{"id":48852,"date":"2022-05-31T11:02:17","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T18:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=48852"},"modified":"2022-05-31T11:02:17","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T18:02:17","slug":"cross-racial-solidarity-against-racist-violence-the-legacy-of-vincent-chin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=48852","title":{"rendered":"Cross-Racial Solidarity Against Racist Violence: The Legacy of Vincent Chin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Jenny Manrique<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Leer este art\u00edculo en espa\u00f1ol<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Forty years ago, on the eve of his wedding, a young Chinese American named Vincent Chin was fatally beaten with a baseball bat on the streets of Detroit by two white men shouting anti-Asian slurs. The miscarriage of justice that followed \u2013 neither assailant served a day in jail for the crime \u2013 marked the birth of the modern day Asian American civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

What made Chin\u2019s killing even more egregious, said Helen Zia, author and veteran activist for AAPI and LGBTQ communities who worked in Detroit at the time of Chin\u2019s murder, was that \u201cthere was no question in anybody\u2019s minds, had the killers been black or Asian, had they not been white, they would have gone to prison for a very long time. So the sense of injustice was great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zia spoke at an\u00a0Ethnic Media Services briefing<\/a>\u00a0on May 27th to highlight plans for a special 40th anniversary commemoration of Chin\u2019s death in Detroit (June 16-19) and efforts to build stronger cross-racial solidarity to confront today\u2019s surge in racist violence.<\/p>\n

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On June 19, 1982 Vincent Chin was beaten in a racially-motivated attack in Detroit, Michigan. The perpetrators, both of whom were white, were released on probation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Noting the parallels between 1982 and 2022, Zia recalled that Chin\u2019s murder occurred amidst mounting public fears that manufacturing jobs were relocating to Asia even as inflation, fueled by an oil crisis, had already hit 20%. Meanwhile the Reagan administration was dismantling social safety programs such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, and mental health services \u2013 policies whose impacts are still being felt today.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were people in the C-suites, the heads of the auto industries, people in the halls of Congress saying we are at war because Japan makes fuel efficient cars,\u201d said Zia, ignoring the fact that German cars were even more fuel efficient. \u201cIt was a scapegoat to blame some external force for the difficulties that were happening internally in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

That has happened repeatedly in American history, Zia noted, pointing to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S., and the Trump administration\u2019s national security program that focused counterintelligence resources on fighting \u201cChinese espionage<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, as now, Asian Americans came together with Black Americans, Arab Americans, and people from all walks of life, social classes, and faiths to denounce racist violence, Zia said, despite concentrated efforts to keep people divided, including misinformation implying that much of the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes are committed by Blacks.<\/p>\n

\u2018Replacement theory\u2019 drives racist-fueled attacks<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Zia noted that the majority of assailants against Asians are white and that Black leaders \u2013 from Jesse Jackson to Stacey Abrams to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar \u2013 have denounced Asian violence, even as Asians have mobilized to support the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George\u2019s Floyd murder.<\/p>\n

\u201cA\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0done by the University of Michigan that came out in the summer of 2021 shows that 75% of the attackers of Asian Americans are white,\u201d said John C. Yang, president and CEO, Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).<\/p>\n

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