(film reel clattering) Welcome to today's National Ethnic Media news briefing.

I'm Sandy Close, director of Ethnic Media Services and today's moderator.

Our briefing commemorates the 40th anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin, a young Chinese-American who was fatally beaten with a baseball bat in Detroit on the eve of his wedding.

His two white assailants mistook him for a Japanese.

At the time, many feared deindustrialization was robbing America of jobs.

The murder and the miscarriage of justice that followed marked what one of our speakers, Helen Zia, calls the birth of the modern day Asian American Civil Rights Movement.

Today, Asian Americans face what some see as an even more intense but maybe simply a continuing climate of racist hate and violence, one that targets all communities of color, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs included, and involves inter-ethnic and even intra-ethnic violence as well as violence by white supremacists.

In keeping with Vincent Chin's legacy, our speakers will discuss not only what's happening today, but the challenge of building a stronger, multiracial movement of solidarity to address racist hate and violence.

We have Michael German, formerly with the FBI, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program; Helen Zia, author and activist and a founding member of the Detroit-based American Citizens for Justice, which formed in the aftermath of Chin's murder.

We begin with Michael German, fellow at the Brennan Center, who will speak about the racist violence and hate communities of color and others confront today.

Mr. German, thank you.

- Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure to be here and talk about this difficult issue to talk about.

I mean, one of the reasons why it's hard to talk about hate crimes in general and specifically anti-Asian hate crimes is that the data that the government collects is so poor.

Even though there are five federal hate crime statutes, the Department of Justice's policy is to defer the investigation of hate crimes to state and local law enforcement, even though they know that year in and year out only about 15, only about 15%- not even, usually- of police departments even acknowledge that hate crimes occur within their jurisdiction.

So, there is a big gap in our knowledge of hate crimes.

It's also a little bit difficult to discuss because there are a lot of common misassumptions about hate crimes.

When I was with the FBI, I worked undercover in white supremacist groups.

And when people hear "hate crime", they typically think of a crime like that mass shooting in Buffalo, where you have somebody who is an avowed white supremacist who is committing a crime there against Black people; In Pennsylvania, against Jewish people; in Texas, against Hispanic people.

And...they don't understand that white supremacy is actually broader than that.

And, racism is much more common in our society and unfortunately, in many ways, foundational society.

And, if you look at the way anti-Asian hate in the United States has developed over the course of hundreds of years, you see that a lot of the anti-Asian hate is actually directed more from powerful segments of society rather than the fringe white supremacists that are engaging in so-called "extremist" talk.

And, you know, that goes back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and open racism against Asian people, viewing Asian people as a threat to the United States.

And I think looking at it, you know, examining what's going on today through the murder of Vincent Chin is a helpful way to look at it, because, there, you didn't have people who necessarily were wearing Klan hoods.

And, you know, part of a sophisticated white supremacist criminal organization.

Rather, you had a pervasive environment where it wasn't "extremist" talk.

It was talk that was on the news every day about how Japan was outcompeting the United States in jobs where- were shifting overseas.

And they were stealing our jobs, particularly in the automaking centers of the world and our manufacturing base.

So, that anti-Asian hatred was something that was drummed up through society from positions of power.

This is what politicians were talking about.

This is what the news media was talking about constantly when, really, most of that was sensationalist.

I mean, the Japanese economy was not nearly the size of the U.S. economy, but it was a convenient way for people in power to create a scapegoat, right?

It's not that U.S. policies are not doing what they should for the common worker in the United States.

It was, "oh, there's this foreign entity that's causing problems."

And, you know, I think that is- explains pretty well why we've seen, like, again the data is bad, but the groups that collect this data outside the government show it has severe uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans is because we're seeing a lot of that same rhetoric from government actors talking about the threat that China poses, talking about the pandemic as if it was China's fault that we're-- you know, in some cases.

And again, this isn't just extremists on the fringe of our society, you know, shaving their heads and putting Nazi tattoos on themselves.

This is members of Congress.

This is senators who are alleging without evidence that the coronavirus was weaponized by China and sent to the United States intentionally as a weapon of war.

So, you can understand how in the general population, not just among these extremists, white supremacists, but that that would drum up anti-Asian hatred.

And I think that's a better explanation for what's going on, even though, of course, you know, the extremist groups look at Asians just as they look at every other minority group.

But, I think the-- what evidence we have points to a broader problem in our society and something that our policymakers should be better having have better control over.

And, you know, part of this came, I believe, out of the war on terrorism, right?

That when, that when our government created a community of suspicion, it was Muslims Americ-- Muslim Americans.

And, of course, many Asians in the United States come from countries that are predominantly Muslim or are Muslim themselves.

So, you know, it was very easy to create a public fear of Muslim Americans after 9/11, and that has just carried over.

But, particularly when you look at the rhetoric coming out of the intelligence community around China and their creation of something called a China Initiative, focusing counterintelligence resources on a particular group just based on their- you know, this is language from the FBI- their quote "nexus to China" unquote, rather than evidence of any criminality.

So, I'm happy to take questions, but I want to make sure that there's plenty of time for everybody to speak.

So, thank you for having me.

- Thank you, Michael.

A question I will start our Q & A off with.

Do you see an expanding lens targeting communities of color as opposed to a specific community?

When you look at the targeting just in the last four to six weeks, you have examples of African-Americans who are the targets, the number one target of hate crimes.

You have Latinos.

You have a widening group, it seems to me, of Asians.

Does this represent something different, and do you see it as-- it feels like a perfect storm at this point.

Do you see it growing in intensity?

Is it sort of feeding on itself?

- So, again, it's difficult to know whether the problem is increasing because the data is so poor.

The government which, you know, again, sort of reinforces what I'm saying about how white supremacy is part of our culture, that we don't even bother-- our government doesn't even bother to collect accurate data.

This is a problem that's been known for decades, right?

In 1990, Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act requiring the Department of Justice to collect accurate data about hate crimes.

Instead, the Department of Justice said, "well, we'll let police agencies voluntarily report to us."

And that proved to be an ineffective methodology which they knew by the year 2000 that the Justice Department funded a study to find out why police agencies aren't reporting these crimes!

You could do that study again today and it would come up with the exact same reasons, right?

We know that, that is an ineffective way to understand this problem.

And yet, the Justice Department doesn't make any change.

And you know, even as there is more discussion of these crimes in the public, right?

The public has had its say.

We talk to our elected representatives.

We demand that they pass hate crime laws; five federal hate crime statutes!

The Bureau of Justice Assistance does crime victim surveys.

In the crime victim surveys, they report that 230,000 violent hate crimes a year.

The Justice Department with five federal hate crime statutes prosecutes 25 defendants a year!

So, do-- 230,000 hate crimes out there.

The Justice Department only prosecutes 25 of these cases a year, on average.

So, there's a huge disconnect.

And even as the Justice Department has in rhetoric focused more on white supremacist crimes and racial hatred crimes, they aren't actually-- it's not actually showing up in prosecutions that they're bringing.

And, I think that's a big part of the problem.

But, a big part of the problem too-- again, this is a whole of society issue-- is the media attention gets diverted from these crimes.

So, it's not that crimes weren't happening in the period between 2000 and '20.

It started getting coverage around the time that President Obama was elected, you know, because the media became interested in this idea, "oh, now that there's a Black president, there's going to be more hate crimes."

And sure enough, when you start looking at it, it looks like there are more.

But, it's just that you're paying more attention to it.

And because media started paying attention to it, policymakers started paying attention to it.

So, police had to react, and be more reactive to it, and acknowledge it.

But, it's not-- it's not really measuring what's actually happening.

This has been a persistent problem, as the Vincent Chin case shows, right?

This is something that's always been with our society.

I think what's different from when I worked these cases in the 1990s is that you have people in positions of authority expressing these ideas and, and expressing some support for the violence, right?

You know?

There was always dog whistle politics, racist dog whistles that politicians would use to try to get votes.

But, what's occurring now is that they are actually openly supporting these causes.

You know?

Appearing at campaign events with members of far-right militant groups.

You know, the President of the United States told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by", right?

I mean, this kind of rhetoric from an authority figure gives license to people to commit these violent crimes.

And for most of the Trump administration, those crimes were being committed in plain sight, publicly.

And yet, you saw very little law enforcement response.

And even now, after January 6, there's some massive effort to understand January 6, but not to go back and look at all those previous crimes that were really committed by some of the same people that later were able to amass the resources to attack the Capitol.

So, it-- this is a persistent problem and it isn't properly addressed.

- Thank you.

I'm going to move on to our next speaker, Helen Zia, author, veteran journalist, activist for AAPI and LGBTQ communities, who will speak about why 40 years after his murder, Chin's legacy is so relevant to the issues we are confronting today.

Helen, thank you for joining us.

- First of all, thank you, Sandy.

And thank you to the Ethnic Media Services for having this really, really important discussion, especially after such a horrendous several days, let alone month and-- two and a half years and, you know, decades of the kinds of things that Mike was describing.

And, yes, in these past especially two and a half years, it's been incredibly intense for Asian Americans, who even when the coronavirus was first identified in 2019 being in China before there was even a single case here in North America, the Asian American communities were feeling the sting of harassment and violence.

And so, it's very chilling, I suppose, to look back over 40 years, a hate incident, you know, a hate crime, a hate murder, that, Sandy, you described.

And Mike, you gave a really excellent context to that in the 1980s when a young man named Vincent Chin was killed 40 years ago on the night of his bachelor party.

The thing about that, what we are trying to remember of that time was that the 1980s were a time of incredible economic crisis in America.

We're facing gas-- rising gas prices, the threat of inflation.

The 1980s?

Inflation was reaching 20% and there was an oil crisis, a couple of oil crises that began in the 1970s that led to the collapse, not only of the auto industry but the entire manufacturing sector of America.

That's when America ceased being a manufacturing-based country.

And so, there was incredible structural change.

The government at that time which- now people sort of lionize Ronald Reagan, but his whole campaign and his a whole administration was based on dismantling the social safety nets: things like unemployment, food stamps, all of those things were part- mental health services.

The things that today, 40 years later, our society is suffering from really began with this dismantling during that period.

So, it was a time of incredible crisis.

And, I had been an autoworker in Detroit myself and was laid off during that time in the late 1970s.

And, I stood in unemployment lines with hundreds of thousands of other people who were looking at never finding work again.

And so, it was very clear just how, how much pain and suffering, and misery there was.

And, Mike spoke about not having people in white robes going around committing racist acts.

These were people in the C-suites, the heads of the auto industries, people in the halls of Congress saying, "we are at war."

We are at war because Japan makes fuel efficient cars."

And, it was a way of bringing people together to scapegoat and blame some external force for the difficulties that were happening internally in America.

And, that was 40 years ago.

We can point to many times in history where that's happened, where Asians in America have been blamed for, especially for economic crises.

That happened in the 1800s, it happened throughout the 1900s and in the 1980s, Japan was blamed.

Well, you know what?

Germany made highly fuel efficient cars but scapegoating and racism only works, of course, when people look different and can be targeted and isolated.

So, I wanted to just sort of add that to the frame.

The thing that made the attack and the hate killing of Vincent Chin even more egregious was when his killers, who were two white autoworkers-- today, there is so much misinformation to imply that the anti-Asian hate is being committed by mostly Black people, and that is not true.

And, we can talk about that more because there are a few national studies that have shown that that's not true.

But, the killers of Vincent Chin who saw him at the bar where he and his friends were celebrating Vincent's bachelor party, saw him and said, "it's because of you mother Fs, that we are out of work."

Now, these were white autoworkers.

And by the way, neither of them was out of work.

They were both fully employed and in high-paying jobs.

But they connected the looking at Vincent Chin, who by the way, they did not mistake for being Japanese.

His friend said, "no, no.

He's Chinese."

And then later, they went through the streets of Detroit stalking him saying, "let's get the Chinese."

So, they knew he wasn't Japanese.

And, this is the part of the anti-Asian hate.

It's that it doesn't matter.

I mean, today, you know, we have more than 11,000 incidents reported where people say their own ethnicity and it's yellow, brown, East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian.

It doesn't matter if you're Asian, you know?

And in the case of Vincent Chin, he was Asian.

But so, the fact that his killers were white, I want to point out because the attack itself was egregious enough.

But when it came time for them to be sentenced, and the killing was witnessed by 70 people or more, and so there was no question that they had violently beaten Vincent's brains out into the street with a baseball bat.

The judge said, "oh, these are not the kind of men you send to jail", (chuckles) and gave them probation.

And, this is in the city of Detroit.

And this was just outrageous.

Because there was no question in anybody's minds had the killers been Black, had they been Asian, had they not been white, they would've gone to jail for a very long time.

So, the sense of injustice was great, and that was-- and that's where I want to go with talking about the real legacy of the Vincent Chin story is that injustice.

And in the midst of great hate toward Asian Americans- but also we know that hate spills over as you and Mike had been talking about- in that time, people came together.

We saw the birth of a civil rights movement.

Asian Americans came together to stand up and say, this is not the democracy we're supposed to be standing up for.

And Asian Americans came together with Black Americans, Arab Americans, people of all walks of life and faiths.

And it was really a multiracial, multiclass, interfaith- I mean- solidarity movement to stand up against hate, and to stand up for justice and equality of all people.

But so, we hope to spread the not just the remembrance of what happened 40 years ago, but the lessons from that of people coming together, and we know that 40 years have passed.

And in these 40 years, there's been highly concentrated efforts to keep people divided, to pit communities against each other.

Even as you pointed out, Sandy, even intraethnic violence and hate.

And so, this is the kind of thing that has been actively promoted by highly, highly resourced think tanks to find ways to keep people divided.

And so the perpetuation, for example, of the idea that it's Black people attacking Asians, you know, we have plenty of data to show that that's not true.

We have plenty of leaders in the Black community who have stood up from Jesse Jackson to Stacey Abrams to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who have said anti-Asian hate is wrong.

They do not get viral attention.

They don't get headline attention.

The fact that there are Asians out there marching in movements for Black Lives and carrying signs and creating their own organizations called Asians for Black Lives, that doesn't get attention.

And so, what does get attention today is the division and the impression that we can never come together, that our communities are so divided.

And that helps create a feeling that, "well, "you know, this group doesn't like that group.

We'll never come together."

But in fact, we know that, you know, this demographic trend is that our democracy is becoming more diverse.

And within a very short time, we'll be a majority-- majority minority.

But majority people of color, you know, demographic in America.

And, that's what some groups are so afraid of.

But if we could break through these divisive barriers and come together-- we're in the majority.

People of color, people of conscience, you know, and all these other movements that are standing up for justice and peace and safety in America, that is the majority of Americans, if we can break through this calculated division.

And that is the legacy that we are trying to remember in this 40th year of, you know, Vincent Chin's legacy.

So, we're trying to do that.

And I think, you know, we really have to break through these divisions.

And seeing this group here, you know, on the Zoom, this is actually where we have to go with this to not allow the disinformation to keep us divided.

So, there's so much more to say about all this.

But, I'll just stop now.

- I think your words are so eloquent, Helen.

What can we in ethnic media-- our strength is communicating with our own in language or special targeted communities to bridge beyond those communities to a more interethnic reporting capability.

What is your advice as a journalist and a committed activist?

What would you advise us to do to support this effort at building more interethnic, interracial understanding and collaboration?

- A lot of it is working in our communities to unlearn and detoxify or decolonize the misinformation that exists.

And then, to tell the truth about the real solidarity, the commonalities, the understanding.

It really has to begin there.

So, for example, one of the things we're doing for this 40th recognition and commemoration of what happened in Detroit then is we're putting together a legacy guide that tells the actual story of what happened then, as well as the solidarity, telling the stories of solidarity.

And, to show that these didn't just magically happen.

It took hard work of people coming together, asking difficult questions of each other, and those are the kind of questions that the journalists here can do.

The other thing we're including there is a history of civil rights in America, you know, starting in the 1500s and 1600s with the enslavement and genocide of indigenous people, and the enslavement of people from Africa, and how the civil rights movement was built.

And we're translating that into Chinese, into several other Asian languages, and we're going to put it online because we think that a lot of the recent immigrants really don't know the history of civil rights in America and their connection to it, and how our communities are so connected.

So, we really want to stress that, too.

And, put that in our Asian languages.

So, doing this kind of cross-- cross information and making it available to our communities, it's just critical because we also are deprived of the real information and our communities are also susceptible to the division.

- Michael, you've placed enormous emphasis on the importance of data.

Michael, I hope you're still on.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

How do we solve the data issue?

So, I think the data is critically important because data drives resources.

And, you know, unfortunately, the way the data is, collected or not collected today, I think reflects law enforcement bias.

Just like every other type of crime in the United States, hate crimes disproportionately target Black people as subjects of the crime.

And so, when somebody is talking about the data, they're talking about what the police have identified and reported.

They're not talking about what crimes are committed as the Justice Department victim survey suggests.

You know, there are hundred thousands of violent hate crimes that police don't report.

- [Sandy] I want to thank our speakers and especially the many media who turned out.

So, thank you for honoring us with your presence and your insights.

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