Lily Chin holds a photo portrait of her son Vincent in 1983, a year after he was beaten to death in Detroit. Vincent was targeted in a racially motivated hate crime [408×729]

Vincent Chin was killed by two white autoworkers—Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz—who mistakenly believed he was Japanese. The assault was fueled by the economic anxieties and intense anti-Asian sentiment prevalent in 1982. The U.S. auto industry was experiencing a major recession, and massive layoffs were occurring. The attackers blamed Japanese auto manufacturers for the loss of American jobs.

While Chin was celebrating his bachelor party, Ebens (a Chrysler plant supervisor) and Nitz (a recently laid-off autoworker) targeted him with racial slurs, shouting, *”It’s because of you motherfuckers that we’re out of work,”* before attacking him with a baseball bat.

I watched a documentary about this case in my Sociology class, “Vincent Who?” I think. An important note is that he was unconscious for four days after that attack before passing away.

The main thing that stuck with me was how the Judge of the initial case explained his reasoning for his manslaughter ruling as “[the attackers] attempted to administer a punishment in careless disregard of human life, which is what manslaughter is … Had this been a brutal murder, of course these fellas would be in jail now.”

He justified his manslaughter ruling by implying that the attackers didn’t *immediately* kill him, so there wasn’t enough justification for a murder charge.

A lot of the issues with the judicial system in this case felt very similar to the cases of Latasha Harlins and Rodney King

This documentary left me fucking livid