What does it mean that a Hmong police officer stood by as an accomplice to the murder of George Floyd? We talk to Vayong Moua (he/him), the Director of Racial and Health Equity at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Vayong tells us about the Hmong community’s unique position in Minneapolis, illuminates their experiences with police brutality, and discusses what solidarity could look like between the Hmong and Black communities in Minneapolis.
This series is made in collaboration with Buddhist Justice Reporter and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College. Music by Small Million.
Siena: Welcome back to our special series–New Narratives: Justice For George Floyd. A lot has happened since our last episode. Derek Chauvin was found guilty, a moment that many heralded as a turning point for police accountability in this country. But of course, accountability isn’t justice. Justice is a world where George Floyd is still alive, or at the very least where no one will ever again be murdered like he was murdered.
And justice still feels very far away. In the past few months alone, we’ve lost so many people to police brutality. Here in Minnesota, the murder of 20 year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center hit especially hard. Daunte’s future was stolen from him only miles away from where George Floyd’s murderer was on trial.
The issues we started this special podcasting series to explore are more immediate than ever, which is why we see the conclusion of Chauvin’s trial as only the beginning of our work. We will continue bringing you episodes of New Narratives: Justice for George Floyd until that justice is actually achieved.
One of the many striking and painful things about George Floyd’s murder was that Chauvin wasn’t alone. There were three officers also at the scene–one of whom was a Hmong man named Tou Thao. Thao’s presence at Floyd’s murder sparked an intense mix of disappointment, shame, and outrage within the Asian American community this past summer.
So today we’ll be talking about Tou Thao–not really him as a person, but what he represents, and the larger connections between the Hmong community, the Black community, and police in Minneapolis. I’m going to hand this one over to Anya, who spoke with Vayong Moua, the director of racial and health equity advocacy at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Anya: Vayong’s family was among the first Hmong refugees to arrive in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the mid-1970s. Since 2000 though, Vayong has lived in Minnesota. The first thing that struck me about him is that really the crux of what he does is focus on the way race intersects with health – which is kind of what the issue of police brutality is – a fight over how race affects people’s lives and ability to live, free and healthy.
Vayong: Yeah, it doesn’t fit neatly, but nothing does, right. And I would say in my world, in public health, there’s a framework called the social determinants of health, which really demonstrates that most of what creates health, 90% of what creates health, is outside of direct health care.
Anya: Social determinants of health…these are things like food systems, access to transportation, and, when you think about it, also the issue of police brutality. So obviously, the big question I had for Vayong was–what did he think of Tou Thao? What did he feel when he saw Tou Thao standing there at the scene of Floyd’s murder?
Vayong: But to me, it was so disturbing to see a Hmong officer as physically and symbolically as an accomplice, you know the signals that gives to the Black community, to the broader community, and also to the Hmong community too. And that juxtaposition really created a wave of defensiveness in the Hmong community and call-outs too.
Anya: For Vayong, the way the scene looked was what disturbed him the most. He was disgusted by Thao’s actions, but also concerned that Thao would become a symbol for something larger than himself.
Vayong: Like, how much is this going to reinforce the model minority myth? How much is this going to reinforce the Asian and white alliance, the underground alliance, that we’re somehow perceived to be as prosperous if not even more successful in many aspects and how our proximity to whiteness reinforces anti-Blackness. So there are all these fears from the physical juxtapositioning, and how that played into, reinforces a lot of, I would say a balance of misconceptions of our community and some very real problems that we need to confront and call out within our community as well.
Anya: Vayong hesitates to name Thao as a symbol of Asian Americans as a whole and their role in American racism.
Vayong: He’s not our leader and he shouldn’t be representative of our community. But it is also expected that this murder case will be abstracted and will be applied to the broader movement, and to Black/Asian and Black/Hmong alliances and tensions. I had friends who are named Tou Thao. And people with a lot of friends and family who have Thao as a last name who received death threats and hate mail. And some of them even changed their names because of this.
And so the impact is that you want to make sure that your own community isn’t unfairly targeted and ridiculed. But you also have to make sure that your own anti-Blackness and conditioning isn’t kicking in and making you overly defensive about this. So it is a complex combination of feelings, of making sure that Hmong people are not vilified because of a single Hmong officer. But also to make sure that this is emblematic of a pattern between our communities, historical and contemporary and that we have to confront that.
Anya: It’s also true that Hmong people in Minneapolis aren’t all Tou Thao, and they aren’t all aligned with Tou Thao. Hmong Minnesotans have their own complicated and painful relationship to the police.
Vayong: Yeah I don’t know if I can speak from a scholarly perspective, but I would say there is a pattern of distrust. I’m not sure if you are familiar with the case of Fong Lee, here in Minnesota, where there was a Hmong man who was shot multiple times running away from the police. And this is during the time of very poor HD security cameras, no cell phones. And the family was really skeptical of the police reports and believed that Fong Lee was set up and that there was a gun placed at the scene.
And you know, we’ve had a lot of incidents through the ’80s and ’90s, where whether they were gang members or just attendees at the July 4th event or New Years events, where shootings occurred. And where police brutality, people were getting hit with batons at our most sacred and important public events. And so it is definitely a complex pattern. And I do not want to equate it with the Black community. But it has manifested itself quite differently. And we’ve obviously been seen as, I think it’s very much attached to xenophobia. We’ve been perceived and conveyed as refugees, leeches to the system, newcomers who are unwilling to adapt or assimilate in white terms.
Anya: And this complicated history, it’s been vastly underreported, both by the Hmong community and by law enforcement themselves.
Vayong: So I think that double effect of underreporting has made our struggles with police underrepresented and misunderstood.
Anya: But even though our struggles are connected, that doesn’t necessarily mean our movements for liberation and justice are, too. Vayong thinks there are some parts of Hmong American and Asian American movements that are disconnected from the broader racial equity movement we are seeing at this moment.
Vayong: It’s not a monolithic movement. And the Hmong community itself obviously has a whole spectrum of political, religious, and cultural views. We have parts of our community that is very much cross-cultural and takes an ecological approach to racial justice, to refugee resettlement, working with the Somali community, working with the Karen community. And then there are other parts of our community that are very much we’re supportive of that but we’re focused on Hmong prosperity and Hmong self-defined issues.
Anya: I loved that idea of an ecological understanding–like seeing our communities as ecosystems, living, breathing, and changing webs of people and places. Vayong tries to incorporate this idea into all the work he does.
Vayong: I feel that the approach I try to embody embeds racial and intersectional equity at the personal level, at the interpersonal, at the organization, at the community, and at the structural level. And connects the dots across all those layers. I do a lot of work in policy advocacy, but I also strongly believe that if you do policy and structural change without the personal cultural self-study, and without the interpersonal relationships, and the community power, then you’re just going to have this mechanical change at the shell. That creates a shell of equity, but it doesn’t have the substance, doesn’t have the long-term cultural impact. And it doesn’t build community power.
Anya: And part of cultivating that ecological understanding between our communities has to do with interrogating the anti-Blackness present in Asian American communities. I asked Vayong about how he thinks anti-Blackness manifests itself in Hmong communities and why.
Vayong: It’s very, very challenging because it cuts across different generational experiences very differently. And the sentiments in our community, especially with elders, it is a very literal interpretation of racism. Like [they’ll say], “How can you say that’s white supremacy Vayong, that was a Black man that called me a g*** or a c**** or told me to go back to my country or kicked an elder at the transit station.” We need to strengthen our understanding of how white supremacy has produced and created that culprit, that the culprit isn’t just that individual in that incident, but who created the conditions for that.
Anya: Like we touched on previously in our New Narratives episode on anti-Blackness, these are tough conversations to have. Our parents, grandparents, and elders aren’t going to be magically conversant in critical race theory–they might not have the language to talk about these complicated issues and societal dynamics. When they think about race and racism, they sometimes only have their own experiences to draw on. Vayong thinks this is where the issue stems from in his community.
Vayong: When Hmong people came into Minnesota and the midwest, a lot of them [Hmong and Black folks] resided in affordable housing and in geographic proximity with each other. And so they had more contact with the Black community than say some of their white neighbors. And so when you are physically and geographically but in the same place under poor conditions with very overt systemic inequities, then you know it’s the scarcity model and white supremacy at play pitting communities against each other. But for us to not understand that our elders, and especially the early first generation of arrivals, their experience of coming to America was being pitted against the Black community.
Anya: It’s tough to balance honoring the very real struggles Hmong folks face when they get to Minnesota and talking about the broader context behind these micro-level community dynamics.
Vayong: We need to have that conversation that honors their experience but also can contextualize it. And help us all collectively pull back to see that, do you understand the social conditions that created that experience for you.
Anya: These relationships can’t be just considered from one lens, though. Vayong insists that Hmong folks and Black folks have enjoyed plenty of friendship and solidarity over the decades their communities have lived side by side.
Vayong: And earlier I mentioned the case of Fong Lee. Fong Lee’s mom came out very strong in support of George Floyd’s family, of Black Lives Matter. And she received a lot of backlash and support from the community. But not just unanimous support, it splintered the community. But to me it was a very powerful act and sustained level of support from a mother who lost a son to the police, and came out in support of Black Lives Matter.
Anya: This solidarity, though…it doesn’t necessarily become community. What I mean by that is, showing solidarity in times of tragedy is one thing– but Vayong wants to know how that solidarity can become something greater and more permanent.
Vayong: I think it can’t just be showing up in times of crisis, in times of shootings. Whether that’s in Atlanta, or in Brooklyn Center, or in Minneapolis. I feel like what would support us is having advocacy and community organizing on upstream preventative issues as well. So that we are in lockstep with arms together fighting on affordable housing, fighting on food security, fighting on COVID-19. And all these slow, unjust preventable deaths that are happening. And not just the pandemics, but the epidemics. Not just the violence in our streets, but the violence in our homes, the violence in our communities that is slow and more difficult to detect.
Anya: Vayong thinks we need to be mending the fragmentations in our different movements because racial equity in housing, racial equity in food systems, in transportation, in policing– these issues are all connected in some way at the root. Connecting these issues could connect our communities, too.
Vayong: And as I describe organizing, I don’t want to convert just about working on a campaign or trying to pass a policy, but organizing in a way that celebrates our art, celebrates our stories, our leadership. Organizing in a way that connects our shared and distinct ancestry, that lifts up our ancient ways of knowledge, our ancient ways of leading, our resilience. For me, ancestry is certainly a cultural and ethnic element, but it is also about ideas and values. So I certainly view my grandparents, great grandparents, my Moua lineage as ancestry, and I take pride in knowing I come from a nomadic hill tribe that has had no nation state. And I take pride in understanding my diaspora. But I also see ancestry with James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and many other great leaders who have given shape and influence to my way of thinking. And I would proudly and humbly claim them as my ancestors too.
Anya: Vayong just kept saying–when we organize, we have to focus upstream. If all of these issues that plague us today are boats, about to tip over the edge of a waterfall–we have to ask ourselves, what could we have done at the headwaters so that it wouldn’t get to this point?
Vayong: I want to make sure we’re not putting all of our resources only into the urgent care/emergency room. But what can we do to make sure we’re going upstream to prevent these things? So we’re not just playing catch up.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
Siena: Thanks for tuning in to New Narratives: Justice for George Floyd. This special series is brought to you by Asian American Organizing Project, in collaboration with Buddhist Justice Reporter, a project led by BIPOC Buddhists, looking to report on the police, criminal injustice, and the carceral state from a Buddhist lens, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College. Featured in this episode was Vayong Moua, the director of racial and health equity advocacy at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. See you next time!
*The redacted words are common slurs used against Asian folks