After watching "Who Killed Vincent Chin," I felt like I had been brought back to the real world. Being on campus 24/7 can be isolating at times; Claremont can be like a bubble where everything seems relatively happy and safe. In class when we talk about Asian American issues, I feel almost as if the discussions are pointless. Although I think that it is still important to discuss and be aware of such issues, I also think that we could spend our time "fighting" for justice instead of sitting in a class and talking amongst each other. All these horrible things are still happening in the world, and I feel so insignificant or powerless to do anything about it.

One of the things that I remember from the documentary is the part where laid-off workers are beating a Japanese imported car with baseball bats and hammers to express their anger. There is a recession and national unemployment rate is as high as 10.5% (probably one of the highest point from 1950 to 2007). Many workers in the automobile industry are losing jobs due to increased number of imported cars from Japan. If you think about, however, the reason why these cars are being bought from Japan and sold in the United States is that they are much cheaper and better. For such obvious economic reasons, the US government allowed a huge influx of imported cars from Japan. Due to a sudden shift in trade and policies, many workers losed jobs, and the government did nothing to compensate for their losses. Logically speaking, the violent car-hitting laid-off workers should have been angry at the government, not the Japanese. Certainly the Japanese car companies were making cheaper, more efficient cars and therefore taking a lot of profit away from the US car companies. The US media framed it as if it were the Japanese people's fault that these American workers are losing jobs. In the end, this unemployment issue became racialized and was blamed on the Japanese.

Vincent Chin was Chinese. However, in the eyes of Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, he was an East Asian and did not matter whether he was actually Japanese. Even though Ebens and Nitz were charged of manslaughter, they were able to get away with only three months of probation. Why? Since they did not have a record of committing a crime. I do not understand how that justifies an intentional murder. Vincent Chin was beat to death. His brain was falling out of his skull and splattered on the street. He did not do anything wrong to Ebens or Nitz. Ebens, who was under the influence of alcohol when he killed Vincent, refused to remember saying anything racial. He kept denying that he had not done what the witnesses (who were sober, by the way) said he had done that night. Also, he refused to believe that what he had done was racist.
I wonder what would have happened if two black men had beat up a white man with a bat that night. Certainly, the black men would not have been given only three months of probation.
What I don't understand is, THIS WAS A MURDER. How could anyone get out of it with only three months of probation if he or she had killed someone intentionally? Just because I don't have a history of commiting crime does not mean I am any less guilty of a murder than a 30-year-old men who has a history of domestic violence kiling an innocent girl on the street. Since this was a Chinese man killed by two white men, it supposedly makes it all okay for the killers to get away with it with a few months of probation.

Unfortunately, Vincent Chin is not the only one who gets killed because of racism in the United States. The documentary made me realize how isolated and protected I was being on a college campus. Just outside of Claremont, it is a completely different world. The world is not so pretty. It's incredibly messed up.