Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong Hunter Incident A Dialogue between Anthropologist Louisa Schein and Filmmaker/Activist Va-Megn Thoj

When the fatal shooting of six hunters by a Hmong man in the woods of Wisconsin received sensationalized national coverage in 2004, Hmong Americans struggled with an intensification of the hostile typing that had haunted their arrival in the U.S. since 1975. Mainstream accounts asserted that the incident, whether from the point of view of the white hunters or that of the Hmong man, could not be interpreted as primarily racial, but more probably centered on misunderstandings of property. Chai Soua Vang was convicted by an all white jury of six counts of first-degree murder. Simultaneously, the Hmong people and their culture were - by many accounts of Hmong in Minnesota andWisconsin - likewise convicted through one sweeping judicial act.

Meanwhile, in eerie anticipation of the gruesome incident, Hmong filmmaker Va-Megn Thoj had in 2001 penned a screenplay, Die By Night, that conjured a contrapuntal image regarding the air of racial danger in the northern woods. Written a full three years before the actual shooting incident, the dark script portrays the terror of a group of Hmong campers who are methodically maimed and murdered by what they think is a Hmong demon but turns out to be white hunters who have ruthlessly hunted the party over the course of the night. Working from the many actual hunting confrontations he already knew of, and evoking the racial tension that had long saturated the everyday lives of Hmong in the Midwest, the text is an intriguing amalgam of Hmong immigrant themes and slasher horror.

In this dialogue piece, we explore the potential for the occult demon feared in Die by Night to illuminate the active and ongoing occulting of race in Hmong-white relations. Keeping artistic vision and social analysis tightly articulated, we intercut the logics of Die By Night, histories of racial dynamics in the Midwest, the proceedings of the trial, the politics of media representation, and notions of turf and property, in order to ask: What accounts for the masking of race in so much discourse on Hmong over the decades, those same decades in which racialized interactions have been so salient to Hmong resettlement in the U.S.? In the process, we explore the erasure of Asian race in the black-white logics of American race politics.