The first post-Jim Crow era hate crime to make sensational media attention was the murder of Vincent Chin, an Asian American of Chinese descent in 1982. He was attacked by two white assailants who were recently laid off from a Detroit area auto factory job and blamed Japanese people for their individual unemployment. Chin was not of Japanese descent, but the assailants testified in the criminal court case that he "looked like a Jap", an ethnic slur that is used to describe Japanese and other Asian people, and they were angry enough to beat him to death.