For One Immigrant Community, George Floyd's Death Isn't Just About Black And White
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
All four fired Minneapolis police officers involved in the death of George Floyd now face charges. Noel King focuses on one.
NOEL KING, BYLINE: George Floyd could have been killed the way he was killed in just about any city in America - a black man, a white cop. But there's someone else on that damning video - an Asian police officer who's also at the scene. He is how you know this isn't any city. It's Minneapolis. Officer Tou Thao is Hmong American. The Hmong are an ethnic group from parts of Laos, Vietnam and China. They settled in this area in large numbers in the 1970s. A handful of Hmong Americans talked to us this week.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: He's the amazing chef.
KING: First in Marc Heu bakery in Frogtown. That's a neighborhood that's the heart of the Twin Cities' Hmong enclave.
Is that an eclair tower?
MARC HEU: Yeah...
KING: It's beautiful.
The bakery is owned by Marc Heu and his wife, Gaosong Heu.
GAOSONG HEU: I'm the St. Paul girl that convinced him to stay in Minnesota, so that's me (laughter).
KING: She seems made entirely of energy and emotion.
G HEU: Personally, I feel angry and sad.
KING: She didn't realize it right away.
G HEU: I didn't know that he was Hmong until I saw his name. Tou Thao is a very Hmong name.
KING: But once she realized, she couldn't shake how he just stood there.
G HEU: When you see that look, that complacency - that complacent-ness, I just - you can't ever forget it.
KING: There is history between the black and Asian communities here. Hmong Americans came to Minneapolis as refugees after the Vietnam War.
G HEU: These Asian people are coming into your neighborhoods. And they're all living in the public housing, like, your same public housing. And there's not enough food. There's not enough resources. They're taking up space. You know, like, they don't understand the culture or the customs.
KING: Set that dynamic on a low boil for 40 years and you get the community she grew up in - a place with quiet and unquiet tension.
G HEU: You know, the competition that we feel and the racism that we feel from this community and for this community is very, like, carefully orchestrated, you know, that this is, like, hundreds and hundreds of years of oppression, of racism that has been taught to both Asian people and also African American people to have these kinds of sentiments towards one another.
KING: But now there's this video, this murder right out in the open, a situation where you'd think everyone would agree. And to some extent, they do. They agree that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. But do they agree that Officer Tou Thao was complicit in the death of another man of color? They don't. And that really upsets her.
G HEU: I am ashamed and embarrassed about the reaction of my community and almost a defense of him in this case.
KING: Why defend him?
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DRIVING)
KING: Outside, on the main drag, Hmong-owned and black-owned businesses sit side by side, almost all of them boarded up now.
BO THAO-URABE: This is a Cambodian restaurant.
KING: Bo Thao-Urabe met me there. She's the head of the Coalition for Asian American Leaders in Minnesota. She's a Hmong American refugee who came to the U.S. with her parents back in the 1980s. I asked her, why are some people defending Officer Thao?
What is the argument that they're making?
THAO-URABE: I think what they're feeling is that in racist systems, they have also, too, experienced racism, right? And I think that in America, when we lump Asian Americans together, there's an assumed universal success, right? And so people have this preconceived notion that if you are Asian American, you must be educated, you must make a lot of money. And that is not the experience of this community, right?
KING: So is the concern then - the people saying we've got to stand up for him - is the concern - I'll put it bluntly. White police officers in America often get away with things. We know that, baseline. It sounds like what you're saying is there may be an assumption that Asian Americans also get away with things, baseline. But you in the Hmong community here know that's not true.
THAO-URABE: That's not true, yeah.
KING: So people who are coming to the officer's defense may be coming to his defense because what they are saying among themselves is, he's not a white guy, don't treat him like a white guy. Reserve judgment?
THAO-URABE: Reserve judgment. But also, because they've experienced racism before, they feel like people haven't seen that - right? - or have sort of dismissed that so that we should be maybe more lenient about Officer Thao in putting him in the same category as white people.
KING: This is something that she and Gaosong Heu are hearing behind closed doors. No one said it to us, possibly because it's the kind of thing that no one really wants to say out loud.
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