Vincent Who?

Angry Asian Man shares two articles published on June 19 in the Detroit Free Press and The Daily Texan.

From the Free Press article by Catherine Ho:

The Chin killing remains a touchstone for the Asian-American community in both Michigan and across the nation, binding previously scattered communities of Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean- and Filipino-Americans to advocate against racial discrimination and hate crimes.

“It brought together Asian Americans as Asian Americans and forged a movement,” said Frank Wu, dean of the law school at Wayne State University. “It made this group of people who had very little in common realize that even if their ancestors hated each other, they had a common cause in America. That’s why this case still matters.”

From college senior Sehjong Hamjong’s op-ed in the Texan:

The outrage that ensued from the lax verdict and the handling of the case sparked Asians and Asian-Americans across the U.S. to raise awareness of the issue, garnering attention from civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, and national news and talk show programs. This effort eventually led the FBI to conduct an investigation, and the U.S. Department of Justice eventually filed charges against Ebens and Nitz.

Ebens was sentenced to a 25-years in prison, while Nitz was cleared of all wrongdoing. But eventually, Ebens was cleared of all charges through an appeal and another trial. Neither Ebens nor Nitz served any prison time. A civil court ordered Ebens to pay Chin’s family $1.5 million, but Ebens refused and is still on the run from the law.

…

The media and mainstream press tend to overlook hate crimes targeting Asians and Asian-Americans. Crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans are not always reported properly by police as hate crimes, which causes these crimes to be underreported. Legislative and law-enforcement officials need to become aware that these crimes are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger trend and climate in the U.S. related to anti-Asian sentiment and racial bias.

The FBI’s most recent Uniform Crime Report, released in 2005, lists 8,804 victims of hate crimes, and 55.7 percent of those were related to racial bias. Of this percentage, 4.9 percent of the victims were listed as Asian/Pacific Islander, and this number doesn’t include cases that didn’t get reported as a hate crime.

There is a stereotype that Asians and Asian-Americans are perpetual foreigners, and some don’t distinguish between an individual from his or her ethnicity. Twenty-five years after Chin’s death, we must look back as a nation to see if we’ve progressed.