Asian-Americans in hate crimes legislation.

One of the killers is still alive and a peaceful candlelight vigil was organized last night outside his home. I couldn’t make it to Henderson, Nevada. But I did make a donation to Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an organization that formed after the Vincent Chin murder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets

I have to admit that I spend a lot of time on Zoom these days, and it’s harder to continue that pace of videoconferencing. So I didn’t join a call of Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets (SASS) last night. But, today, I did catch up on SASS’s statement of purpose today and plugged into the outreach process going forward.
Read more

Inauguration Day and the Hill We Climb

Image
Today, I took the afternoon off from work and watched the Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States. It was the capstone that completed my journey to commit one civic act per day for four years. It’s something that I’ll never forget, just like Amanda Gorman at the ceremony today.
Read more