Vincent Chin rally in Detroit, 1983 (Photo by Victor Yang, China Times) On the night of June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin was celebrating his bachelor's party with friends in a Detroit strip club. He got into an altercation with two white men, and both groups were thrown out. The two men tracked down Chin with the help of a...
My friends at sites such as Angry Asian Man, 8 Asians and Slant Eye for the Round Eye have already posted this but I want to bring attention to it too:
Asian students are being singled out and viciously beaten at South Philadelphia High School. Now, the students are protesting the lack of response by school officials over the continuing attacks. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
More than 50 Asian students stayed away from South Philadelphia High yesterday, as they will all week - a boycott, they said, of the school's unsafe conditions and the district's failure to deal with long-standing violence between racial groups. School district officials, the students say, are downplaying attacks last week on about 30 Asian students and aren't taking the problem seriously.Having 30 students of one ethnic group attacked should be cause for alarm, but the Asian students feel the school district isn't taking the problem seriously. The Inquirer continues:
Vincent Chin was beaten with a baseball bat 27 years ago today in a Detroit suburb, and died four days later.
At the time, I was three years out of art school, managing a paint store, and was a budding young rock critic writing for Denver's alternative newspaper, Westword. I didn't follow any news coverage about the attack on Vincent Chin, and I was clueless about the importance of his tragic death. I was still a "banana" -- yellow on the outside, but white on the inside. Like the name of the 2008 documentary film about the impact of Chin's murder on the Asian American community, if you had asked me then about him, I would have said, "Vincent who?"
Today, Vincent Chin is very much on my mind. I haven't seen director Tony Lam's "Vincent Who?" yet, but I definitely feel I'm a part of Chin's legacy. In the decades since, I've become aware and much more appreciative of my ethnic roots, culture and history as a Japanese American, which I used to take for granted. I've also become much more aware of my place in the much larger Asian American community.
The girl hung up, Huntley said, and they called back and left two messages telling her that she would die because of what they were going to do to her. "The girl answered the first call, but her parents intercepted the other messages," Huntley said. "They didn't pick up the phone, but they listened to the messages and shielded their daughter from hearing them." The messages included details about damaging the girl's female organs, Huntley said. "In the messages, they indicated that they wanted to have sex with her because she was Asian," Huntley said. "That is the basis for charging them with a bias-motivated crime."Boulder may be liberal politically and environmentally, but not always racially. In recent years, the University of Colorado -- where most of the city's Asians and other people of color can be found -- has suffered a series of embarrassing racial incidents that range from vioelnce against minorities to a campus news website columnist satirically declaring "war against Asians."
The 15-year-old black belt thought he was doing his tormentor a favour when he elected to fight back with his weaker left hand. He had heard his white classmate throw an angry racial slur in his direction after an argument during a gym class game of speedball, and now the student was shoving him backward, refusing to retract the smear. The white student swung first, hitting the 15-year-old with a punch to the mouth. The 15-year-old heard his father's voice running through his head: Fight only as a last resort, only in self-defence, only if given no choice, and only with the left hand. His swing was short and compact, a left-handed dart that hit the white student square on the nose. The nose broke under his fist, igniting a sequence of events - from arrest to suspension to possible expulsion - that has left the Asian student and his family wondering whether they are welcome in this small, rural and mostly white community north of Toronto, one that has been touched by anti-Asian attacks in the past. The 15-year-old, the only person charged in connection with the April 21 school fight, faces one count of assault causing bodily harm.This week, 400 students at his high school walked out in protest -- even though he is shy and hadn't made a lot of friends, they supported his defiance of bullying and racism.
Update Nov 3: The Boulder Police Department now says there was apparently no knife involved in the assault against the Asian American as described below, but the victim was threatened with being "cut." The police are also investigation another assult made the same night, Oct. 30: a gang rape of a woman by four men. Although neither crime occured on...