Brenda Yang Was the First Hmong Elected to the Dane County Board: Voices at the Table (Part 1 of 2)
Brenda Yang was elected Dane County Supervisor for District 19th in 2022, the first Hmong American elected to the board.
by Jonathan Gramling
Brenda Yang hears from a lot of people as a community activist. She works full time at UW-Madison College of Letters & Science as an assistant director with SuccessWorks helping students transition into careers. She is also a member of the YWCA board and SHRAC, the Superintendent’s Human Relations Advisory Committee. She also does some consulting work with the city of Madison on language access.
Yang had her hands full with the work that she performs. But she wasn’t satisfied that the voices of the people she worked with and interacted with were being heard in the formation of public policy. And so in 2022, Yang ran to be the Dane County Supervisor for District 19 and won, becoming the first Hmong American elected to the board. Just recently, Yang was reelected for a third term.
“I saw that there was a huge gap of representation at the table, just in general, of representation for Southeast Asian communities and Asian communities in general,” Yang said about her motivation to run. “And so I wanted to bring my expertise in understanding systems and how they perpetuate and create more barriers for certain narratives and certain people groups and bring my lived experience to that, try to help fix some of those systems. Through my work on the county board and the City of Madison, I have impacted access to culture and identity and race because those are at the intersections I understand deeply the complexities — I grew up in these systems — of why we are where we are today.”
In addition to Yang, there are two other Asian American representatives, Patrick Miles, the board chair and Yogesh Chawla.
The term Asian American refers to a broad array of people with their own unique history, culture and languages. For Yang, it is important for public policy to take that diversity into account.
“The Japanese people have their own unique history and unique narrative in America,” Yang said. “So do South Asians. Southeast Asians also have their own unique narrative. But I think the thing for South Asians that they struggle with the most barriers because the whole Asian model minority is a myth because we don’t fit that narrative as North Asians do. In fact, when we look at the data compared to Southeast Asians, they are underperforming and there is a lot more of the financial component whether there are economic gaps in there as well. So I think it is important for us when we look at data, we have to disaggregate it specifically to understand certain people’s roots and how they fit into those systems so that we can actually dismantle them or create access. Because if we don’t understand it through those unique character lens, we’re not able to really build systems in place to uphold those people and that there is sustainability for them whether it is economic growth or access to support services or bringing more visibility to their narratives, whatever it is.”
The history of the Hmong Diaspora also speaks to their uniqueness.
“We are a people group that has been displaced for about 3,000 years,” Yang observed. “We used to have a really strong, thriving kingdom in Northern China. The Chinese-dominant dynasty of that era came over and tried to make us assimilate into becoming part of the Chinese culture. But we had our own unique culture. So we were very resilient and very creative in how we were resilient. And so to this day, we still keep our own unique language and our identity even though our language was stripped from us as well. And it wasn’t until the 1950s when white missionaries came to the mountains of the Lao, met Hmong people and created our written language, what we use today, the Romanized version. But before that, for hundreds of years, we did not have a written language.”
If public policy is going to have a positive impact on people, then it needs to take into account who people are and their histories.
“If you’re trying to help the people group and you don’t understand that historical component, you wouldn’t know how to create solutions for that group,” Yang emphasized. “I think the more that we stay curious and the more that we start to dive into curiosity in understanding people and how they fit into the larger American immigration pattern and how that works, the better we are able to create solutions that will directly impact people.”
While Yang came to the county board with a lot of knowledge and wisdom about people, it was her first foray into politics. Sitting on the county board is a lot different than viewing it from the outside. There was a lot to learn.
“That was really new to me,” Yang said. “And even though I’ve finished my first and second terms, I’m still learning. There is so much in Dane County that we do for services and support to Dane County residents. The budget is huge. We have close to a billion dollar budget. There are a lot of things that I still need to learn and I am still learning every day and I soak in and absorb.”
Nonetheless, Yang made sure that the voices of the people and their lived experiences were heard in the process.
“My goal has always been ever since I’ve been on the board to highlight the narratives of those who are typically marginalized and underrepresented or to also highlight the narratives of those who need it the most,” Yang said. “We can say that we are trying to be inclusive and we value diversity and equity. But if we don’t do that and understand the impact and we don’t change our fiscal budget to match that, then it’s all just words pretty much. So I would say that my biggest impact has been in creating space where inclusion and different voices and advocating for those voices can exist. But also from a fiscal responsibility with my role on the Personnel & Finance Committee, but also in my first term, I served on the Health & Human Needs Committee, which oversees the largest department in our county and also the largest money budget in our county. I was able to impact a lot of things through that through my lived experiences but also highlighting different lived experiences that are not traditionally at the table.”