1) a) What happened in the Chin case? (Who were the assailants? What specifically happened on the night of June 19th, 1982?) b) What were the motivations? (This can be based on the film, readings, lectures AS WELL AS your own interpretation).
On the night of June 19th, Vincent Chin went out for a bachelor’s party before his wedding at a sleazy strip club. As they purported to enjoy the venue, they were apparently becoming the target of an impending hate crime that would escalate into Chin’s death. A stripper named Racine Cowell reported that another patron, a former motor foreman named Ronald Ebens was saying things that blamed the Detroit economic plight on the Asian “motherfuckers.” Ebens would later beat Chin to death with a baseball bat. Initially, Ebens was acquitted. Implied in context, the motivations were racial, thus this was in the jurisdiction of a civil rights case that took quite a bit to build up. However, taken out of context, the words could be used for anything, and likely led to the successful appeal case that would eventually re-set Ebens free. Though true justice was not served, this incident and the resulting community action that tried to work the system to solve it, helped unify Asian Americans across the US over a collective cause. However, injustices like this happen all the time, though many not on such extreme levels. From personal experience, even walking down the street in San Francisco in 2018, an Asian-American can be called racial slurs or other derogatory terms.
2) In your opinion, was this case racially motivated? Economically motivated?
This case was both economically and racially motivated. It’s a chicken and egg problem. The bad economy of the US motor vertical would put a lot of motor workers out of jobs; traditionally, they would blame foreign-looking races such as Asian people as the cause. Theories of evolution would favor how it’s easy or even natural for the human brain to blame bad things on the group that looks different than one’s own. It’s perhaps a stereotype that job loss would be blamed on the Asians - historically, that has always been the context, as compromised immigrants who have few options but to take the unfavorable cutthroat deals in order to survive.
3) What did you find to be the most significant about this case? (The physical act, the legal act, the response of the community at large?)
For me, personally, I feel that this case and its outcome illustrates the collective weakness latent in the traditional strength of the Asian-American community. Most Asians are employed and burdened to produce with heavy sense of obligation, but this leaves them with no time to worry about the other issues that cast a miasma over their collective well-being.
The problem with the Asian community is that those who are “out of jobs” or “in between” are not usually overqualified, thus the right labor force to try forwarding the Asian civil rights cause. In the African-American population, that seems to be the exact case - and thus, they have a lot of overqualified people literally with nothing better to do to advance their civil cases. In other words, the stereotype that Asians are seen as more “employable” than Africans means that we lose out on time available to help advance our collective civil rights.
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