Racial progress in Wausau is no simple story
When Roy Beck wrote his 1994 story for The Atlantic magazine about how Hmong immigration was changing Wausau, there was barely a Hmong source in the entire 6,000-word story. The perspective detailed in the landmark essay, which became symbolic of a certain sort of immigration panic, was almost entirely that of the white leaders and government officials who were then struggling to provide needed services to new immigrants.
This month, The Atlantic returns to Wausau with a new feature, “To be both Midwestern and Hmong” by Minnesota-based reporter Doualy Xaykaothao. It went up online last week, and this essay turns the lens around, making Hmong voices the primary sources and white people the secondary voices. That’s a good and welcome approach, and points out one of the weaknesses of Beck’s 1994 piece.
But in my reading of Xaykaothao’s piece, it also became hard to escape the conclusion that the white people in Wausau are a bit dopey, a bit clueless about the Hmong experience in Wausau in 2016, and a bit tin-eared in how they talk about it.
I should know. I am one of them. Xaykaothao quotes a piece I wrote in 2014, not altogether charitably.
In the space of two paragraphs in the story, two sources in the piece use the word “neat” to refer to the Hmong community — not “tidy” but something closer to, golly gee, these Asian folks are swell. That's surely an improvement on the use of a racial slur or some other overtly disparaging language, but it also risks coming off in a condescending, patronizing way.
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Wausau Mayor Robert Mielke is quoted saying “the neat thing about the Hmong — and Laotians and Cambodians — these people worked hard. They worked hard to assimilate.”
The "neat" thing, in other words, is that Hmong immigrants took low-wage jobs and learned to act a lot like white people. That attitude falls somewhat short of a celebration of diversity. Xaykaothao reports that a local pastor told her that “the Hmong have been in the city for so long he doesn’t even see them as a minority group.” And though Xaykaothao never really signals judgment of any of her sources, there's an uncomfortable echo in that line of the satirical Stephen Colbert character on “The Colbert Report” who claimed never to notice anyone else’s race. It’s not something anyone who actually belongs to a racial minority group would be likely to say.
And this brings us to my part in the story. In 2014, to mark the 20th anniversary of Beck’s essay, I revisited that piece, interviewed Beck and talked with Wausau sources about how the piece looks in retrospect. One of my key arguments in that piece was that Beck made a bunch of empirical claims about things that would happen in Wausau's future that just didn't happen. As of 1994, Beck called it probable that the city would be majority Asian "well within the present residents' lifetimes." Today that looks extremely unlikely as a factual matter; and also, so what? All of America is becoming more diverse. That's not a bad thing; that's a great thing.
But it would be absurd to pretend that racial paranoia does not exist in America in 2016, alongside disparities in income, education and criminal justice. Indeed, anti-immigration sentiment and sometimes open racial animus has helped drive the rise of Donald Trump to become the Republican presidential nominee.
Xaykaothao writes that my essay painted a "rosy" image. Maybe so. Less than six months after it was published, the murder charges against 15-year-old Dylan Yang brought out a bunch of old racial anxieties, most visible in the dubious claims about gang activity, which Wausau Police Chief Jeff Hardel says was not a factor. That case also has been an occasion for some very serious, very legitimate discussions about how minors and people of color are treated by the justice system.
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But the last few years have also seen the election of two young Hmong residents to local public office: Mary Thao, who took a seat on the Wausau School Board, and Yee Leng Xiong, elected first to the D.C. Everest School Board and then to the Marathon County Board. The creation of the Wausau World Market and the establishment of a Wausau branch of the Hmong Chamber of Commerce; the dedication and planned completion this month of the Hmong Vietnam War Veterans Memorial — all these things are signs of real progress from where Wausau's race relations stood in 1994.
But that progress hasn't been steady, and it isn't assured. Xaykaothao's piece is a good reminder to those of us white people who want to celebrate progress that we ought to be careful not to whitewash the complexities that remain.
Robert Mentzer is central Wisconsin storytelling coach and a columnist for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. Contact: robert.mentzer@gannettwisconsin.com, 715-845-0604; on Twitter: @robertmentzer.
