Jun 19, 2017
Chin estate trustee provides insight on how
difficult it was to get justice for Vincent Chin. The Asian
American community was small and reluctant to speak up. Even civil
rights organizations weren't sure about Asian Americans in a black
and white world. It may also explain why Asian Americans have
reacted differently in recent years to hate crimes that should be
considered as significant as Chin's but have failed to get traction
with a now larger, divided and complacent Asian American
community.
Show Log:
:00 Intro, the basic factsa about the death of Vincent Chin,
update from Helen Zia, and observations about the case.How the
civil rights community was sometimes at odds with Asian
Americans.
10:21 Audio portion of interview with Helen Zia
23:26 Emil reads from his 2012 column where Chin's killer
Ronald Ebens apologizes for the murder.
34:04 End
We have now arrived at the 35th year of these essential Asian
American facts:
On June 19, 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin, 27, who was
with friends at his own bachelor party, was mistaken for being
Japanese by two white auto workers, Ronald Ebens and his stepson
Michael Nitz, at a Detroit strip club. Ebens told me Chin
sucker-punched him. The fight was taken outside, but then broken
up. It would have ended, but Ebens and Nitz pursued Chin by car and
found him at a nearby McDonald's. In the parking lot, Ebens
brutally beat Chin with a baseball bat.
Chin was comatose for four days and pronounced dead on June
23.
For that crime, Ebens and Nitz, his accomplice, were allowed
to plea bargain. They pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, were
sentenced to three years' probation, and fined $3,720.
There was no prison time for the murderers of Vincent
Chin.
The Asian American community was outraged, which led to a
federal civil rights prosecution against Ebens and Nitz. Ebens was
found guilty on one charge and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He
appealed to the Sixth Circuit, and a second federal trial was moved
from Detroit to Cincinnati. Ebens was acquitted by a Cincinnati
jury that found no racial motivation in the killing of Chin.
That's where the story has been for the last 35 years: The
perps are free. And Asian Americans can still be victims of
extremely violent hate crimes, like Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Asian
Indian mistaken for a Muslim. This year in Olathe, Kansas,
Kuchibhotla was allegedly killed by a white gunman who yelled, "Get
out of my country."
For the 35th year marker of Chin's death, I called to get an
update from the writer Helen Zia, who is also the trustee of the
Chin estate.
Zia said the Chin family was awarded a $2 million judgment in civil
litigation against Ebens back in the '80s, and continues to monitor
Ebens, now 77 and retired in Nevada. "The judgment has been
continued," Zia told me. She said that with interest and penalties,
the judgment could be in excess of $8 million, but Ebens has "not
paid a dime."
Zia said she's philosophical about recovery.
"The guy did what he did," she told me. "He's a killer. He got
away with murder. But the things that need to be done on behalf of
the community don't depend on him or his death. It will bring
closure. But it doesn't mean hate crimes have ended."
An edited portion of my interview with Zia is in my podcast,
Emil Amok's Takeout.
Besides being the trustee of the estate, Zia was right there
in the thick of the Chin case in Detroit. A journalist with legal
training, she wrote for the daily newspaper there, but refrained
from writing about the case so she could be one of the founders of
American Citizens for Justice, the group formed to fight for
Chin.
It was just a handful of Asian American lawyers and activists.
At that time, there were few Asian Americans in the law or in
journalism. And there was no one with the expertise to do a federal
hate crime case.
Thirty-five years later, Zia said that what strikes her the
most are the things people don't bring up about the case.
The human stuff, like the late Lily Chin, Vincent's adoptive mom.
"She died feeling that if she hadn't adopted him, he'd be alive,"
Zia told me. "It's so sad to me to think about it that way."
But the human stuff also includes the human opposition to the
case within the community and the backlash that existed at the
time.
"We had civil rights people who said, 'We'll support you
because Vincent was Chinese and thought to be Japanese, but if he
were Japanese, we won't support because he would've deserved it,' "
Zia said. "I said 'What? You're kidding?' The Michigan ACLU and the
Michigan National Lawyers Guild strongly opposed a civil rights
investigation because Asian Americans are not protected by federal
civil rights law. That was something we had to argue."
Fortunately, the national offices of those legal groups
prevailed and forced the state chapters to comply.
"Here were some of the most liberal activist attorneys saying
Asian Americans shouldn't be included under the civil rights law.
Vincent was an immigrant. We had to establish he was a citizen,
with the implication there might not have been a civil rights
investigation if he had not been naturalized. All of this
stuff...these were hurdles we had to overcome with major impacts
today," Zia told me.
"Can you imagine if the Reagan White House had followed the
National Lawyers Guild's Michigan chapter and the ACLU of Michigan
and said, 'Why should we look expansively at civil rights? We
shouldn't include immigrants and Asian Americans.' And at that
time, that would include Latinos too, because at that time if you
were not black or white, what do you have to do with race? Those
were the things people would say to us."
Zia said after 35 years, a quick telling of the Chin case
rarely discusses just how difficult it was to fight for justice.
But she says those are the enduring lessons of the Vincent Chin
case, because it has contributed to a modern sense of social
justice for every American.
"Every immigrant, Latinos. Every American," Zia said. "Hate
crime protection laws now also include perceived gender and
disability. It was the Vincent Chin case when we had to argue civil
rights was more than black or white."
Zia said the case was also more difficult because it was
during a pre-digital, non-computer, pay-phone age. Communication
occurred slowly.
But the case was also slow because Asian Americans were a
micro-community.
We're 21 million now and feel empowered.
In 1980, the Asian American population was just 3.7 million
nationwide. And most were timid, non-boat rockers.
"In the Vincent Chin case, people were incredibly reluctant to
become involved," Zia told me. "They had never gotten involved
before. And I think that's what gets lost [in the retelling of the
story]. Exclusion didn't end till about 1950, and so what that
meant was Asian Americans of every kind, from Chinese to Filipinos,
everybody, were pretty much totally disenfranchised till the
mid-20th century."
"So when Vincent Chin was killed 30 years later [in 1982], the
communities had. . .I think of it as stunted growth. There weren't
people running for office. If there were, it was a miniscule
number. There weren't people standing up; we didn't have advocacy
organizations."
A right to justice, and a community's sense of empowerment,
was a difficult thing to imagine for many Asian Americans. "Not
only did we not have it," Zia said, "People didn't even recognize
it was something we could have. The idea we all came together with
the Vincent Chin case and sang 'Kumbaya' and took over and went to
the Reagan White House and the Department of Justice and got all
these things to happen. . .that's a mythology. And I think it's a
disservice to the next generations to think this."
Helen Zia knows what was happening in Detroit in the '80s as
the fight began for Vincent Chin.
More of her thoughts on Emil Amok's Takeout.
RONALD EBENS
I don't know what Vincent Chin's killer did for Father's
Day.
I last talked to Ronald Ebens in 2015, around the June 23
anniversary of Chin's death. "I'm doing fine," he told me then,
adding quickly he had a good Father's Day with his kids.;
I asked him then if he ever thought about the anniversary.
"Like what?" he said. "I never forget it."
Never?
"Of course not."
It was 2015. "I'm 75 years old, and I'm just tired of all that
after 33 years."
He's 77 now, and Helen Zia doesn't want him ever to tire or
forget the truth.
"He will never spend a day of his life without knowing he has
a huge debt to society and a huge debt to Vincent Chin's family,"
Zia told me. "And one day, he will pay for it."
The very first time I talked to Ebens was in 2012, on the 30th
anniversary of the Chin murder.
On the podcast, I read aloud the column that I wrote on
June 22, 2012.
It has Ebens explaining himself and describing what happened
that night. He was reluctant to talk to me, but he did. And during
our conversation, he apologized for the murder.
"I'm sorry it happened and if there's any way to undo it, I'd do
it," he told me in my
exclusive interview. "Nobody feels good about somebody's life
being taken, okay? You just never get over it. . .Anybody who hurts
somebody else. If you're a human being, you're sorry, you
know."
But Zia, who read my column at the time, has never bought that
as an apology.
"I stood next to this guy in court, and I see his face, over
and over, read his words, and frankly, I don't see a shred of
sincerity," Zia told me. "[He's really saying] 'I didn't even mean
to kill, why should I have to go through this.'"
And then to me, Zia said, "It would take more than you
interviewing him saying, ' I'm sorry, I killed him.' Let's see how
sorry he is and set an example for future people who are thinking
of killing a Muslim student in North Carolina, or a man in Kansas.
These killers who kill out of hatred and go to justify their
killings, it takes more than saying I'm sorry."