Authorities aren't calling the drowning of a Vietnamese fisherman a hate crime, but members of the Asian-American community who gathered at a vigil on Saturday said they believe he was targeted because of his race.

"There were a lot of people out at the harbor early that morning from different backgrounds. Why did the alleged perpetrator pick on those individuals?" said Ben Lumicao, an adviser on the city's Commission on Human Relations. "Everyone in the Asian-American community had the same reaction: That could have been me or my uncle or my grandfather."

It has become required viewing in Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies classes nationwide: “Who Killed Vincent Chin,” a documentary produced by Renee Tajima and Christine Choi, chronicles the June 19, 1982 Detroit hate crime that took the life of a young man a day before his wedding and left a community reeling from the leniency afforded to the murderers.

For those who have not seen this film yet, a very brief synopsis of this chapter in Asian American history follows:

On June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin and his friends were at his bachelor party in Detroit, when they got into an argument with two white autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz. The two stated, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work!” Ebens and Nitz later followed Chin to a McDonald's parking lot. They beat Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. Chin died a few days later, the day before his wedding. Ebens and Nitz did not even spend a night in jail, instead getting three years of probation and a $3000.00 fine, because Judge Charles Kaufman thought they were otherwise upstanding citizens. Interestingly enough, Judge Kaufman, who died in 2004, had been a navigator for the Army Air Force in World War II; after 27 missions, his plane was shot down and he was held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war. Perhaps his experience in Japan led him to view Asians, as well as Asian Americans, as the enemy.

Today is a solemn day for many across the United States, as it is the 25th anniversary of the hate-crime murder of Vincent Chin. His murder signifies the beginning of the contemporary Asian Pacific American, or APA, civil rights movement.

In 1982, 27-year-old Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American draftsman and engineer, got into a confrontation with two white men, Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, at a strip club in Detroit, Mich. where Chin was having his bachelor party. During the early 1980s, the U.S. auto industry in Detroit faced tough competition from Japanese automakers, and many workers were laid off as a result. Mistaking him to be Japanese, Ebens yelled at Chin, "It's because of you little motherfuckers that we're out of work," according to a 2002 article from www.tolerance.org.

The verbal confrontation escalated into a physical scuffle between Ebens, Nitz and Chin, taking the fight from throwing punches to grabbing chairs and culminating in the three being kicked out of the club. In the parking lot, Nitz took a Louisville Slugger baseball bat out of his car, and Chin told the two men, "I'll fight you guys more if you want, but put the baseball bat down." When Nitz refused, Chin and his friends left.

Auburn police are investigating a campus assault last week that targeted an 18-year-old Auburn University student because he is Asian, according to the police report.

The man was standing outside Lane Residence Hall about 11:30 p.m. Thursday when he was attacked by four men, according to the report. The assault lasted for about two minutes and the victim suffered cuts to his lips, a swollen right cheek and a knot on the right side of his head.

The victim's cousin, a part-time graduate at Auburn, said he believes the attack was a reaction to last week's massacre at Virginia Tech which left 33 people dead. The gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, was Korean-American.

A man already charged with murdering two people last month in San Francisco's Japantown has been accused of committing another killing two months earlier, and police said Wednesday that they were investigating whether he had been targeting Asian American victims at random.

Joseph James Melcher, 25, was charged Tuesday with killing Robert Stanford, 21, who was shot early Aug. 27 as he and a 16-year-old friend drove away from the home of Stanford's girlfriend in the Portola district. The friend was wounded but survived.

Police say that it was nearly two months later, on Oct. 21, when Melcher walked into the Flow bar on Post Street, asked for a woman who turned out not to be there, then opened fire. Song Sun Lee, 34, of San Bruno, was killed.

Melcher then allegedly walked across the street and gunned down Stephen Kam Yan Li, 22, of San Francisco, as Li walked with his girlfriend in the Japantown Plaza.

Police said Melcher had been living in Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley and didn't know any of the victims. The only thing those who were shot appeared to have in common, investigators said, was that they were Asian American.

Frank Wu, dean of the Wayne State University Law School, spoke Monday at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on "Race Beyond Black and White: Asian Immigrants and the Criminal Justice System." The lectures came on the eve of today's sentencing of Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong-American hunter convicted of killing six white deer hunters in Sawyer County last year. Wu, who has taught at Howard, Columbia and Stanford universities, and whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, spoke with Alice L. Chang of the Journal Sentinel staff last week.

Asian American women across the country are outraged and disgusted by the arrest of a Princeton student two weeks ago for harassing fellow Asian women students. Many believe the incident is symptomatic of larger problems, including stereotypes and the exotification of Asian women.

Michael Lohman, 28, a third-year doctoral student, was arrested March 30. He admitted to surreptitiously cutting locks of hair from at least nine Asian women. He also admitted to pouring his urine and semen into the drinks of Asian women more than 50 times in Princeton’s graduate student dining hall and other places. Investigators found women’s underwear and mittens filled with the hair of Asian women at the apartment Lohman shared with his wife of four years, who is Asian. Police believe Lohman stole the mittens from Asian women and then used them to masturbate.

RUTLAND, Vt. -- A 19-year-old Rutland man has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly firing a BB gun and striking two Asian members of a high school track team running through the city.

Daniel Streeter pleaded innocent Friday in Vermont District Court to two counts of attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the April 25 incident. He was released on conditions that he not contact the alleged victims.

I went deer hunting once. And I never went back because of the racial tension I encountered. My experience in southern Minnesota was relatively benign, involving two condescending white hunters calling the Department of Natural Resources to check up on my group, which was Hmong, even though we had done nothing wrong.

The experience reaffirmed my stereotype that small Midwestern towns are bigoted toward people of color.

CSUN students need to get more involved with issues affecting Asian -Americans and Asian Pacific-Islanders such as violence and sexual assault, says Chun-yen Chen, executive director of Asian Pacific Women’s Center in Los Angeles.

The APWCLA is a non-profit organization that place families who are victims of domestic violence into permanent housing and teaches them life skills, such job training and bookkeeping, to help them become independent.

After unsettling some Minnesota State University students by putting an anti-Hmong bumper sticker — "Save a hunter, Shoot a Mung" — on sales racks, the owner of a Mankato store has removed the sticker, calling it a "mistake."

Michael Baumann, owner of Custom Zone, a decal and sticker store, said he had the sticker yanked Monday after inquiries from students and local news media. The sticker was one of several left over from a custom job, Baumann said, and was not for display. News of the sticker made its way through several hundred MSU students, and the university's Hmong Student Association was planning to meet Wednesday to figure out how to respond.

RICE LAKE, Wis. — If racial slurs were spewed in the woods Sunday, it would hardly be a first for a rural Midwest community. But racial tensions around Barron County have generally been subtle, say residents, who describe a place that's fairly tolerant, if only because there is so little racial diversity.

The nearly all-white census figures for Barron County and Rice Lake, which are 98 percent and 97 percent Caucasian, tell a familiar story of a heavily northern European landscape so tradition-bound that newcomers might easily feel like outsiders.

I am as guilty as any other stereotyper, for the first thing I did when arriving at work Monday was start calling Hmong leaders regarding the awful shootings in the Wisconsin woods over the weekend.

Had the name of the alleged shooter been Johnson or O'Reilly, I would not have been calling Scandinavian leaders or Irish leaders to ask about one man's actions.

But the man suspected of killing five people is Chai Soua Vang. And I was calling Hmong leaders to talk about the group effect of one man's horrible acts.

All the people I spoke with were pained, yet gracious.

In all cases, their pain was on two levels.

The arrest of a Hmong-American in the shootings of eight hunters in northwest Wisconsin left some Hmong citizens in his hometown fearful of a backlash.

"This is a very tragic event," Michael Yang, a Hmong activist, said. "This hurts all of us."

In St. Paul, home to more Hmong than any other American city, Sunday's shootings hit hard.

Ying Vang, executive director of the Lao Family Community of Minnesota in St. Paul, said he fielded 35 to 40 calls Monday from Hmong residents who are worried about reaction to the shooting.

A white teenager who committed felonious assault in a hate crime against Asian American teenagers last summer was ordered Thursday to 100 hours of community service and one year of juvenile probation.

Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy ordered the 18-year old senior at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory school to do the community service at On Lok, a health service for the elderly whose clients are primarily Asian American, or Sunset Youth Services. The teenager's probation officer will determine which agency is appropriate.

University police announced Tuesday they were investigating a possible hate incident that occurred in an Asian American studies class last week.

The investigation began after Vu Long Trinh, a teaching assistant in Asian American Studies 20, told police that petitions students in his class signed Thursday supporting the removal of Taco Bell had been vandalized with ethnic slurs and derogatory remarks.

Lili Wang was killed while playing tennis.

Although no definitive conclusions can be drawn from these press reports, if it is the case that Anderson singled Wang out first as the target of his unwanted advances, and then for murder, because of her race, then the crime should be reported and recognized as a hate crime. In October 2002, ModelMinority.com petitioned the law enforcement community to urge that a formal investigation be opened on the question of Anderson's possible racial motivation. Even if Anderson cannot be brought to trial, recording the murder as a hate crime will serve as a precedent to educate the legal system about the potentially tragic consequences of the model minority stereotype and other subtle forms of racial discrimination against the Asian American community.

A San Francisco judge delivered strong words to a 17-year-old boy in finding that he and several other white high school students participated in a hate crime last summer in attacking five Asian American youths on Taraval Street.

"There is no question that this was a race-based assault," commented Judge Kevin McCarthy following a trial that began more than two weeks ago. "What happened in front of J.T.'s [diner] was race-based."

But McCarthy noted that the lone defendant, whose name is being withheld because he's a juvenile, was not among the three boys who apparently started the unprovoked attack by pouring beer over one victim's head and hitting another in the leg. The judge called it "unfortunate" that none of the instigators had been arrested.

He went on to find that the defendant "injected" himself into an already violent encounter in which racial epithets were loudly tossed around by the assailants, then proceeded to strike a third victim when the attack continued with a bigger crowd gathering across 19th Avenue.

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- After more than a year, closure may be near for some Asian American families in San Francisco who say their teenaged sons were victims of a hate crime.

On one side of the courthouse hallway, three of the victims (Jeff Woo, Paul Wong Jr., and Sung Noh) and their families appeared on the the first day of trial in the highly charged assault case.

On the other side, the teenager accused of being one of their attackers and his family waited.

"They crossed paths one fateful night and it was motivated by race," claims victims families' lawyer Edwin Prather.

That's the charge: On June, 2003, at 19th St. and Taraval, a large group of young white males attacked five Asian teenagers after hurling racial taunts.

Police say a mob of about 15 mostly high school aged white males had left Stern Grove after officers broke up a keg party.

By Susan Van Gelder
©2002 News and Letters.org
July 2002

Detroit’s Asian-American community came together June 21–23 in remembrance of Vincent Chin, murdered in 1982 by two drunk white laid-off autoworkers who thought he was Japanese. The weekend included a screening of “Who Killed Vincent Chin?," a civil rights teach-in, an evening of poetry and performance, and a visit to the Chin family gravesite. At the teach-in the Asian-American Center for Justice recognized the families of hate crime victims Joseph Ileto and Won-Joon Yoon, and the daughter of Wen-Ho Lee.

Incident Prompts UI Minority Student Group to Address Racism

Police are investigating a possible hate crime in which the alleged victims -- an Asian-American woman and her white boyfriend -- say they were attacked and beaten in downtown Iowa City by a group of men shouting racial slurs.

In a letter to University of Iowa President David Skorton this week, second-year UI law student Janis Chang, 23, said her boyfriend suffered three face fractures in the attack, that he will be permanently deformed and that he will need reconstructive surgery.

MILFORD — Phil Hovey wears his differences where everyone can see them.

He’s Asian-American, is missing a finger on his right hand due to a birth defect and has an artificial leg.

He grew up hearing constant racial slurs, being stuffed into lockers, being beaten up and being "chased" and tackled face-first into the mud by students because he couldn’t run.

On Thursday night, Hovey, now 23, and a master’s degree candidate in education, appeared comfortable in his own skin as a panelist at a forum sponsored by Milford’s Anti-Hate Task Force held at the Parsons Government Center.

Until he started talking.

By Emil Guillermo
©2001 AsianWeek
July 27, 2001

Here’s the burning question of the week: What do we mean when we say “chink?”

If you’re offended, curious, or otherwise intrigued by the word, then read on. I’ll be using it several times in this column, not as a “fighting word,” but as a matter of reporting, and free speech.

I certainly won’t be calling it the “C” word.

VANCOUVER -- Filipino youths constantly fear for their lives and safety, the brother of a teenager beaten to death outside his high school told reporters yesterday. Garnet Lanot, 19, described the pain his family has experienced since the weekend slaying of his 17-year-old brother, Mao Jomar Lanot.

The slain Grade 11 student had moved with his brother to Canada last year from the Philippines, joining their mother, who earlier took a job abroad in order to support her children.

"I am here today because I do not want to see this tragedy happen again," said Lanot.