Chin, a 27 year old Chinese-American draftsman, was out celebrating his engagement with friends at the Fancy Pants Club in Detroit on June 23, 1982. There he encountered two white men, one a supervisor at Chrysler, the other his recently laid off stepson. Words and blows were exchanged. “It’s because of you little m-f-s that we’re out of work,” one of the perpetrators allegedly shouted. After running Chin out of the club, the pair then hunted Chin down, even paying an accomplice to help them, and savagely beat him with a bat. Vincent Chin succumbed to his injuries four days later.

In our current historical moment, one defined by the intersection of racist scapegoating and the international crisis of COVID-19, the saga of Mr. Chin still resonates, bearing resemblance to any number of hate crimes that have grabbed headlines in the last few months: the stabbing of an Asian-American man in New York’s Chinatown; the vandalization of a Texas ramen restaurant, with COVID-related slurs directed against the Vietnamese owner; Chinese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin being called “coronavirus” by a member of an opposing team; a brutish attack of a 65 year old Filipino immigrant in New York; and most disturbingly of all, the mass shooting at two Asian-owned spas in Atlanta, which resulted in eight deaths, including six Asian women.

The similarities between the murder of Vincent Chin and contemporary anti-Asian violence, as well as the events and rhetoric that catalyzed these racist attacks, serve as a testament to a seldom-spoken truth: throughout various crises in American history, Asians and Asian-Americans have often served as scapegoats, objects of fear, subject to blame, excluded, contained, victimized by violence. From discriminatory public health measures against Asian-Americans during the 1900 San Francisco plague to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, from the vitriolic reaction to Japanese industrial success to the vilification of South Asians following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “Yellow Peril” runs all through American history, now appearing as “Kung Flu.”

At the forefront in tracing the lineage of anti-Asian racism and organizing against it is activist, journalist, and scholar Helen Zia. Zia’s lifelong commitment to advocating for equal rights and combating social injustice began with her role as a community organizer in Detroit in the 1970’s, and gained national prominence in the wake of Vincent Chin’s death. After Mr. Chin’s murderers were released on probation, Zia partnered with other activists to form American Citizens for Justice, a pan-Asian civil rights organization that spent its burgeoning months protesting, petitioning, and advocating for justice in the case of Vincent Chin.

Since then, Zia has dedicated herself to speaking, writing, and mobilizing others against racism, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia. She has received numerous awards for her activism and journalism, and her informed investigations and publications have brought hidden aspects of the Asian-American story to the public consciousness–for example, Zia is now working on developing the Vincent Chin story as a TV series.

UH Manoa’s Better Tomorrow Speaker Series is honored to host Helen Zia as she seeks to contextualize the March 16th Atlanta shootings within the intersecting histories of anti-Asian racism and misogyny in the United States. Below is the video recording of the event.