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| Jim Morin, The Miami Herald |
A lot of artists use the term turning point when they talk about that moment where they knew they wanted to pursue being a painter, a director, a playwright. For me, one of the turning points of when I knew that a career as a reporter was the right one for me was this article, by crime reporter R. Scott Moxley for "OC Weekly" (where I interned for and wrote a couple of pieces back in 2009).
It was a profile of Gunnar Jay Lindberg, who, with an accomplice in 1996, brutally murdered the 24-year-old Vietnamese-American Thien Minh Ly in Tustin, CA as he was rollerblading on an evening in January. What the story told me was that, 1) unfair things happen, especially when you're a person of color, and 2) journalism can be a way to bring light to that kind of injustice.
What brought this old case to my head again was Travyon Martin and George Zimmerman, and how Zimmerman, despite killing Martin, was acquitted of 2nd degree murder and manslaughter. This isn't 1996, it was 2013 and injustice is still alive.
Of course it's false to equate a pre-meditated hate crime with manslaughter, but the reason Thien Minh Ly came to me now was because of the racial motivation. Zimmerman followed Martin because he was black. Lindberg targeted Ly because he was Asian.
But I'm not going to go into whether I think Zimmerman's acquittal was the right decision or not (it wasn't), or whether he had the right to shoot a teenager (he didn't). Instead, I want to go into discourse, or whether, the state of discourse in this country about race and victim blaming.
