Like Helena, I also felt the pop of the Claremont Bubble while watching “Who Killed Vincent Chin.”

Ron Ebens beat a man to death with a baseball bat. His only punishment was a $3,000 fine and a few years of community service. How is this possible? Vincent Chin, the victim, was Chinese. The only reason Ebens did not receive any further punishment was because the justice system that his case was as racist as he is.

He murdered someone. With a baseball bat. There were witnesses. If the justice system was not upholding racist ideals, what was their reasoning for letting this man off with a $3,000 fine. Where I live, that’s the fine for shooting off fireworks on the 4th of July. If you kill someone with a baseball bat, you go the Chino Prison. Simple.

Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “Banality of Evil”—as alluded to by Renee Tajima during the Q&A—is the theory that ordinary and normal people are capable of carrying out horrendous actions because of situational pressure and circumstance, and not because of any innate evil or malice had by the individual. To see Ron Ebens’ expressionless face, and to hear him say, “this is something that could happen to anyone,” made me think of Adolf Eichmann before Tajima even mentioned the “Banality of Evil.” (Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. It follows the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi official responsible for organizing the transportation of Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe during WWII.)

Ebens showed absolutely no remorse throughout the entire film—it was like he was detached from his own reality. In my opinion, he felt no guilt because his society never blamed him, or punished him, for having done anything wrong. It is this same society that created the evil and racism that led to the killing of Vincent Chin. With that being said, I do want to clarify that the fact that Ebens is the creation of his society does not excuse him from any blame. He killed a human being. Once again—how is it possible that he wasn’t punished?

Moving on:

I could really relate to the narrator in “A Fire in Fontana.” (The Claremont Bubble is once again going to come in to play.) While I’m not a gay, I have friends who are. While I’m here at school, which is such an accepting community compared to life outside the Bubble, it’s something I really think about. But when I go home, to Chino Hills, which is only 20 minutes away, people use the words “gay” and “faggot” as casual insults. And when I go visit extended family in Orange County, I usually have to excuse myself at some point in the evening to keep myself from screaming at the people around me. Or get into an argument with an uncle (Not the pot-head. A different uncle.) about whether or not films like “Brokeback Mountain” should exist.

But, despite my good intentions, because of my heterosexuality, I still enjoy privileges that others don’t. And because she isn’t black, so does the narrator. While she cheers for the Watts riots as a form of retribution for the black family that was killed in Fontana, she cheers while “sitting safely in a house which was located on a street where panic would be the order of the day if a Black family should happen to move in” (157).

-Nicole