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Asian Americans, especially Filipinos whose primary family members came to this country as colonized nationals to work the fields in California, identify with the African Americans in Texas in 1865. The Texans lived as slaves for two years longer than they had to, even though everywhere else black men and women were free.

Some Filipinos never are freed from colonial mentality.

For the Texans, it’s like being held back in school for two years. But worse. Or spending two extra years incarcerated when you should have been free.But even worse.

That’s the infuriation and injustice of Juneteenth.

As I like to point out every year, Juneteenth also brings Asian Americans together with African Americans because of a coincidence in America’s race history.

The day slavery finally ended for all of America is also the day Asian Americans suffered what is considered one of the most famous hate crimes in American race history.

THE VINCENT CHIN COINCIDENCE

It’s hard to believe there may be some people who don’t know Vincent Chin. But even after 42 years, some people may have only a vague sense of Chin, the Chinese American who died in a Detroit hospital officially on June 23, 1982.

But it was four days after an assailant struck Chin in the head with a baseball bat on June 19, 1982.

It was Vincent Chin's Juneteenth.

That’s when Chin crossed paths with Ronald Ebens in a strip club in Detroit.

Ebens, a white auto worker in an industry under siege by Japanese imports, saw Chin, and his brain registered “Japanese,” even though Chin was Chinese American.

I asked Ebens about this in 2012 and he denied the racial subtext of the incident: “It had nothing to do with the auto industry or Asians or anything else. Never did, never will. I could have cared less about that. That’s the biggest fallacy of the whole thing.”

Really? To him, was it really just pure rage like he would have shown another white male at a strip club? Chin’s friends, who were there, testified in court to the contrary.

It was a supercharged rage, as we will see.

But Ebens may have told me all that to lessen the racial aspect of the crime. It was anger. And it was murder.

Ebens couldn’t deny the most important fact–it was intentional.

After leaving the strip club, Ebens said he hunted down Chin, found him in the parking lot of a suburban McDonald’s,and then swung a baseball bat at Chin’s head resulting in his death.

Forty-two years after that day, Ebens, 84, has never served time for the murder. Nor has Ebens--ordered to pay $1.5 million to the Chin family in a wrongful death settlement—ever paid off his debt to the Chin family.

Ebens has avoided justice even when he knows he’s at fault.

“I’m as much to blame,” Ebens admitted to me during one of several long phone calls. “I should’ve been smart enough to just call it a day. After [Chin and his friends] started to disperse, it was time to get in the car and go home.”

But he didn’t.

Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, got to Chin in that McDonald’s parking lot, and as Nitz stood behind Chin, Ebens swung the bat.

“I went over that a hundred, maybe 1,000 times in my mind the last 30 years,” Ebens told me in 2012. “It doesn’t make any sense of any kind that I would swing a bat at his head when my stepson is right behind him. That makes no sense at all.”

The murder doesn’t make sense. But Ebens did it.

What really doesn't make sense is the application of justice, which has only benefitted Chin’s killer.

Ebens is free.

Chin was in a coma at the Henry Ford Hospital on June 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.

For those born in the Civil Rights Era, Chin was the call to social justice, an awakening. It was just the first wave.

Since then, the Asian American population, including mixed race, has grown to more than 27 million people. And now, a new generation is discovering the impact and the importance of the Chin case, during a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans have risen during and after the pandemic.

In 1994, I wrote a column proposing that the four days between June 19th and the 23rd give Asian Americans a period for reflection. And not just on the Chin case, but on what it means to be an Asian American now.

What does it take to stand up for ourselves? Our community? Our personal and public identity? What does real equality, real justice, mean today? Have we reached that place? Are we still far short? Why are some of us still asking “Vincent Who?”

We may not get a federal holiday, but the coincidence of Juneteenth and Vincent Chin’s murder gives us some time for reflection.

It’s not a re-litigation; it’s more like a meditation. It's a way to understand what’s happened to our community, and what more needs to be done now. Vincent Chin’s death is our marker in time.

This is why when I think of justice delayed on Juneteenth, I think of our common ground with the African American community.

The coincidence of justice delayed? At least with Juneteenth there is a sense of celebration.

But for Vincent Chin, we wait still.

See my original interview with Ronald Ebens in 2012 here.

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I will talk about this column and other matters on “Emil Amok’s Takeout,” my AAPI micro-talk show. Live @2p Pacific. Livestream on Facebook; my YouTube channel; and Twitter. Catch the recordings on www.amok.com.