Tou Thao’s role in George Floyd killing has Sacramentans discussing Hmong-black relations

When the names of the four officers involved in George Floyd’s arrest were released, Dr. Chao Vang, founder of Project HMONG at Sacramento State, knew immediately that one of them was Hmong.

The officer’s name, Tou Thao, is a textbook Hmong name – “Thao” is one of the 18 Hmong clan names. His role in Floyd’s death last month, as he turned away from Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, has sparked numerous discussions about anti-blackness within Sacramento’s Asian American communities.

But the narrative of Asian complicity becomes far more complicated when dealing with Hmong Americans, whose history as refugees burdened by war trauma and high rates of poverty and mental health issues is often swallowed up by stereotypes of middle-class, well-educated Asian American privilege.

Reactions to the news of Thao’s involvement in Floyd’s arrest have been mixed. Chao Vang said some folks have expressed fear that being Hmong, or the officer’s name, will become associated with complacency and complicity.

Mai Vang, a candidate for Sacramento City Council and a second-generation Hmong American, hosted a Zoom panel about Black Lives Matter a few days after Floyd’s death. Many comments were supportive, she said, but many others accused the speakers of drawing attention away from Hmong issues. A few even posted death threats.

Despite the pushback from some community members, several Hmong organizers said the moment has also led to more honest, courageous and sometimes painful conversations addressing the roots and effects of anti-blackness in Sacramento’s Hmong communities.

“Our community members are really struggling to situate themselves in this moment of uncertainty,” Mai Vang said. “It reminds me we have so much work to do.”

A painful history

The Hmong are a Southeast Asian nomadic farming community who live across several countries, including China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. During the Secret War — a proxy war fought in Laos between the CIA and Communist forces during the Vietnam War — Hmongs were recruited by the CIA to fight against Vietnamese and Lao Communist insurgents.

The U.S. immediately cut off aid when Communist forces overtook Laos in 1975, stranding Hmongs in an enemy country. To escape persecution from the Lao government, many Hmongs immigrated to the U.S. as refugees and settled mostly in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

California is home to the largest Hmong population in the U.S., with the largest communities in Fresno and Sacramento. The Hmong population in Sacramento stood at 31,000 as of 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.

Almost 50 years after the first Hmongs resettled in the U.S., disparities still persist. Rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are disproportionately high in the Hmong American community, according to Cecilia Tsu, a historian at the University of California, Davis.

And 28.3 percent of Hmongs were below the poverty line as of 2015 — more than double the national rate of 11.8 percent — while the poverty rate in African American communities was 20.8 percent in 2018.

Many Hmong refugees were sent to live in black and brown communities when they arrived in the 1970s. This can be seen in Sacramento, Chao Vang said, where Hmong and black Americans have always lived in the same neighborhoods.

Often these neighborhoods were underfunded, low-income and heavily policed, which meant Hmong Americans shared some similar experiences with their black neighbors. Nancy Xiong, an organizer for Hmong Innovating Politics, said police officers would harass her brothers walking home from school or to the bus stop while they were growing up.

Living in the same disadvantaged areas also meant Hmong and black American communities were often pitted against each other for community resources, Xiong said. She recalled a string of home robberies in south Sacramento a few years ago, which fed the narrative some in the Hmong community held that black residents were targeting them.

But this conflict isn’t born from one community of color deliberately targeting another, Xiong said. It begins with a lack of investment from the city, she said, putting communities of color in conflict.

“I always feel like we were fighting for crumbs,” Xiong said. “The government institutions always made it seem like there was never enough for everyone.”

“The reason is white supremacy,” Mai Vang said. “We have to question, ‘Why have we lived in those conditions?’… It’s not a coincidence that we grew up in poverty alongside black folks, Latino folks.”

Patterns of conflict and solidarity

Black and Asian Americans have a complicated history that has oscillated between unity and division, according to Tsu.

Black Americans pushed the U.S. to take in Southeast Asian refugees after the Vietnam War, including Hmong refugees. A Hmong mother in Minneapolis whose teenage son was fatally shot by an officer in 2006 recently spoke out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, recalling that black and brown activists had been some of her loudest supporters. And during the 1960s, Asian American activists like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs were heavily involved in the “Black Power” movement.

They have also had tension and strife. Tsu cited the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of four white police officers who were seen on video beating Rodney King. About half of the businesses damaged in the riots were Korean-owned, souring relations between the Asian and black communities. Many Asian Americans also spoke out in support of New York police officer Peter Liang after he fatally shot Akai Gurley, a black father, in 2014, saying Liang was unfairly targeted by prosecutors because he was Asian.

But understanding this difficult history begins with recognizing the differences between Asians who were in the U.S. before immigration laws expanded in 1965, and the wave of Asian migrants that arrived afterward, Tsu said.

Asians living in the U.S. before 1965 were mostly working class, unemployed immigrants who were “just trying to make it,” Tsu said. Asian American activists in the 1960s were the children of these immigrants, raised alongside other working class communities.

“Not surprisingly, they were more likely to develop that consciousness and recognize (their commonalities) with other people of color,” Tsu said. “They would have been the ones to build those connections.”

In contrast, many Asians who arrived after 1965 were already highly educated, middle class or professionals, contributing to the stereotype of “model minority.”

Most of the Asians in the U.S. today were part of the post-1965 wave, Tsu said, including the Korean immigrants in Los Angeles during the riots.

And, as immigrants, they arrived with little to no understanding of African American history, or the work black activists did to expand Asian American rights.

This education gap and lack of cross-cultural understanding within the post-1965 generation of Asian Americans, Tsu said, partially explains why some are still unaware of the importance of solidarity with other communities of color.

Tsu added that even her students born and raised in the U.S. often have inadequate education about American history.

“Maybe this is finally the moment where all of this is going to be brought to light,” Tsu said. “People are realizing we need to have a conversation about this history … not blaming people for not knowing this history.”

How Asians can talk about anti-blackness

So how can Asian Americans begin conversations about anti-blackness within their families and communities?

“It starts at home, with your parents, and it starts with your siblings,” Chao Vang said. “Many of us … we’re being challenged on how to navigate this. There is no curriculum on this, there is no training on this.”

Mai Vang said those conversations could start by underscoring shared struggles with the black community, as well as how they have benefited from civil rights movements led by black people today.

While Hmong Americans need to acknowledge their trauma and pain, they also need to understand why they have this in common with black communities, Mai Vang said.

One obstacle, Chao Vang said, is the language gap. He is not aware of Hmong translations of black history texts, and the next generations don’t always know enough Hmong to explain such complex topics to their relatives, he said. Some English words and phrases don’t have Hmong equivalents, he added, such as “community” or “mental health.”

“How do you actually say ‘black lives matter’ in Hmong?” Xiong said. “You can say it, but the context is not there in Hmong. What is it that ‘black lives matter’ stands for?”

To bridge the gap, Xiong said, a translation guide was created to help non-English speaking Hmong Americans understand specific words needed to discuss anti-black racism. They can also use Hmong translations of pre-written letters to springboard conversations with family or friends.

Even with these tools, confronting loved ones about anti-blackness can be daunting, and the discussions that follow can be painful. But they are needed, community leaders said.

“This is … where a breaking point happens,” Chao Vang said. “Lip service is no longer needed. Action is needed to support the black and African American community. I’m looking forward to seeing how I can be part of this conversation.”

Xiong said Sacramento’s Hmong community has already come a long way. During protests in 2012 for Trayvon Martin, a black high school student killed by a Neighborhood Watch officer, she posted a photo of herself and other HIP organizers holding signs saying “Hmongs for Black Lives” to Facebook. The amount of backlash from members of her community made her feel “so lonely,” she said.

Now, Hmong Americans are organizing for Black Lives Matter on social media, Xiong said, many of them led by queer, trans and female Hmongs. Other advocacy groups such as Freedom Inc. in Wisconsin, South Asians for Black Lives and Man Forward, a group of Hmong men dedicated to uplifting female Hmong organizers, have also grown.

“For some reason this incident has been particularly powerful in galvanizing (people),” Tsu said. “The question is: What are we going to do with it?”

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This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 5:00 AM.