Violent Hands
As people in Minneapolis struggled with questions of jury selection, prejudiced judgments, and appropriate places for a trial for the killer of George Floyd, another young white man picked up a gun. He ultimately killed 8 people, six of them Asian-American women. His actions were explained by the local sheriff as the result of a bad day.
Violence, at the hands of the state, or among neighbors, is routine in America. Often it is inflicted on people of color by white men. Often it is deadly.
Over this past year, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand that we stop, take a long, hard look at who we have been, and who we want to become. This cry to look deeply at ourselves, at our history, and to affirm our capacity to change and become more human, has itself been met with violence. Sometimes deadly, against those who dare to question how much we have come to disregard life.
Those of us in Detroit have a special responsibility to speak out against the rising tide of violence against Asian Americans. We know this leads to death. We know this violence has a long history in the white settler colonial assault on this land. We have witnessed the results of rage.
In the spring of 1982 a young Chinese American, Vincent Chin was brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat wielded by two unemployed autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. On the night of his bachelor party, Chin was attacked by these men who accused him of taking their jobs. Vincent Chin died four days later and was buried on what would have been his wedding day.
The two men who killed him never spent any time in jail. In an agreement with prosecutors, both men ultimately plead guilty of manslaughter and were sentenced to three years of probation and fined $3000.
A year later, activists brought a federal civil rights trial against the killers. They were convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but this was later overturned. Their defense was simple. It was just a bar room brawl gone bad. They had a bad day.
The brutality of this killing and the protection of the murderers by the justice system sparked the Asian American movement in this country. As Frank Wu, former Detroiter and Dean of the Hastings College of Law, University of California wrote:
“The killing catalyzed political activity among Asian-Americans — whose numbers had steadily increased since the 1965 overhaul of immigration laws but who then represented only about 1.5 percent of the population — as never before. “Remember Vincent Chin” turned into a rallying cry; for the first time, Asian-Americans of every background angrily protested in cities across the country. For all that Asians had been through — racial exclusion, starting with a ban on Chinese migrant labor in 1882; the unconstitutional detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the legacy of America’s wars in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam — no single episode involving an individual Asian-American had ever had such an effect before.”
Wu, writing in 2012, concluded his article on the importance of Vincent Chin with this observation, “History also teaches us that before Asian-Americans were seen as model minorities, we were also perpetual foreigners. Taken together, these perceptions can lead to resentment. And resentment can lead to hate.”
Resentment and hate are not natural, inevitable conditions. Violence in the defense of the state, or at the hands of neighbors, is a choice. Violence is the result how we understand ourselves, each other, our history, and who we want to become. We can and must acknowledge and turn away from violence, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. We can choose life. We are at a moment when the possibilities of radical transformation are not only possible, but essential, if we are to have a future.