Black Lives Matter Movement Stirs Painful Divide in Local Vietnamese-American Community

One of the burning issues of the day is playing out painfully among Vietnamese-Americans in New England: Which side of Black Lives Matter should the community be on?

Some see the movement as a rightful denunciation of structural racism and police brutality. Others in traditionally conservative Vietnamese-American communities in Dorchester, Quincy and Manchester, New Hampshire, regard BLM and their supporters as unpatriotic and dangerously leftist.

BLM’s detractors include a Vietnamese immigrant named Bao Chau Kelly of Hooksett, New Hampshire. She is a pro-Trump activist who has recruited a small but vocal group of Vietnamese-Americans to attend “Blue Lives Matter” rallies in support of police and flood social media with messages attacking Black Lives Matter as a violent anti-American ideology. They have excoriated Vietnamese-Americans who embrace BLM, including Massachusetts Rep. Tram Nguyen of Andover.

Earlier this summer Nguyen released a video on Facebook explaining why she thought it was important to support Black Lives Matter. Her video included a reference to Asian-Americans’ heightened fears following a string of reported verbal and physical attacks across the U.S.

“We can’t fight against racism directed towards our community while standing complicit in a system that disproportionately discriminates, devalues and criminalizes and brutalizes our Black friends and neighbors,” she said.

Nguyen told WGBH News she knew that some among the area’s estimated 30,000 Vietnamese-American residents would react negatively to this message. However, she said she did not expect it to lead to “personal attacks” and what she called “vile anti-Black rhetoric.”

“I also didn’t anticipate equating Black Lives Matter to socialism and communism. And in fact, I find that to be very ironic because my father served in the South Vietnamese military and was put into a re-education camp by the Communists for eight years.”

In her translated post written in Vietnamese, Chau Kelly said of Nguyen: “It is a shame that her father was an officer of South Vietnam … and was imprisoned by the [North] Vietnamese communists.”

Chau Kelly’s post, cited in an article in the Eagle Tribune, goes on to say: “They escaped Vietnam so that she can live in freedom and democracy and have a better future, yet this Massachusetts [representative] embraced the American communists and domestic terrorists BLM.”

Complicity with communism are fighting words in Vietnamese communities. {snip}

WGBH News reached out to Chau Kelly but received no reply. With a large following on social media, she has organized and taken part in several anti-Black Lives Matter protests, including one in Concord, N.H., this summer attended by armed white counter-demonstrators.

{snip}

A recent graduate of Boston University, Nguyen is in her early 20’s and believes that Vietnamese-Americans her age generally agree with the notion that Black Lives Matter. By contrast, she said, she is shocked by what she has been hearing and reading in right-wing Vietnamese social media. Nguyen alleges that some of what she has seen is not just racism. It’s more specific than that, she said.

“There’s so much anti-blackness rhetoric within the community. I didn’t realize how much anti-blackness there was. I’d start joining like Facebook groups to read more about why folks are so against the current movement. I’m just still in the appalled level of it.”

{snip}

Most Vietnamese immigrants in the Boston area came from the south of the country and were ardently anti-communist. Many identified with the Republican Party {snip} and viewed African Americans generally as too liberal. Some accepted racist stereotypes of Blacks as criminals and as people to be feared {snip}. This dread was compounded by street violence during the early post-war Vietnamese migration period.

{snip}