Conversations during the summer were wary, and often explosive. Yang Sao Xiong, a professor of social work and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies Hmong American political participation, observed that Hmong Americans sometimes have an “uneasy” relationship to the broader category of Asian American. Their higher rates of poverty are often invoked as a “negative test case” to disprove the model-minority myth, he explained, “and that’s the only time they enter into the Asian American conversation.”
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