The ‘Minnesota Paradox’: A State Grapples With Stark Racial Disparities

MINNEAPOLIS — Since the first flour mills sprung up on the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1800s, Minneapolis has been seen as the land of opportunity, a place of innovation. The stately homes along the Chain of Lakes showcase the wealth of the city, which often tops lists for the best places to live.

But by Friday, May 29, the city's 3rd Precinct station had burned to the ground. For many Minnesotans, the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck for more than eight minutes, felt like a moment of reckoning rooted in a century of frustrations. Because in thriving Minneapolis, it can seem like nothing changes if you're a person of color.

In the Twin Cities area, blacks face poverty over four times the rate of whites and unemployment over three times the rate of whites, according to the Census Bureau and state government statistics. Minnesota also has one of the worst achievement gaps in the nation.

This core tension is called the "Minnesota paradox," says Samuel L. Myers Jr., a professor and director of the Roy Wilkins Center of Human Relations and Social Justice at the University of Minnesota.

"One of the worst sins you can commit in public life in Minnesota is to call somebody a racist," Myers says. "In Minnesota, people instinctively say, 'I believe in equality. I believe in fairness.' And they're outraged when they see racial disparities. "

This makes racism in Minnesota particularly difficult to root out because it's not due to individual behaviors, Myers says. The advantages to being white – and the disadvantages to being black – are deeply embedded in the state's economic and political structures.

"How do you understand racial discrimination if there are no racial discriminators?" he says. "Is it possible for things to be so institutionalized, to be so baked in, that good people can perpetuate racial disparities without knowing it?"

The Making of a Controversial Police Department

Leaders in Minneapolis have long acknowledged racial inequalities. In 1948, future Vice President Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, spoke about civil rights at the Democratic convention. In 1975, the City Council put together a civil rights commission to investigate civilian discrimination complaints. In 2018, civil rights lawyer Jacob Frey, who is white, became mayor on a platform of police reform after the high-profile shooting deaths of black residents Jamar Clark in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016 and white resident Justine Ruszcyzk Damond in 2017.

But as virtuous as the talk might be, many believe it hasn't translated into results.

The Minneapolis Police Department, for example, has long been criticized for the way it treats African Americans. On Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced a civil rights investigation into the department's policies, procedures and practices over the past 10 years in hopes of addressing its history of racial discrimination.

"African Americans account for about 20 percent of the city's population, but they are more likely to be pulled over, arrested and have force used against them than white residents," according to an analysis of police data from The New York Times.

The police department, which is led by an African American chief who sued his own department for racially discriminatory practices in 2007, has rendered 44 people unconscious with neck restraints since the beginning of 2015, according to an NBC News analysis. In many U.S. cities, neck restraints are restricted or banned outright.

One obstacle to police reform in Minneapolis is the city's strong police union, which secures contracts that shield bad cops while actively resisting attempts at change, according to Augsburg University history professor Michael J. Lansing.

Prior to Floyd's death, Derek Chauvin, the officer who was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck, faced 18 complaints filed against him. The officer who arrived on the scene with him, Tou Thao, had six complaints against him and was involved in an excessive force lawsuit settled for $25,000. Yet neither man seemed to have experienced any detrimental effects to their career.

Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis's police union, defended the officers in a letter obtained by the Star Tribune and widely circulated on social media.

"What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd," he wrote. "The media will not air this. I've worked with the four defense attorneys that are representing each of our four terminated individuals under criminal investigation, in addition with our labor attorneys to fight for their jobs. They were terminated without due process."

Lansing argues white voters – both Democrats and Republicans – institutionalized police power when they overwhelmingly elected Charles Stenvig as mayor in 1969 after African American youth rebelled in the city's north side due to lack of opportunity and mistreatment by police. Stenvig, who was president of the police union, promised to "take the handcuffs off police" during his campaign and restore law and order.

"Stenvig's use of the mayor's office for much of the 1970s to protect officers from external oversight cemented the police union's powerful presence in city politics," Lansing wrote in The Washington Post.

A History of Redlining

The police department isn't the only Minneapolis system with distinct white-black disparities. African Americans were shut out of many homeownership systems as well.

Beginning in 1910, racial covenants – legal clauses that required exclusive use of the property by white people – pushed black residents into two small sections of the city, laying the groundwork for residential segregation.

"Minneapolis was deliberately constructed as white space or black space, and that reshaped the urban geography," said Kirsten Delegard, a historian and director of Mapping Prejudice, which uncovered 30,000 racial covenants in Hennepin County deeds. According to her research, the intersection where Floyd died – 38th Street and Chicago Avenue – historically acted as a barrier between white and black neighborhoods.

The lines drawn in 1910 left Minneapolis with economic consequences that still linger today, Myers says. Government-sponsored programs such as the Home Owners' Loan Corporation marked black neighborhoods as "hazardous" in red ink on maps, making mortgage loans – and the economic opportunity that came with them – nearly impossible. Federal highways such as the one designed to connect Minneapolis and St. Paul tore through the prospering black communities that did arise, devaluing property and threatening neighborhood identity.

As recently as 2013, discriminatory practices existed. According to a 2015 study of the 50 largest banks in the Twin Cities co-authored by Myers, the University of Minnesota professor, local minorities are disproportionately more likely to have their loan applications rejected.

The parts of the city with the most restrictive racial covenants, outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, remain some of the whitest and richest today. Meanwhile, blacks in Minnesota have some of the lowest homeownership rates in the nation.

"Home ownership is the primary avenue for wealth accumulation for Americans," Delegard says. "If you cut that avenue off for people, that has profound implications – not just for one generation but for the generations that follow."

Policies for racial equity are in the works. In 2019, the City Council – which currently has two transgender members, both of whom are black – adopted a resolution to approve Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan that eliminated citywide single family zoning in an effort to open up some historically white neighborhoods to affordable housing. Beginning in 2021, a contentious new redistricting plan will attempt to better racially balance the city's public schools.

But according to Myers, what's sorely lacking is an honest conversation about race and historical inequities.

"Some people say Minnesota is a reflection of the rest of the country. I say that's a mistake," he says. "Our problem is a Minnesota problem. The nature of the Minnesota paradox lies in the willful ignorance and inability to see racism as a contributing factor associated with racial disparities."