Maine Landlord Insists Signs Referring to Asian Mayoral Candidate as 'Ho Chi Chin' Are Not Racist

A landlord in the small Maine city of Lewiston is declaring, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” which, as always, is your first sign that he’s probably done something racist. In this case, that would be making signs referring to his political foe —an Asian-American community activist named Ben Chin— as “Ho Chi Chin.” Chin isn’t Vietnamese or a turn of the century Communist revolutionary, but you knew that.

Joe Dunne, the landlord in question, has been called one of the city’s three worst landlords by local housing organizations, accused of overseeing some of the worst and most dilapidated properties in town. In his bid for mayor, Ben Chin has referred to Dunne and other landlords in town as “corporate slumlords,” saying he and the others use “legal and financial structures to shield them from liability, taxes and, apparently, moral decency.”

And so, in the deranged spirit of overreaction beloved of alleged slumlords everywhere, Dunne has admitted he’s the one who put up blaring red signs all over town. The signs feature a bunch of tiny little hammer-and-sickle insignias above a caricature of Ho Chi Minh and the words, “Don’t vote for Ho Chi Chin. Vote for more jobs, not more welfare.”

In an interview with the Portland Sun Journal, Dunne said the signs were a natural reaction to Chin “saying a lot of bad things about me.”