Not black and white

There's a lot being made of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the Blood and Crips gang who by the time you read this will have been executed in California after his last-minute bids for clemency were turned down by Governor Schwarzenegger and then by the Supreme Court.

I had no real opinion on this case--oddly enough the latest cause celebre of a bunch of Hollywood stars doesn't stir me much--until I saw this headline: Chinese Voices Absent in Tookie Verdict.

Hmmm, odd. At first I thought the article was about how every group in California seems to have an opinion one way or another about Tookie, but Chinese Americans, true to their don't rock the boat nature, were just going about their daily business.

And the article is sort of about that. It's weird; in all the coverage I've read about this case, I'd just assumed the victims were members of other gangs--I'd seen nothing that led me to think otherwise.

But....

Williams was convicted for the slaying of Yen-I Yang, his wife Tsai-Shai Yang, and daughter Yee-Chen Lin during a robbery at the hotel that the family owned in Los Angeles.

Hmmm. The article continues:

According to a Chinese-language Sing Tao Daily report on Dec 11, Yen-I Yang, a former middle school English teacher, immigrated from Taiwan to the United States in 1970 after he retired. The Yangs invested their money in a motel in south Los Angeles called Brookhaven. Mr. Chen, a friend of the Yang family, told the Sing Tao Daily that customers at the motel only stayed for one or two hours at a time, creating a quick flow of clients and a large cash reserve that attracted robbers.

On the morning of March 11, 1979, Williams allegedly broke down the door into the motel, shooting Tsai-Shai Yang, who was sitting at the front desk. Williams then shot and killed Yen-I Yang, who was sitting on a couch nearby and his daughter, Lin, who came into the room. Williams then took $100 from the cash register and fled. Yang’s son, Robert Yang, was in an adjacent room, heard the commotion and found his father, mother, and sister, who were all shot at close range.

Chen, who had been with Robert Yang after the murder, said that Robert Yang found his sister shot in the face and his father shot in the abdomen, his organs exposed. Chen said that it was a sight that still haunts Robert Yang. Although many groups, including celebrities, have come out in support of Williams, Chen said that court documents showed Williams bragged about the murders to friends, saying that he “blew away three Buddhaheads.” When he heard about the support for Williams’s clemency, his first reaction was, “Mr. Yang and his family are truly unfortunate.”

There's a lot more in the article about the Chinese-American community's reasons for staying silent, but that's grist for another day's post on how different immigrant groups define being American.

I now have an opinion on Tookie Williams: I don't give a damn what happens to him.

I generally don't support the death penalty, for the usual myriad of reasons. On those grounds, I think Tookie should rot in jail for the rest of his life.

But to hear his supporters, keeping this murderer in jail not only is the worst form of injustice, but as an apology from society he should also get the Nobel Peace Prize upon release.

Oh? I've seen no evidence this man is innocent of the crime he's imprisoned for. You can lead a model life after you're sent to prison, but let's not demean the memory of the victims by lying about the person responsible for the heinous crime that ended their lives.

No matter how much good you do or change you undergo, there are some things so horrific that they cannot be forgiven no matter what. I'd say the cold-blooded murders of four people falls in that category, especially if you never apologize or show any sort of remorse.

Telling others not to kill carries with it an arrogant holier-than-thou feel when you don't begin the conversation by saying I should know, I killed myself.

Governor Schwarzenegger's statement turning down clemency had this interesting detail:

After Williams was arrested for these crimes, and while he was awaiting trial, he conspired to escape from custody by blowing up a jail transportation bus and killing the deputies guarding the bus. There are detailed escape plans in Williams’ own handwriting. Williams never executed this plan, but his co-conspirator implicated Williams in the scheme. The fact that Williams conspired to murder several others to effectuate his escape from jail while awaiting his murder trial isconsistent with guilt, not innocence.

It's also telling that the L.A. Times article says:

Despite persistent pleas for mercy from around the globe, the governor said Williams was unworthy of clemency because he had not admitted his brutal shotgun murders of four people during two robberies 26 years ago.

Clemency, I'd think, starts at home, from the heart of the man requesting it, and requires honesty above all--it cannot be gainsayed by lobbyists on your behalf.

Tookie maintains he's innocent, so I can see how it'd be hard for him to ask forgiveness for his crime. But as far as I can tell he's playing us for a fool when this co-founder of the Crips says he didn't kill these people. I have no problem with others arguing otherwise, but I'd say you better be damn sure about his innocence, and devote your energy to first establishing that case above all, before you go parading in the streets and let loose cries of racism.

It's bizarre that the L.A. Times, in its lengthy article, leads with the case's "racial overtones and compelling theme" yet does not once mention the ethnicity of his victims, nor his racist braggadocio. Any coverage of racial overtones has been dominated by African-American voices--whether that of Williams, or his celebrity and political supporters, or as on ABC's Nightline tonight the voices of family members who lost loved ones to gangs. [The African-American community, like any other group of Americans, isn't of one mind about Tookie--many of them know all too well about Tookie's legacy, in the form of the Crips gang.]

It's troubling to me that the racial overtone of the deaths of three Asian Americans is not part of the discussion around the Tookie case (everything else seems to be). I can't imagine what it was like in 1979, where maybe a generation of Americans who went through Vietnam were desensitized to the point that killing Asians abroad and Asian Americans at home seemed somewhat no big deal.

But I know that at this moment in New York, the New York Times can write about a spate of Chinese deliverymen murders:

The authorities say that two 16-year-old boys decided to set up the deliveryman, that they stabbed him and beat him with a baseball bat for fear that he could identify them, that they wheeled his body out in a shopping cart before shoving it into his car, that they dumped his body in a pond about three miles away and that from this endeavor they realized about $50.

The boys were charged with murder, and the news media briefly revisited one of this city's continuing narratives, the victimizing of Asian food deliverymen. John C. Liu, a city councilman from Queens, who is Asian-American, called for a one-day moratorium on such deliveries, and suggested that while picking up their food, customers get to know the people on the counter's other side.

People needed to be reminded "that there are human lives and human faces behind the preparation and delivery of their food," Mr. Liu said this week. The reminder was necessary, he added, because he detects a racist component to the beating and killing of deliverymen - men like Mr. Chen.

"It's as though we're not American," Mr. Liu said, his voice rising in anger. "We're not human, even. We're not real people."

I think the fact that none of Tookie's victims were white, and specifically, that three of them were Asian American, is what allows this debate to exist.

I think most people would agree there is no way if Tookie killed four white people he'd have lived this long--he'd have been strung up, or executed by the state, long ago, and there would be no room made for any other view.

If all his victims were black, I don't think you'd see Hollywood's brightest out there excusing black-on-black crime.

But because three of his victims were Asian Americans, and it's easy for our society to see Asian Americans as part of the furniture, and the Asian American community seems to be sitting this one out, there was a vacuum created.

And into this vacuum rushed a lot of no doubt well-meaning people, but ones with their own agenda, an agenda that is served by the invisibility of his victims (just try finding a photo of any of the three dead Asian Americans).

In some ways I feel bad for Stanley Williams. We're all in part the product of our environment--he must have had a pretty bad upbringing to turn out the way he did.

But let's not lose sight of personal responsibility, and the importance of truth. You can dress it up six ways to sundown, but a man who murdered four people in cold blood, tried to murder his way out before his trial, and refuses to admit to any of it, has forefeit his right to complain about how society decides to deal with him.

Of his own choice, he's laid his neck down on the chopping block, and shouldn't be surprised if the executioner's axe comes down. It's a choice his victims never had.

If you have the stomach for it, photos of what Tookie did to his victims are at this site.