Prejudice Against Asians

Some situations can prompt those who are prejudiced against a particular ethnic group as a whole to target specific people within the group. In this novel, anti-Asian sentiments were prevalent in the Detroit area around 1970. The prejudice was fueled mainly by the effects of foreign cars on the domestic manufacturing market. Vincent Chin's death was the direct result of those attitudes.

One important part of prejudice is that the group being targeted is identifiable by some specific trait. An Asian American named James Shimoura said, “Due to physical appearance, we fall victim to the attitudes toward the Japanese nation” (48). A U.S. Representative at the time publicly referred to the Japanese car companies as “the little yellow people” (48). He went on to clarify that he did mean it, though he apologized later. Another politician compared the competition created by the foreign imports from Japan to “an...