Re-Post: Eric Byler blog — What Killed Vincent Chin

[THE FOLLOWING APPEARED ON ERIC BYLER'S MYSPACE BLOG ON JUNE 19, 2007:]Eric Byler Tuesday, June 19, 2007

7:47 PM

What Killed Vincent Chin

To mark the 25th anniversary of Vincent Chin's murder, my friends at Asian Pacific Americans for Progress are planning a National Townhall on Hate Crimes June 19th thru July 14th in Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Grand Rapids, and other cities around the country. More info:

www.apaforprogress.org

I was scheduled to speak at the event in D.C. this Saturday, but I had to cancell because I'm working in Honolulu. Instead I stayed up all night and wrote an essay.

What Killed Vincent Chin

Acts of violence take on a different dimension when the humanity of the victim is valued differently than that of the perpetrator, especially when the defining quotient is race. At the time of Vincent Chin's murder, American airwaves were filled with xenophobic punditry — a familiar dogma of "us vs. them." The "us" was mainstream American (implicitly Caucasians) and the "them" was the Asian trade deficit (specifically Japanese), the people, products, and cars that were stealing American jobs and hurting America's economy. In the eyes of two laid-off autoworkers, Vincent Chin looked like a Japanese person. A prerequisite to his murder was a judgment that he was thus less deserving of justice, less deserving of life, and essentially less human. When the murder was brought to trial, our Justice system upheld this view.

Thanks in great part to the seminal film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Pena, Asian Pacific Americans across the nation learned of this travesty. Helen Zia recalled of this period: "For the first time, we considered ourselves as a race, a minority race in America that faced discrimination and had to fight for our civil rights. The Vincent Chin case marked the beginning of the emergence of Asian Pacific Americans as a self-defined American racial group." We realized the consequences of not having a voice, not having leadership, and not having visibility. Without them, we were in danger of being defined as perpetual foreigners, and stripped of our rights. In defending our place in this society, we were also defending our right to equal justice.

The same battle, of course, is ongoing today. Xenophobic rhetoric currently proposes different targets. But the aims remain the same: to harness the power of resentment, hate, and prejudice in the name of an otherwise unpopular ideology. Over the last year or so, the majority of Americans have come to realize there were no WMD's in Iraq, and there was and is no moral justification for military violence against a nation of innocent people who happen to share the same religion and skin color as our attackers on Sept. 11th. It is not a coincidence that during the same period, American airwaves provided less and less strategic punditry about the "War on Terror" and more and more about "Illegal Immigration." When our fears and weaknesses could no longer be jolted with images of dark-skinned Muslims brandishing rifles, we were inundated instead with images of dark-skinned Mexicans jumping over fences. With the concerted efforts of our leaders and our news outlets, the issue of "Illegal Immigration" has come to overshadow an illegal war.

If we could take a step back, almost all Americans would agree that equal justice should not be allotted according to race, religion, or even sexual orientation. But when we allow our leaders to use such prejudice to drum up support for disastrous policies, we are implicitly encouraging one another to ascribe different values to human beings according to their race, creed, or sexuality. In the 80's political strategists implicitly challenged the rights of Asian Americans and Asian products to be in this country. In this decade, they have done so with Arabs, Muslims, and now Mexican and Latin Americans. For good measure (and for political gain), they have challenged the rights of gays and lesbians to equality under the law. When we as a people fail to respond effectively to these tactics, we are, by default, setting the stage for hate crimes.

When we remember Vincent Chin, let us not only honor and appreciate a human being whose life was stolen from his family, his fiance, and friends. Let us also remember to defend the rights and the equality of all human beings. To do this, we must stand up to prejudice, in particular when it is utilized by the media and by politicians who control the media. Prejudice is more than impolite social behavīor; prejudice begets violence. Even if the current target is not your own community (even if you're not gay, Muslim, or Mexican), it is our duty as citizens to punish "leaders" who perpetuate hate. Our silence enables them. Our voice can stop them. The choice is ours.