Blog #13: The Car is the Sacred Cow of America

In the film Kelly Loves Tony, something that resonates with me is whole dilemma in which Tony and Kelly have different views and opinions on gender roles. I feel like a lot of their conflicts stem from their differences in personality. They have different views on marriage, family, child rearing, education, etc. Their relationship problems compound with having a child, making more problems prevalent in their relationship. Kelly has many responsibilities which include going to school, fitting in with Tony’s family, being a daughter-in-law, having a child, etc. In my opinion, Tony is the type of father who only takes responsibility of a child when things are going smoothly. He tries to be the fun dad, but doesn’t step during the hard parts of being a father. Tony talked about how some people are school oriented, and that Kelly is in the middle of that spectrum. He lacks support for her and her attempt to break teenage pregnancy stereotypes.

Automobiles are significant to the American history an economy. Having read the title of the article, I immediately thought about industrialization in American history and how the production of cars originates from Detroit. This is something I learned in APUSH, AP United States History. It is interesting to see how various factors such as class and race play into the car manufacturing. On the surface, the problems that arise may not seem as visible, but under further inspection, we see that there are racial tensions involved. As the United States became more prevalent in production, they needed to find cheap labor to fuel their projects. The best option was cheap immigrant work, namely Chinese Americans and other minority Asian Americans. The reactions of middle class White workers towards the influx of ethnic labor was negative due to the highly charged, racialized society at the time.

Ford is a car brand that represents American workers. However, what happens when the engineers and workers are of Asian descent? There is an infamous case about a man named Vincent Chin, who is underrepresented in Asian American history. Vincent Chin was a Chinese American who was in the automobile industry. He was out with some friends for his bachelor party and got into a disagreement with two white employees who were recently laid off. The argument was about Asian Americans taking over the car industry and stealing jobs that belonged to Americans. Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz [the white men] accused Chin of being a Japanese job stealer, which wasn’t even his ethnicity. This conflict escalated, as Chin and his friends split up to avoid a fight with these White men. The two men followed Chin into a McDonald's’ parking lot and beat him severely with a baseball bat. He [Chin] died a few days later in the hospital. The charges against the two men were minimal and insignificant. The unequal treatment in legal systems against Whites and Asian Americans is clearly present. This case is something that I believe more people should know about. It’s frustrating to hear about these types of events and to read about the injustice towards the Asian American community.