REVISITING THE VINCENT CHIN CASE: Most of you have probably heard of the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was killed in Detroit in 1982. The way the killing was and still is reported in the media, it was several white auto workers who attacked him with a bat because they thought he was Japanese. In light of recent publicity surrounding anti-Asian violence, the Chin case has renceived renewed attention.

The reality, it turns out, is much more complicated than the received story, as I discovered accidentally while researching my forthcoming book on racial classifications. Chin was drinking at a bachelor party at a strip club. He got into a verbal dispute with some white patrons. An eyewitness testified that the whites, auto workers, made racial remarks related to the loss of auto jobs to the Japanese. However, the white men denied it, and the witness who so testified received a lighter sentence for another matter in exchange for her testimony, calling her credibility into doubt.

As for the violence, Chin threw the first punch. When they were all kicked out of the club, he yelled to the white men in the parking lot, “Come on you chickenshits, let’s fight some more.” Eventually, the white guys tracked him down at a McDonald’s and beat him, he became unconscious and died.

That’s enough for me for a second-degree murder charge, which is what they were charged with, though they pled guilty only to manslaughter, and, outrageously, received probation based on their lack of criminal history. In any event, I always find it disturbing when an incident that “I know” turns out to have been nothing like how it was consistently reported. In short, the killers were let off too easily, and that seems to have been a result of the judge giving them undue sympathy. But the altercation itself may have had no racial motivation, and the notion that Chin was set upon randomly by autoworkers, which is how I have seen it consistently reported, is false.