Hmong People, You Don’t Need to Give a F*ck About Black People
I’m not here to convince you to care about black people or the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m not here to lecture you on why you should care. I get it. Being Hmong is not easy, especially not for those who were first generation here in America. Along with white people, a large number of black people made our every day existence horrible for decades. I hear you. I feel your pain. That was me too.
But I feel there is a need to explain certain things to help you see yourselves better and how the Hmong play into the fabric and history of America.
America has been on fire long before the Hmong were recruited by the CIA to fight in an ugly war that killed more than 30,000 Hmong soldiers. During the Secret War, 18,000 Hmong soldiers died in just 1968 and 1969 alone. From a population of approximately 400,000 Hmong in Laos, it is estimated that between 30% to 50% died between 1961 and 1975. Yeah, I bet most of you didn’t know that. The numbers are loose because there was never an official tally. Hmong men were recruited in 1961, and when most of our men had died, our boys were recruited in 1965 to replace their fathers and uncles. There is an entire generation of Hmong people who never grew their own rice. Instead, they only ate rice that dropped from the sky.
We may have a few hundred recorded officers who adorn the hallways at Hmong Village in St. Paul, Minnesota, but who fought under these men? Your dads, grandpas, uncles, moms, aunts, and grandmas, that’s who. They served as guerrilla foot soldiers on the front line. They served as infantry. They served as nurses and caretakers for the wounded.
My dad was one of those boy soldiers recruited to replace the men who had died. He was twelve the first time a gun was placed in his arms. To the day he died, he received no recognition from the US government for his sacrifices for this country. It is said that for every one American soldier that was saved from behind enemy lines, ten Hmong soldiers died in the effort to save him. We were dispensable. We were just these backwards, small, hill people — uneducated, dirty, and poor.
More than half the Hmong who attempted to cross the Mekong River to safety in Thailand died — either from drowning, being hunted down, land mines, starvation, or sickness. My own uncle lost his entire family. His first wife and his small children were swept away by the current in the dead of night. He later remarried and had more children, but that is no replacement for the ones he lost.
The fact that you are here to read this right now means that you are lucky, that your parents are lucky. Most of us are not children or grandchildren of officers. More likely, we are the children of the unrecognized soldiers. Each and every one of our parents lost someone. In my family, that would be every single one of my mother’s brothers, her father, and countless family members on both sides of my family tree.
Now, take a look at your family. Think about them, then imagine one of your children dead. At least half of your siblings dead. A few of your cousins, your aunts and uncles, all dead. That’s how real it was. People lost whole families. Because we live in the comforts of America where a war has not happened on this land since 1890, it’s hard to imagine how brutal war is.
Yet even with all that we Hmong had given up for the American cause, it still wasn’t enough to save what remained of us. In 1975 when America pulled out of Vietnam, they only wanted the officers and the educated. They did not want the soldiers or their families. They did not want the civilian Hmong who had to escape the hills. The Lao government had called for an open genocide for the Hmong, but the American government didn’t see us as good enough to save.
My mother often retells of those days, not realizing how much PTSD she still carried, lecturing me and my siblings on how important an education was. She and my father knew that the uneducated risked getting left behind. That even with great sacrifice, you could still be turned away and left to die just because you couldn’t spell your own name.
The name Yang See should mean something to you. It is mostly because of him that you are here. He built the first stepping stone. When the US government and Congress decided that the Hmong were “not suitable for resettlement,” the burden was placed upon him to convince them that the Hmong were worth saving.
In 1975, 2500 Hmong were evacuated from Long Cheng, but only 1000 Hmong were allowed to come to America, and then every year after, a few thousand more were allowed. It wasn’t until the Refugee Act of 1980 that finally families could be reunited and brought over.
So what’s the point to this history lesson? Did you catch it? Outside of your sense of anger and sadness, did you see it? Here, let me tell you more stories, something a little more recent.
If you read the piece I wrote on the MOD, you’ll be familiar with John’s story. He was thirteen when he and his cousins were attacked by grown white men. When the cops showed up, John was the one arrested. Or how about the fact that John had to request for lawyer after lawyer after lawyer to defend him because the first two just wanted to send him to jail?
Or how about when we were kids in the 80's, our teachers would never believe us when we reported bullying. They would always side with the other kids instead, and the Hmong kid was usually the one to be punished.
Or how about the poor little Hmong kids in Portland, Oregon in September 1981 who were murdered, but the police, the medical examiner, and the media called it an “accidental drowning.” They shut the case despite the kids being found tied together on the riverbank.
Or how about Thai Yang and Ba See Lor, two thirteen year old Hmong boys who were killed by a white cop in 1989? The cop was never indicted. The boys were not armed. All that was found next to them was a screwdriver.
Or how about Fong Lee, with his back to the cop, still shot to death? Cops can use deadly force if they are “in reasonable fear for their life,” but Fong Lee was moving away from the officer. He had no weapons. His prints were not on the gun that the police “found” near his body. Despite the fact that Fong had blood on his right hand and arm, there was no blood traces on the gun. Still, the police released their own version, details that go against everything the evidence pointed towards.
So what do all of these stories have in common? Have you guessed it yet? They are all examples of systemic racism. If racism is the fist that punches you, then systemic racism is the arm that holds out that fist. It is the system that ensures that your injustices are never heard, that pushes you into believing that Hmong people have it so good and that your fight is over because you’ve worked hard to get out of the ghetto. It is the system that allows cops to shoot your kids and not be held accountable; that allows a government to leave their allies behind to die in a war that those allies weren’t responsible for; that ensures that no matter how hard you work, you will never be in a real position of power.
Systemic racism is what makes it alright for twelve year old Hmong boys to be recruited to be soldiers, but not twelve year old American boys — especially white boys. Systemic racism is also the reason why America didn’t want to save the Hmong after the Hmong had sacrificed so many in a battle that really wasn’t their own. Systemic racism led white leaders to believe that ignorant, tribal Asians could never modernize and adapt to American civilization.
Systemic racism made it so cops would arrest a small, skinny, 13 year old Hmong kid instead of the 21 year old white man that was trying to kill him. Systemic racism made it so the white Public Defenders would rather just put John in jail than defend him in an obvious case of self defense, because John is just a little, poor, brown Asian kid.
Systemic racism made it so our teachers saw us as untrustworthy little perpetual foreigners who started trouble, despite the fact that we were far smaller than our black and white counterparts.
Systemic racism made it so the police and the city of Portland never brought justice to the Her kids. Instead, it was swept under the rug, ruled accidental, and forgotten about for all these years.
Systemic racism is what made a white cop claim that two 13 year old boys had a gun and he feared for his life so he shot them. Systemic racism is why the justice system chose not to indict that officer; instead forcing the victims’ families to need to relocate because they were getting death threats.
Systemic racism is what made two white cops stop to question some teen Hmong boys who were doing nothing wrong, resulting in chasing Fong Lee and killing him. The cops had no reason to approach those boys, yet they did. Systemic racism is what made those cops see Hmong teens standing together and automatically think they were gang-bangers.
But systemic racism can also be more subtle. For instance, a cop pulling me over for no reason and running my license plate just for being in a mainly Italian neighborhood. Systemic racism also makes it so non-Asian people doing slant-eyes in pictures is “just a joke.” There are so many examples.
Now, let me tell you a little bit about black people.
Did you know that black babies used to be fed to alligators for entertainment? Did you also know that lynching postcards used to be sold as souvenirs? Did you know that white people used to breed black people on farms the same way you would breed chickens and cows? They’d be forced to have sex and produce babies, who then would be sold off to new owners at around the age of six.
Did you also know that black people, at one point, had entire thriving communities until it was burned down in what could only be called a battle. Black Wall Street existed in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma during the late 1910’s. In 1921, hateful, jealous white folks burned down their entire neighborhood, leaving over 9,000 black folks homeless and approximately 300 dead. They used their crop duster planes to drop bombs on buildings and destroyed entire city blocks. Just recently, the government is finally searching for the mass grave where hundreds of black bodies were dumped.
Both white people and black people have brutalized so many of us in those first years of Hmong resettlement. We haven’t forgotten and many of the hard feelings born during that time still exists today. So why should we care? Hmong people have worked hard to pull themselves out of the ghettos and poor neighborhoods. We truly epitomize the meaning of “the American Dream.” Within just a few generations, look at all we’ve accomplished despite the racism and brutality we suffered through. We have lawyers, doctors, senators, judges, Olympic hopefuls, Ivy League graduates. Hmong people are amazing.
So again, why should we care what black and white people are doing to each other? Where is our skin in this game? Don’t they both deserve their troubles because of the way they treated us?
I’m not bringing up black history to compete with Hmong history. Instead, I’m hoping that you’ll see similarities in our histories, how systemic and overt racism has played a role for both our peoples. In fact, for all people of color. Whether we are Asian American, African American, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, or other, we are all fighting the same fight. Even poor white folks, whether they are aware of it or not, are in this same fight.
When settlers started to come to America, the Polish and the Irish were considered to be beneath those of the English, French, and Scottish. Up until the mid-1960’s, Italian-Americans were considered to be dark skinned and called “n*ggers.” Many white folks still remember those days. It wasn’t so long ago.
We spend so much time hating each other, fighting each other, when we fail to realize our common enemy. It isn’t regular white folks either. It is the powers that be, the rich who run this country, who have always run this country in favor of greed instead of humanity. As long as we hate each other and fight for scraps and refuse to see our common struggles, we won’t fight them and race issues will continue.
America has always had a violent history. It is literally built on blood and war. So no, you don’t have to care about black people. I know there are a lot of problems within the black community that needs to be addressed (just like there are in ours). I know that there needs to be people from the black community that will need to step up to help us heal from the traumas inflicted upon us, but I also want you to know that there is a larger picture. As long as you refuse to see it, we will never grow beyond it.
Have you ever wondered why you never learned any of the details of the Secret War when you were in school? Oh, you sons of rebel warriors, you daughters of shaman priestess healers, keeping you comfortable and erasing your fight is another form of control to keep you compliant. Never mentioning the Hmong in American history books is another way of assimilating you into thinking that everything for you and your people is alright.
When we lose sight of the struggle, we lose the essence of ourselves. In the quiet way America allows Hmong history to disappear, it causes no waves. It will simply slip away as our elders and their stories return to the earth. Such is the struggle with Asian America. Our silence is bought by the gradual burial of our struggles. We cannot fight for things we never know, for a past we can’t remember. Because of the acceleration of our adaptation into American society, acceptance may feel like equality, but as long as the hands of power still exist, that “equality” is conditional.
Some of us may blend in well. We may stand closer to our white friends than we do to other people of color, thinking that because we drink the soda, change our names, and convert our religions, we will be safe; but just know that you can never shed your skin. Until we are all treated equally, none of us truly are. You can stand by the side and think that Black Lives Matter isn’t your fight, but just know that every march to end systemic racism is being marched for you too.
