Book Review
'Death on the Fourth of July': Violent intolerance, American style

By Tim McNulty
Special to The Seattle Times

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In the early hours of July 4, 2000, three young Vietnamese men vacationing from Seattle stopped at a Texaco mini-mart in the small coastal resort town of Ocean Shores. They were after a late-night snack to bring back to their hotel. What they found was a group of skinheads who waved a Confederate flag in their faces and taunted them with racial slurs and physical threats.

The Asian Americans found little concern for their plight among those in the store, where the clerk declined to call the police. In fear for his life, one of them, Minh Duc Hong, armed himself with two paring knives from a store shelf. Outside, when their car was blocked and his brother and friend were attacked, Hong interceded. Minutes later Christopher Kinison, the most hostile and aggressive member of the group, lay bleeding from 23 stab wounds. Two punctured his heart.

Ignoring the felony hate crime that precipitated the act, the Grays Harbor prosecutor charged Minh Hong with first-degree manslaughter. That fall the quiet Vietnamese student who worked in his parents' Bellevue diner stood trial in Montesano before an all-white jury.

"Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial and Hate Crime in America" by David A. Neiwert Palgrave/Macmillan, 242 pp., $26.95

Seattle journalist David Neiwert covered the trial for Salon.com. Curiously, it wasn't until the trial had begun that the author realized he knew the defendant casually from eating at the family's diner. He describes his reaction in the clean and straightforward prose that moves "Death on the Fourth of July" at a brisk, narrative pace: "what I already knew about the Hong brothers did not jibe with the portrait that the prosecutors had been painting in the papers: big-city Asian gangsta wannabes who got into a fight with local kids and stabbed one to death."

Using the incident and trial as a springboard, Neiwert launches an insightful, troubling and scrupulously researched inquiry into the history, psychology and sociology of hate crimes in America. "Hate crimes cause intense damage right at the most fragile point of [multicultural] societies," he writes, "because they erupt along the contiguous fault lines of race and culture, rupturing whatever fabric of racial harmony may exist and sowing distrust and fear."

An investigative journalist long familiar with racist and right-wing groups, Neiwert's' previous book, "In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest," examined the legacy of extremist groups in our region. Here he examines the prevalence of hate crimes, particularly in small rural towns. His findings have implications that spread well beyond the Northwest.

Due to their racial and cultural homogeneity, small towns are particularly vulnerable to hate crimes. Neiwert reports that the vast majority of bias crimes outside urban areas go unreported. Small law-enforcement agencies, the majority in the U.S., are ill prepared to recognize and deal with hate crimes. And when victims (usually intimidated and fearful for their safety) fail to press charges, small-town cops are loath to make arrests.

Indeed, a few days before Kinison and his friends attacked the Hongs, they terrorized two Filipino families visiting a strip mall in Ocean Shores, shouting racial epithets and pounding on the families' car window. The investigating officer "admonished" the boys but made no arrests. A similar event took place later that day in Long Beach, two hours south. Again, no arrests were made.

Coming Up David A. Neiwert The author of "Death on the Fourth of July" will read at these locations: • 7:30 p.m. Aug. 9 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600; www.elliottbaybook.com). • 7 p.m. Aug. 18 at Seattle's University Book Store (206-634-3400; www.bookstore.washington.edu). • 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at Tacoma's Wheelock Library, sponsored by the Tacoma Branch of the University Book Store (253-591-5640).

Though insignificant in comparison to the brutal race-induced murder of James Byrd in Texas in 1998, or the homophobic murder of young Matthew Shepherd in Montana the same year, Neiwert makes a strong case that all hate crimes are insidious.

By victimizing an entire community, bias crimes create far more harm than the parallel crimes they resemble. Thus a swastika on a synagogue or a shouted racial slur sends a message of fear and intimidation to a larger targeted community. When the author asked Minh Hong what went through his mind on the night of the attack, Hong told him "I just knew I didn't want to end up like that guy in Texas." He meant, of course, James Byrd.

Neiwert probes the dark origins of hate-induced violence in America. He traces the rise of lynchings that followed abolition, when blacks were no longer considered private property in the South, and the more recent rise of white supremacist groups in the rural West.

His survey of hate-crime legislation finds statutes on the books in 46 states, but he sees most as ineffective. Few, for example, include critical funding for education of law-enforcement officers or prosecutors. Existing federal statutes are equally "toothless." Federal legislation pending since 2000 would establish an effective hate-crimes law, one that includes crimes against gays and lesbians. But its broad reach has held up the bill's passage.

In the end Minh Hong was acquitted by a jury vote of 11 to one. Even so, the feeling lingers among some in Ocean Shores that Minh Hong is guilty of a violent crime, and justice was not served. What this probing study demonstrates is that for many victims of hate-based crimes justice remains an illusive goal.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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