Don’t Forget Vincent Chin

Apr 28, 2025

Today, the president of the UAW is supporting Trump’s tariffs on the auto industry. By doing so, he and other union leaders are, in fact, telling workers here that workers in other countries—whether it’s Mexico or Canada—are taking American workers’ jobs.

This is not a new set of ideas intended to direct U.S. workers against workers in other countries. It’s not new that workers here are being distracted away from the reality that it’s their own capitalist bosses here that are responsible for an economy in crisis.

Today, it’s Mexican and Canadian workers that are presented as competitors for jobs. During the recession of the late 1970s into the 1980s, the target was Japanese workers. Workers were told that the import of vehicles manufactured in Japan was the cause of plant closings, mass layoffs, and wage and benefit cuts. Workers were told, point blank, that they were losing their jobs because of Japanese workers.

The media, the politicians, the companies, and the leaders of the UAW repeated these lies. Well-known Democratic Party politicians, from John Dingell to Carl Levin, joined in this Japan-bashing—Dingell blaming “little yellow men” for the automobile industry’s problems; Levin saying, “We are being shot at and shot up, by the Japanese,” even referring to them as “Japs.” (See the documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin, streaming on PBS YouTube.)

But it just wasn’t words. Some union officials even went so far as to organize workers to smash Japanese cars with sledgehammers at media events. The UAW distributed racist bumper stickers.

And so the stage was set, the groundwork laid, for what happened to Vincent Chin. And it was two men; one a Chrysler plant supervisor, and his stepson, a laid off UAW Chrysler worker, who acted on those lies.

Nearly 43 years ago, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American young man at his bachelor party with friends at a bar in Highland Park, a city within Detroit, Michigan, was first verbally attacked by these two men. Thinking he was Japanese, they yelled, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” The altercation spread to a nearby McDonald’s, where the two men repeatedly beat Chin with a baseball bat. Chin died four days later.

And for this lynching, the two men were fined $3,000, put on probation for three years, and did no jail time.

Who killed Vincent Chin? Yes, it was two men that held him down and wielded the baseball bat. But the unions, the media, the companies, and the government, including the courts, which all promoted the Japan-bashing, were just as guilty then, and are so today.