‘He Just Stood There’: What Tou Thao Teaches Us About the Need for Solidarity & Intra-Asian Accountability
On Monday, video footage of another black man being killed by a white police officer exploded onto the internet. The man’s name was George Floyd, a 46-year-old security guard suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the video, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is kneeling with his full weight on Floyd’s neck. Delirious and terrified, Floyd chokes out the words, “I can’t breathe” then cries out “mama!” twice before passing out on the asphalt. He later died in the hospital, a result of Chauvin holding him face-down in a chokehold for 8 minutes, punishment for a petty crime he didn’t actually commit.
The video footage also plainly shows an Asian American police officer creating a one-man barrier between Chauvin and onlookers. The moment I saw his face, I wanted to yell, “Why don’t you do something?!” But he doesn’t. He just stands there idly as Floyd chokes to death.
The officer’s name is Tou Thao, and his complicity in George Floyd’s murder has sparked outrage among Black and Asian communities alike over the past week. Some Black people are also turning to Asian people in anger, as if to pose the same question to the Asian American community as a whole: “Why don’t you do something?!”
It goes without saying that Tou Thao’s actions (and inactions) should be regarded as reprehensible regardless of the color of his skin. Many Asian American activists have already pointed out the importance of standing up against anti-Black violence and anti-Blackness within our own communities with the same vehemence that we called out anti-Asian violence we’ve seen in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Anti-racism is an all-or-nothing game.
For many Asian Americans who feel invisible or misunderstood, this is a part of ourselves we struggle to confront. As people of color, we too have a desire to recast ourselves under the American gaze as fully self-actualized individuals with agency to participate in larger society, unencumbered by stereotypes or stigma. Tou Thao is a stark reminder of how painful it is to see ourselves reflected in individuals we abhor. Even the vacuous expression on Thao’s face seems to betray our own unpreparedness, confusion, and insensitivity in dealing with issues of anti-Blackness in the Asian American community.
But this commitment to racial justice comes with baggage as well: it’s one thing to oppose hate crimes and/or casual, everyday racism; to support affirmative action; to refrain from using racist language. But we must also accept that the direct and knowing participation of Asian Americans in the policing of Black people is not an anomaly. There are Tou Thaos aplenty, Derek Chauvins of every race, serving in police departments across the country. They are not all “bad apples”, but they are nevertheless agents of an organization that is inherently racist and corrupt.
Law enforcement in this country is rooted in century-old policies allowing white people to hunt and kill runaway slaves. What used to be slave patrols and Night Watches are now government-operated law enforcement agencies on the one hand, and armed vigilantes like George and Michael McDaniel who lynched 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin , on the other.
Like all institutions undergirded by capitalism and white supremacy, police departments follow a peculiar physics akin to the “particle-wave theory”: police officers are a group of individuals of various races and ideologies, prone to bias, and carrying intentions both good and bad. But collectively, they are also avatars of a societal and cultural force that cannot be seen, arrested, or tried in a court of law.
Non-uniformed people can also get caught up in this scheme, unintentionally or otherwise. I was humbled by my own realization of this earlier this year when, out of fear for my parents and siblings, I encouraged them to call the police if they ever became targets of anti-Asian violence amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It didn’t occur to me until after the conversation that I could be putting at risk Black, brown, and/or undocumented people present at the scene, with no guarantee my loved ones would be protected in the process. It also reminded me of times when my own friends and family members have had the police called on them for no reason, and the intense fear and anger that made me feel.
As Asian Americans, we can be complicit in perpetuating police violence and anti-Blackness too, because anti-Blackness is built into so many of our institutions and present in many of our cultures. There’s no question Tou Thao should be prosecuted for the murder of George Floyd, but we also need to have a critical conversation about how we as Asian Americans choose to relate to and participate in law enforcement, especially when many in our community are being targeted and rounded up by immigration enforcement in similar ways.
The murder of George Floyd is not the first time in recent history that a high-profile murder of a Black man involved an Asian American police officer. In 2015, rookie NYPD officer Peter Liang was indicted for the killing of Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old unarmed black man who was killed when a bullet from Liang’s gun was shot into a stairwell and ricocheted into Gurley’s heart. Liang was eventually found guilty of manslaughter and official misconduct, but served no jail time.
Peter Liang became a litmus test for Asian Americans’ attitudes on racial politics. Conservative Asian Americans, mostly first-generation Chinese Americans, made aware of the fact that few white officers had been indicted on similar charges, claimed that Liang was being scapegoated, that this lone Asian officer was taking the fall to satisfy public demands for police accountability. Meanwhile, more progressive Asian American supporters of the Movement for Black Lives felt that Peter Liang deserved to face the full battery of charges associated with Akai Gurley’s death, but also called for wholesale police reform to bring justice to past killings of Black people at the hands of the police, and to prevent future tragedies.
The comparison between Liang and Thao, however, is somewhat limited. While Liang’s actions could at least be partially attributed to ineptitude (he had graduated from the police academy just 18 months prior, and also went against his training in failing to attend to Gurley as he bled out in the stairwell), Thao had a long history of police brutality against Black people. He had been part of a lawsuit in 2014 over his use of excessive force on a Black man named Lamar Ferguson, who says Thao “was the most aggressive” of the officers involved in his encounter and that Thao “punched and kicked” him repeatedly.
On the surface, Tou Thao, a light-skinned Asian American police officer who doesn’t bat an eye as George Floyd suffocates to death, fits the negative archetype of the aloof Asian American man who harbors unexamined, internalized anti-Blackness and seeks adjacency to whiteness through toxic masculine behaviors (perhaps in an effort to protect himself from the rejection he knows he will face as an Asian man, or perhaps because he’s just as sadistic and corrupt as some of his colleagues).
But the difference in the two ex-officers’ ethnicities offers an additional level of complication. Peter Liang is Chinese; Tou Thao is Hmong. In Minnesota, Hmong Americans are among the most populous Asian American communities, having been resettled as refugees after Hmong allies fought with American troops during the Vietnam War. Hmong Americans also have the second highest rate of poverty of all Asian immigrant groups (after Burmese Americans): 27% of Hmong Americans live in poverty, and more than half (53%) are low-income. Hmong American communities have themselves been victims of gang violence and police violence including in Minneapolis. Yet in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, many Hmong Americans are being taken to task for the racist complicity of the entire Asian American community despite not benefiting from the white adjacency more privileged Asian Americans possess.
To be sure, Liang and Thao are only symbolic representatives of their respective communities. Chinese Americans also experience poverty and police brutality (as do other Asian Americans), and not all Hmong Americans are involved in the criminal justice system. But their surface-level commonalities as light-skinned Asian police officers creates a powerful heuristic that colors over the nuances between them. While Thao’s Hmong background does absolutely nothing to change his responsibility for the murder of George Floyd, it does force Asian American allies of Black people to do more than issue a blanket “mea culpa” on behalf of our community to the Black community and examine the blindspots within the pan-Asian movement as well.
During a March town hall on anti-Asian violence related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hmong American activist Kabzuag Vaj of Freedom Inc. shared about how the recent conversation about anti-Asian discrimination reveals asymmetries in pan-Asian consciousness:
“Hmong Americans are also facing anti-Asian discrimination and violence even though we are not Chinese, and we stand by our East Asian brothers and sisters. But as Hmong Americans we are erased in the larger discussion about Asian Americans. Where are East Asians when Hmong and other Southeast Asian communities are fighting mass incarceration and deportation?”
Jay Caspian Kang of Time to Say Goodbye mirrors this observation, taking it one step further:
“You don’t need to be a Hmong scholar to understand the differences between the lives in a refugee community who have spent much of the past fifty years in poverty and the life of an upwardly mobile East Asian whose family came over on a skilled worker or student visa and quickly found a foothold in a town with a good school system. Hmongs and wealthy East Asians do not share a history, except at some point, one of them was oppressing the other. They also do not “benefit from White Supremacy” in the same way. Any category that includes both of them fails, mostly because wealthy East Asians define “Asian American” through their own personalized politics. So, why would the Hmong community have to carry the guilt burdens of wealthy Chinese, Korean and Japanese immigrants? And why, for God’s sake, do upwardly mobile Chinese, Korean and Japanese immigrants feel the need to launder their own class guilt through the Hmongs? It’s all nonsense.”
We must, without fail, acknowledge and work to dismantle anti-Blackness in ourselves, our families, and our institutions; and make no exceptions in our outrage over the killings of Black people (whether the victims are male or female; young or old; cis or trans; with or without physical, mental, and cognitive disabilities), and whether the murderers are Asian or some other race. And we must acknowledge instances in which anti-Asian racism in the wake of anti-Black violence is borne by a community that already experiences poverty, trauma, violence, and exclusion from larger pan-Asian conversations, and refuse to let them bear the responsibility for a racial divide they did not create. If our motivation for making Tou Thao the poster child for Asian anti-Blackness is that we simply feel disgraced seeing an Asian face in the foreground of a Black man’s murder, we are not being allies to anyone but ourselves.
Fighting anti-Blackness is not about just mourning victims and bringing individual wrongdoers to justice, though both of these steps are important in building awareness of our collective grief and activating our collective power. We must take apart the machinery that keeps Black people -- and other people of color -- under constant fear of being killed by a combination of outright and systemic violence. As our list of hashtags of the deceased grows and riots explode across the country, police budgets skyrocket, white domestic terrorists stock up on guns, gentrification spreads, schools fail, and wealth inequality swallows the hopes of poor and working class families.
If violence is a blunt instrument, solidarity is a fine-threaded suture. Rather than claiming to speak for or to all Asian Americans when discussing complicity in anti-Black violence, we need to act within our full capacity to cultivate a greater pan-ethnic and class consciousness, recognizing that the burden of dismantling anti-Blackness and the model minority myth does not rest equally on all members of our multiethnic, multi-faith, multi-class, and multigenerational community. We must demand more than to be represented fully and fairly in the news, in entertainment, and in politics. And we need to be as willing to take upon ourselves the responsibility to protect the most vulnerable among us--Black, brown, and Asian alike--as much as we’re willing to reject the worst.
Below are some recommendations on what you can do in this moment to support the Movement for Black Lives, AND develop a greater awareness of issues facing Hmong, Southeast Asian, and refugee communities.
What you can do to support the Movement for Black Lives:
Attend a local “Black Lives Matter” protest: Your local Black Lives Matter chapter is a good place to start, but be safe. Wear a mask, and Know Your Rights before you go.
Educate yourself on local police reform legislation (Campaign Zero has where you can enter your address and look up these policies). To start, contact your elected officials and ask them to:
Support a national use of force standard: Chokeholds like the ones used to kill George Floyd and Eric Garner are permissible in many localities. Federal legislation limiting use of force and instead training law enforcement agents to de-escalate high-risk situations needs to be put forward.
Defund the Police: Police departments take public resources away from other much-needed programs. Minneapolis groups are asking Mayor Frey to defund $45 million from the police and divert it to community programs. For example, imagine if the $6 billion budget for the NYPD were diverted to improving public schools, incubating new businesses, and building affordable housing. This is a no-brainer.
End qualified immunity: The reason why police officers literally “get away with murder” is because of this loophole, which lets officers accused of abuse and excessive force go free unless the plaintiff can point to specific precedents in case law, which is nearly impossible. Rep. Justin Amash is introducing a bill to end qualified immunity this week, and we all need to call our elected leaders and let them know we want them to support it.
Advocate to Defund Prisons (and Oppose the Construction of New Jails): Movements to end funding to private prisons actually work. Many of the commercial banks we utilize for everyday banking are funneling our money into financing private, for-profit prisons.
Donate and Fundraise (more will be added as they emerge):
Read, read, read:
What you can do to support our Hmong, Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese American brothers and sisters:
Read up on the impact of Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policies on SE Asian and refugee communities:
The Devastating Impact of Deportation on Southeast Asian Americans: Report (SEARAC)
Former Vietnam War refugee faces deportation to country he's never visited
ICE deported 25 Cambodian immigrants, most of whom arrived in the U.S. as refugees
Largest U.S. refugee group struggling with poverty 45 years after resettlement
Support national and community-based organizations that serve Southeast Asian and Hmong refugee communities (more will be added)
Freedom Inc. (Wisconsin)
Mekong NYC (New York)
Viet Unity (Bay Area)
VietLead (New Jersey and Philadelphia)
Asian American Resource Workshop (Boston)
Asian & Pacific Islanders Re-entry (Orange County)
