Opinion: Filipinos, Juneteenth and the Vincent Chin hate crime
Juneteenth | (AP Illustration / Peter Hamlin)
Filipinos know Filipino time, that sense of timelessness that allows for delay and our late arrivals.
And then there is Juneteenth, which we celebrate today. It’s about a kind of lateness and about the struggle of getting it right.
It’s the day Texas finally recognized that the slaves were free in 1865. That’s even though Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was in 1862.
Three years delay for Texas and its slaves? Three years of overtime.
So yes, we celebrate today. But we also recognize the eff-up.
The slow roll to freedom.
Don’t blame it on the mail. Or the lack of social media. The communication of freedom is always slow.
Celebrate the announcement, yes. But ponder the delay. And how the process too often remains the same. The timeline of justice is never swift or immediate enough.
Not when opposing forces hang tight, gripping to their lies and false arguments, holding on to the justified immorality of the past every last second that they can.
And then they regroup and regrip, and start the cycle all over. Slaves were free in Texas finally, as they were in the rest of the nation. But discrimination and racism never ends.
Which is why the fight continues. That’s politics.
In 1865, it was better late than never. It’s now 2025, and the search for equality and equity seems forever.
That’s what happens when no one seems to get the message in time.
These Trump times
As Trump walks back civil rights and negates the notion of a federal government that cares about all of us, we celebrate this Juneteenth like never before. And we must remember how it bonds all communities together in coalition.
Let’s take the positives of last weekend’s grand coincidence – Donald Trump’s military birthday parade and the counterforce of the nationwide No Kings rallies – and not let up.
But first we remind ourselves it wasn’t perfect last weekend.
It started with the reminder of how low our political discourse has sunk. The Speaker of the Minnesota legislature and her husband, were shot and killed, and another state legislator and his spouse were also shot but recovering.
The suspect, Vance Boelter, 57, a Trump voter, left a manifesto which leaves little doubt of political motivation. Boelter had Democrats named on his target list.
And who has poisoned our politics so much that suspects like Boelter feel enabled?
When the president does unlawful things and dares the courts to undo his action, he serves as a model for public lawlessness.
By late Sunday, the violence of Saturday, came roaring back.
Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, also known as “Afa,” was named as the protestor who was shot at a No Kings protest in Salt Lake. Loo, a Samoan, who appeared in season 17 of “Project Runway” as a fashion designer, was allegedly shot by Arturo Roberto Gamboa, 24, who was seen by a witness as acting as a “peacekeeping” volunteer. Gamboa, arrested on suspicion of murder, was at the protest with an AR-15.
This is the kind of mentality you get in America when Jan. 6 insurrectionists are convicted, only to be pardoned by Trump for their “act of love.” What message does that send to the public?
How can Trump not feel some responsibility for Loo’s death?
But the country is not mourning Loo. He’s merely Trump’s collateral damage.
As is California’s US Senator Alex Padilla, handcuffed because he had a question for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
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The secretary who thinks she’s a Spice Girl, was oblivious to the protocol of a US senator at a public event. Even though he identified himself, Padilla was not seen as a senior public official.
Instead, Padilla was a menace – a large, brown man too loud for the room – fit to be promptly tussled out of the room, and forced face down to the ground for handcuffing.
He did not belong.
That’s the way the Trump’s and the Noem’s see things as we witnessed the invasion of LA by a National Guard federalized without consent of the California governor as required by law. It was unnecessary, of course, but then why send at least 700 Marines to serve as do-nothing military mannequins?
They were scarecrows, sending out Trump’s message of fear to all those who don’t belong, including those who do, but who only disagree.
As Padilla said, if this could happen to him, it could happen to all of us.
When you see senior US senators from the nation’s largest state, the fourth largest economy of the world, being treated as “less than” you know America is not normal.
Welcome to the emerging Trump autocracy.
Domestically things are bad. But the global picture is worse.
The war in Ukraine has not been ended on Day One. The global trade war initiated by Trump with his beloved tariffs persists. And now as Israel and Iran fight a new forever war, Trump acts as Israel’s proxy and a weak peacemaker issuing one-sided demands to Iran.
Then he says, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
Ignorance? Ambivalence? Doesn’t sound like the “art of the deal.” Not when it’s causing division between the hawks who want war and the MAGA isolationists. What indeed is Trump’s “America First?”
And why does it seem that whatever Trump says it always puts people of color last?
How Juneteenth binds us
And so we come to Juneteenth as a reminder that our communities have much in common – the long struggle for social justice.
In the case of Vincent Chin – perhaps the most infamous individual hate crime in Asian American history – we have a known killer, Ronald Ebens, who has never served any time for Chin’s 1982 Detroit murder.
Ebens, still alive in his 80s,, has not only skirted prosecution in the criminal matter; he has skillfully used bankruptcy and homesteading laws in Nevada to avoid a wrongful death civil suit settlement. Ordered by the court in 1987 to pay $1.5 million to Chin’s family, the Chin estate has received nothing for the last three decades.
That sense of delayed justice is no less than the extension of the crime itself – one thing the Chin case has in common with Juneteenth.
For Asian Americans, the date itself, June 19, coincides with another shameful episode of American history – the iconic hate crime of Chin.
The official record will say Chin died on June 23rd, 1982. But his ordeal began the night of June 19th, when Ebens, a white auto worker, took a baseball bat and clubbed Chin unconscious in a fast-food parking lot in suburban Detroit.
Chin was in a coma at the Henry Ford Hospital on the 19th, the 20th, the 21st, the 22nd – and then on the 23rd, he didn’t wake up.
But an entire generation of Asian Americans did.
Chin was the call to social justice, an awakening.
To this day, June 19th continues to be a date that binds us all together, when we get and understand the message.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst, stage monologuist and a poet laureate in Northern California. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues since 1995. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack.
