‘It’s Not Fair’: Vincent Chin and the Rise of White Male Victimhood
Two weeks ago, we commemorated the 38th anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American engineer who was violently murdered in Detroit in 1982 on the night of his bachelor party by two white auto workers, Ron Ebens and Michael Nitz.
Although they openly admitted to the crime, Ebens and Nitz denied it was racially motivated, despite the fact that they used racial slurs and comments during the encounter. In an era that pre-dated federal hate crime legislation, Ebens and Nitz were each sentenced to a paltry $3000 fine and three years of probation, despite outrage and protest by a pan-Asian, pan-racial coalition of civil rights activists, including Black civil rights leaders like Reverend Jesse Jackson and journalists like Helen Zia. Neither Ebens or Nitz spent a day in jail.
This story hits close to home. My father, an immigrant from Taiwan, studied engineering at the University of Detroit just a few years before Vincent Chin was lynched. “I still remember the news when that happened,” my father said to me on the phone when I asked him to recall the moment he heard about Vincent’s death. “I could never forget that name.”
Vincent’s death also marked the political moment in which the “Asian American” identity as we know it was forged, so that future generations like mine could organize for civil rights beneath a unified, pan-ethnic banner. Yet many Americans, including those in the Asian American community, are unfamiliar with Vincent’s story. Omitted from U.S. history books, the yearly remembrance of Vincent Chin’s death often comes and goes with little fanfare.
But in 2020, amid national uprisings over the police murders of Black Americans and with hate crimes against Asian Americans on the rise, Vincent’s death seems more relevant than ever as we scrutinize our criminal justice system’s role in perpetuating violence against Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, and work to coalesce against these systems of oppression.
Beyond that, Vincent’s story forces us to recognize the volatility of white American sentiments towards Asians and Asian Americans throughout our country’s history, despite the prevalence of the “model minority myth” that grants some Asian Americans access to privilege. It also asks us to interrogate more broadly how the performance of white masculinity in our country is predicated both on American hegemony abroad and white economic and racial dominance at home.
These unspoken rules have left little room for immigrants from non-European nations to be accepted as fully American in both good times and bad. In such a place as this, what happened to Vincent Chin was not a fluke; it was practically inevitable.
What Happened to Vincent Chin?
Born in Guangzhou, China, Vincent Chin was the adopted son of Hing and Lily Chin. His family had already left their mark on American history: Vincent’s father Hing, who died two years before Vincent was killed, had served in the U.S Army during World War II, while his mother Lily was the descendent of a Chinese railroad worker who had worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1800’s. Vincent worked as a draftsman for Efficient Engineering and was engaged to Vikki Wong, whom he had been with for three years.
On the night of June 19th, 1982, Vincent and two friends had gone to a topless bar called Fancy Pants after work to celebrate his bachelor party. At the club, Vincent became boisterous and inebriated, causing tension with two fellow patrons, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz (who were father and stepson). Ebens called Vincent a “Jap”, adding: “It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work.”
“Don’t call me a fucker,” (2:55) Vincent responded. Despite his friends’ attempts to calm him down, Vincent punched Ebens, and the ensuing brawl caused both parties to be kicked out of the club. The fight spilled over into the parking lot before Vincent and his friends stumbled their way towards a nearby McDonalds.
At this time, Ebens and Nitz retrieved a baseball bat from their car and began hunting down Vincent and his friends, even enlisting the help of a neighborhood local to track them down. According to this witness, who was interviewed on the 1989 documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, Ebens had said to him, “when we catch up with these Chinese guys we’re going to bust their motherfuckin’ heads” (2:10).
Sure enough, Ebens and Nitz cornered Vincent into a phone booth. As Nitz held Vincent from behind, Ebens began swinging the baseball bat at Vincent’s legs. Vincent tried running away, but slipped and fell. That’s when Ebens took the bat to Vincent’s skull, cracking his head open.
A Highland Park police officer who was there at the scene describes the fatal blow: “[Mr. Ebens] swung the bat as if a baseball player was swinging for a home run -- full contact, full swing.” (3:10) Vincent’s blood and brain matter spilled onto the street. He was rushed to the hospital and died four days later. His last words before succumbing to his coma: “It’s not fair.”
From White Apathy to White Victimhood
Still more chilling than the lurid, play-by-play details of Vincent’s death is the matter-of-factness with which Ebens, interviewed in his living room several years later, recalled the whole affair:
“Well to be quite honest, I expected to go to jail (5:59),” he says, one leg crossed over the other, one arm draped casually over the corner of the couch. “I pleaded guilty to manslaughter, did just like anybody else, I went to take my licks. I thought, sure, I’m going to jail. I was prepared to go.”
Yet he also passivizes his role in the crime, as though Vincent’s death was nothing more than an accident: “There are a thousand what-ifs I could ask myself. It was preordained to be, I guess. It just happened.” He might as well have tilted his head and shrugged.
Meanwhile, one of Ebens’ neighbors, a woman named Debbie Moore, had this to say about Ebens and Nitz: “They’re real good people, you know, and it could happen to anybody. It could happen to my husband, it could happen to anybody in my family, it’s just one of those things.” (4:30)
Their statements insinuate that what happened to Vincent was at least understandable if not justified, and that racial animus was not a factor in Vincent’s killing. It was as if no one could tell which party was the victim: the Chinese American whose wedding became a funeral, or those “really good people” who had simply gotten caught up in a heated exchange.
In 2020, the phrase “it just happened” would hardly be admitted as a defense against sexual harassment allegations, let alone a murder charge. Yet, it is the same style of prevarication that Donald Trump used when describing white nationalists attending the fateful “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville as “very fine people”. The racial attitudes expressed by the smug ambivalence on Ron Ebens’ face and the aloof reaction by his neighbor, have in the decades since evolved into a rhetoric that Zach Beauchamp of Vox called “white male backlash”, the phenomenon in which cis white men claim to experience persecution and silencing in the face of social progress.
Similarly, passively neutral phrases like “it could happen to anyone” and “it was preordained” have been replaced by a full-throated revisionism that asserts that in fact, it is white men--even powerful white men--who are the losers in society. When Trump claimed that the contentious hearings regarding numerous sexual assault allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh were “harsh and unfair”; or when he tweeted, “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”, following two Supreme Court decisions ruling in favor of undocumented youth and the LGTBQ+ community, respectively, he is, in effect, weaponizing victimhood."No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly,” Trump has claimed.
In his 2017 Salon piece, Gunther Peck, Duke University professor of history and public policy, explains why this tactic has been so successful: “Critiquing his personality or contradicting his claims with facts ironically fuels his very appeal, which is grounded in a kind of professional victimhood.” Invoking victimhood triggers vulnerability and fear, and out of fear comes anger.
Charles M. Blow of the New York Times, in 2018, wrote that Trump and Kavanaugh personify “white male victimization anxiety”: “Kavanaugh’s belligerent defense and Trump’s dismissal of the accusers — he mocked one at a political rally and called the accusations a hoax — represent for many men a back-against-the-wall, no-more-space-to-retreat moment of fighting back, of pushing back, of standing proud in their patriarchy and proclaiming that it will not bend.”
Domenico Montanaro of NPR also pointed out that from 2015 and 2018, “[Trump] has used the word ‘unfair’ 69 times in tweets, and since becoming president, 40 times.” That was two long years ago, even before impeachment investigations involving Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia were underway.
Research has confirmed that this is not just a fringe sentiment among white conservatives: in a widely-cited study, White Americans were found twice as likely as African Americans to believe they have been victimized because of their race. And in a PRRI/MTV survey, 43% of young white men said discrimination against whites is as serious a problem as discrimination against other groups. 48% believed efforts to increase diversity would hurt white people. White male victimhood is not a phenomenon reserved for people longing for the “good old days”.
With his dying words, “It’s not fair”, Vincent Chin verbalized a sentiment that many people of color have felt throughout the course of our lives. Vincent was denied the presumption of individuality because of the color of his skin. He was not Vincent, the Chinese-American adoptee, son, fiancé, and draftsman; he was the phantasm of Japanese encroachment that Nitz and Ebens wanted him to be, whose extermination would reinstate, if just for a moment, some semblance of power.
The delusion of white male victimhood has always positioned itself against movements for racial and gender equity. Its prevalence today is a telling sign that as a country, we have yet to cast off the pernicious double-standard for what constitutes fairness, and who is entitled to it.
Economic Anxiety is Racial Anxiety
My father lived in Detroit in the mid-70s, a few years after the Detroit race riots and the oil crisis of 1973. The oil crisis had sent shocks through the American auto industry, setting off a dramatic chain of events. Detroit, nicknamed “The Motor City” for the presence of the “Big Three” auto companies--Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler--was hit especially hard, as layoffs of auto workers became more and more commonplace.
One interpretation suggests that as oil became scarce due to the global oil crisis, pressure mounted on auto companies to create smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. As Japanese car manufacturers like Toyota and Honda started increasing their share of the market, American manufacturers struggled to compete. This eventually took a toll on autoworkers like Nitz and Ebens, who had both been laid off.
However, Japanese imports were not the only, or even the most critical, source of stress on the Detroit economy. Even when the Detroit auto industry was at its peak, auto manufacturers had already begun undermining the effectiveness of union organizing by moving their factories out of Detroit and into the suburbs. This restructuring had the intended effect of deterring and lessening the impact of workers’ strikes, as well as the collateral effect of shrinking job opportunities in the city.
Richard Wolff, professor of economics at UMass Amherst, named a number of other failures on the part of the Big Three auto companies:
“The key decision-makers – major shareholders in General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, etc, and the boards of directors they selected – made many disastrous decisions. They failed in competition with European and Japanese automobile capitalists and so lost market share to them. They responded too slowly and inadequately to the need to develop new fuel-saving technologies. And, perhaps most tellingly, they responded to their own failures by deciding to move production out of Detroit so they could pay other workers lower wages.”
The resulting economic fallout in Detroit exacerbated Black-white racial tensions, leading to the 1967 Detroit riots, which affected neighborhoods where youth unemployment and poverty were most severe. Automation also further contributed to the loss of job opportunities, hastening Detroit’s demise. Vincent Chin’s murder occurred in the midst of a perfect storm of social discontent and economic insecurity.
Today, manufacturing jobs across the country continue to vanish, organized labor has lost political influence, and corporate giants have more power than ever before. The decades-long failure of the government to mitigate these losses has had a profound effect on our current political discourse. For instance, debates on whether economic or racial anxiety was more influential in ushering in the Trump era have been ongoing since 2015, with some economists arguing that fear of a loss of economic prospects and the vanishing of the middle class was the primary driver; while others argue that Donald Trump’s appeal to white identity and entitlement superseded such concerns.
These arguments are flawed, simply because the correlation between racial and economic anxiety is not only demonstrable, but also highly reflexive and structurally inert. You cannot claim that Donald Trump’s election was only about economic anxiety any more than you can claim that redlining and white flight were only about housing values or public safety.
That’s because policies on race and immigration in this country have always been closely tied to issues of labor: were it not for the centuries-long trafficking of African hostages, America would not have been able to develop many of its early industries; without Asian “coolie” labor, the transcontinental railroad would not have been built to unite the country and stimulate commerce; without foreign-born and low-wage workers (both in the U.S. and overseas), our corporations would not see the surpluses they enjoy today. And so on and so forth.
Yet each and every one of these groups have borne the brunt of white male backlash. White working class men in particular have been taught that they are entitled to a standard of living that includes job security first and foremost. While innocent on its face, such a desire belies the tacit expectation that the U.S. maintain a global advantage on trade, immigration, and national security in keeping with the promise to provide stable economic opportunities for “real” Americans, who are the keepers of America’s “soul”. And while most Americans support less involvement in foreign matters overall, the one-third of the U.S. electorate who are “Trump nationalists” also support increasing military spending and restricting immigration. The long-touted “American dream” is thus hegemonic, isolationist, and patriarchal all at once.
It’s also a zero-sum game: the white male victim cries of “white genocide” with each wave of immigration and every whiff of personal and collective success by women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color. He believes that these developments are the harbinger of his own demise, which he cannot imagine taking place through non-violent, non-coercive means.
After all, our nation’s economy was built on the systematic commoditization and dehumanization of Black people, immigrants, and the poor and working class of all races. The construct of race during the slave trade was created to justify economic exploitation, imperialism, and cultural hegemony. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.”
Today, anxieties around China in matters of trade and national security have imperialist undertones that parallel rhetoric around Japan and Japanese people in Detroit at the time of Vincent Chin’s murder. It also hearkens back to the anti-Chinese propaganda in the late 1800s that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the pretenses behind of Japanese internment during World War II. Focusing on individual acts of prejudice, no matter how severe, detracts from looking at how anti-Asian violence is deeply and uniquely imperialistic.
But unlike anti-blackness, anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. is not always perceptible, tending instead to fluctuate with the times and becoming combustible when stoked by demagogues during events like the Detroit auto collapse or the coronavirus pandemic. But if we are to learn from these episodes, we must remember that in periods of dormancy, like the thirty years between Vincent Chin’s death and the scourge of anti-Asian hate we see today, more proactive, sustained organizing in the Asian American community for Black and working class people of all races must continue unabated.
I, for one, am happy to see these conversations and movements already beginning to coalesce in a historic way. But I also know that in the months ahead, more Black/Indigenous/people of color, women, queer and poor folks will die for the crime of not being born white, rich, cis, and male. Pundits will point to charts and say things like, “The average voter is more concerned about the economy than about social issues like immigration or criminal justice”, or “Trump’s approval ratings on the economy remain high”. We must question this framing, because in a country that values wealth and whiteness above all, there will be no end to tragedies like the deaths of Vincent Chin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Shaki Peters if we continue to separate the problems in our economy from issues of class, gender, and race. Escaping the cycle of violence means that our collective goal must not only be to seek fairness, but freedom. We are not separate, secondary, or foreign to what really matters. We are not the mere shadows of weak men’s worst nightmares.
