By Cristian Carlos, special for Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
The fight against racism in America is not over yet. Forty years ago, on the night before his marriage, Vincent Chin was savagely beaten with a baseball bat. The sloppy justice that followed - the perpetrators were not jailed for a minute - was seen as the beginning of the Asian-American civil rights movement, according to author and activist Helen Zia.
Today, Asian Americans face a more aggressive climate of racist hatred that targets all people of color ?ethnicity? as well as Jews and Muslims.
Racism is a problem in the United States that goes far beyond the issue of police brutality. Racism is defined as the belief that one race is superior to another, and it has a long history in the United States. One of the best known examples of racism in the United States is slavery, which was legal until 1865. Slaves were often treated cruelly and many were forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions. Today, racism is still a problem in many parts of the country.
Some Asian communities are unfairly targeted by the police, and racial stereotyping is common in the media. Although many people believe that racism is disappearing, it is still a serious problem.
The United States has come a long way in its fight against racism. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded in banning segregation nationwide, and laws protecting people from discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and disability have been passed at the local, state and federal levels. Despite these achievements, much work remains to be done.
In view of the outlook, Ethnic Media Services offered a briefing where speakers discussed the growing danger of violence and hate in the U.S., the push for increased multiracial solidarity to combat it, and the commemoration of Chin's death at a special 40th anniversary event in Detroit June 14-16.
Michael German, a member of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, acknowledged that "it is difficult to talk about this issue" because, he said, one of the reasons is that there is a lack of quantitative knowledge about crimes based on ethnicity. He reported that perhaps only 15 % of police departments in the country recognize that this type of violence exists due to different jurisdictions.
Another factor, German said, is that white supremacists in different parts of the United States abuse not only the African-descendant population, but also communities of other ethnicities. "Racism is a more common problem in societies like ours because that's the foundation we grew up on," German lamented.
He pointed out that the focus of violence against the Asian-American community is in what he referred to as "privileged sectors of society" and not by the marginalized and extremist sectors that lead to the racism of Asian communities. He cited the example of the murder of Vincent Chin as a watershed in the evolution of awareness of racism.
Helen Zia, author, activist and former journalist and founding member of Detroit-based American Citizens for Justice, began her participation by stating that the problem of racism in the U.S. is not limited to the contemporary, but is a problem that has permeated American society "for decades"; however, she noted that, in the last couple of years, the Asian-American community has had a difficult time standing up against acts of racial violence.
He said the Asian-American community felt the onslaught of "horrifying" violence in the iconic and representative case of Vincent Chin on the eve of his wedding 40 years ago in Detroit. "The 1980s was a year of crisis for the U.S.," said Zia, who said he lost his job at that time due to a policy of increasingly restricting the quality of life for different spheres of labor focused on the auto industry 40 years ago.
"The Asian-American community has been blamed for the economic situation in the U.S." historically, Zia said. He noted that it is important to misinform about who in the U.S. is at the forefront of violent speech and acts against the Asian-American community: "It's not the African-American community," Zia clarified, referring to the Vincent Chin case - witnessed by about 70 people - who, he added, "were white people" with higher-paying jobs.
"We have thousands of testimonies from different ethnicities telling their own stories" of racial violence, Zia said. "It's horrifying," Zia confesses, thinking that if Vincent Chin's killers had been of a different ethnicity and not white, they would have been sentenced according to the law.
From cases like Vincent Chin's, Zia points out, different Asian and other communities united for civil rights in the U.S.
John C. Yang, president and CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), said it is important to focus on "how to transform despair into hope and tragedy into strength," the trigger being the Vincent Chin murder case that Yang called "a great tragedy."
"Many groups of people of different ethnic backgrounds in the Asian American community unified at a time in history when they were thought to be separated during the 1970s," Yang contextualized. After the murder of Vincent Chin, Yang says, the different Asian American communities began to organize and gain a sense of civil rights. "A lot of strength developed from that tragic event, something that is happening in our times."
Yang said that while the U.S. is witnessing a major escalation of racial violence against Asian-American communities, communities such as African Americans are also experiencing an increase in instances of violence such as the murder of George Floyd, the Charlottesville case and the most recent violent takeover of the Capitol prompted by former President Donald Trump.
He reported that the media has pushed information for both good and bad by referencing a strategy of replacing the white American population "or people who feel they are in danger of being replaced, like white Christian men with guns, those are the people who feel threatened."
Lisa Cylar Barrett, Policy Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, described as "horrifying" the escalation of violence seen in the U.S. against ethnic and Afro-descendant communities and referred to the recent case where 19 minors and two teachers were murdered at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where, said Cylar Barrett, up to 80 % of the population identifies as Latino.
"The violence and loss of life in the last 12 days in the U.S. is unheard of," lamented Cylar Barrett. He said that disinformation has been used as a weapon "to divide the African-American and Asian-American communities.
Cylar Barrett warned that the problems of violence, discrimination, hateful rhetoric "have the same roots, a white power structure that is trying to maintain its control and is afraid of the growth of Afro-descendant communities".
Regarding the murder perpetrated 40 years ago against Vincent Chin, Cylar Barrett related that it was the African-descendant community in Detroit that first raised its voice against this act of violence and pointed out the lack of civil rights for U.S. racial minorities. "We need to unify the communities we serve," Cylar Barrett concluded.
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