What I want to say about Vincent Chin

It took me a few days, but I realized what I want to say about Vincent Chin. I wasn’t alive to be shocked and appalled by what happened to him. He was murdered in 1982, a year before I was born. I wonder if this event affected my parents’ decision to bring a Chinese-American child into a world with this much hate. My first introduction to what happened stemmed from seeing the play Carry the Tiger to the Mountain. It was a dramatization of Chin’s life and his mother’s (ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to get justice for him. I was about 15. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was one of the things that cemented my belief in the power of theatre to educate and empower. In a wonderful coincidence, I met the woman who played Chin’s mother in that production years and years later and got to tell her what an immense impact it made on me.

In that play, the actual murder of Chin (where he was beaten to death with a baseball bat) was played out in alternating full speed and slow motion. The final death blow via baseball bat was dealt in slow motion, and the explosion of blood was portrayed using a rolled out bright red ribbon. (How appropriately American that the murder was committed with a bat – a symbol of our American virility and masculinity, our home run dreams, our sports heroism.) During this scene, the song “Dancing in the Streets” was playing. Right at the moment of Vincent’s death, the song abruptly cuts off at this moment:

“There’ll be dancin’, they’re dancin’ in the street.
This is an invitation, across the nation,
A chance for folks to meet.
There’ll be laughin’ singin’, and music swingin’
Dancin’ in the street ”

A little history of Dancing in the Streets – It was performed by Martha and the Vandellas, and was released in 1964 on the Motown label. One of the most significant things about Motown is that, summer after summer, people of all races were dancing to the same music. Black folks’ music. In a country dominated by segregation, the significance of this can’t be overstated.

I remember once reading a black memoir (can’t remember specifically) that mentioned that Motown was “ghetto music” – all my life, this was my parents’ music. It was old people music. But this was music on the edge fifty years ago.

So, now whenever I hear Dancing In The Street, a song that helped unify people across races, I think of the murder of Vincent Chin. This song is simultaneously ruined for me and more deeply contextualized in my personal struggle.

“Dancin’ in the street.”

Trayvon

Here’s what I think (and what my experience has been, at least talking to people about this on social media) – many white folks don’t understand why this trial and this verdict meant so much to people of color and similar progressive communities. They see it as an isolated incident of uncertain evidence (because the racist media spin machine is in full effect) or as an example of justufiable self-defense (because they’re fucking racists) or an unfortunate series of events – and this last one actually bothers me the most. The first two are almost expected on my part. I want to talk about that last one.

It’s not JUST a series of unfortunate events. From the day Zimmerman took it upon himself to protect his neighborhood, to him profiling Trayvon, to him getting out of his car, to Trayvon’s death, to the jury selection (five white women, one black woman), to the verdict itself, to people’s reactions to it – all of these events are products and symptoms of racism.

And you can’t see that if you can’t acknowledge the existence of systemic racism and white privilege. And so much of the Protestant work ethic, meritocracy, and economic conservatism is built around the idea that racism doesn’t exist, or was beaten back long ago. If you subscribe to any of those beliefs, or hell, you just don’t want to believe that the world is a stinking cesspool of inequality (because if you believe racism exists, you’ve got to start investigating sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.), you CANNOT allow yourself to believe that racism was a motivating factor in Zimmerman’s actions.

I cannot emphasize enough how the existence of systemic racism gnaws at the roots of many of the things that Americans like to believe about social mobility and equality of opportunity. And the worst part, the most insidious part of it all, is that the more we ignore this festering cancer, the more social mobility and equality erodes. The more we ignore these issues in favor of believing in the promise of America, the more elusive that promise becomes.

This is a vicious cycle that’s continued since the end of Jim Crow and legislated, in-your-face racism. Racism never went ended. It just went underground. It disappeared (at least to white folks) into coded language, spoken by politicians and pundits. It’s not “negroes” or “chinamen” – it’s “welfare addicts” and “foreign powers”. It’s not “fuck the poor,” it’s “rewarding a work ethic.” But the truth is obvious to the people who live with racism every day. And absolutely invisible to those who don’t.

Now, more than ever, we live in two worlds.

Political violence

You know if Americans were able to admit that we have killed far more people trying to “stop terrorism” than terrorism itself has killed, we might actually be able to look at things clearly, and actually reduce incidents of political violence. Also the movies, TV, and books surrounding the issue would stop being terrible jingoistic nonsense.

SWAP 2012: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

“It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Here in cowboy country,
we are a spinning cylinder
a poet finding truth
in gun metaphors
even though he’s never fired
a real one before.
This is the land of the quickdraw.

When all you read
are Westerns
and spy thrillers,
you can only write stories
of James Bonds
and dusty bandits,
of clean lines
unblurried by journalism
or the search for truth
or bodies
or anything else
more uncomfortable
than the queer thrill
of the hero
lighting a match
and walking away
from an explosion.

Mr. President,
you were a constitutional lawyer once.
Tell me which Amendment includes
“kill them all, let god sort them out.”
You told the New York Times
that every man in the blast radius
of your American vengeance
is named terrorist
unless posthumously discovered otherwise.

It’s like stop and frisk
except the cops don’t search for drugs,
they just shoot all the black men in the head
and call them drug dealers.
Do you fail to see the irony
in your actions, Mr. President?

Barack Hussein Obama,
did you know you share your middle name
with a Shia martyr killed
for refusing to swear allegiance
to an unjust caliph?

Did you know that Iraqi Shiite men
wound themselves
on the crowns of their head
for failing to save him?
The blood runs into their eyes,
until they cannot see.

Last night I stood at the mirror
holding a knife,
pondering the metaphor,
Mr. President.

Here in cowboy country,
for years,
I have shouted facts
into faces
whose rolled eyes
and grimaces
settle for an evil
they name lesser.

It’s a tale we’re used to telling.
These colors don’t run.
Two presidents taught me
they just bleed
when you try to wash them,
into an indistinguishable lavender
that no one follows anymore.
I am running out of metaphors
for this despair.

Here in cowboy country,
we’re all just Marlboro men
taking long drags
on bad stories
that kill us slow.