The report ranked cities based on such factors as income, education, homeownership, unemployment, incarceration and mortality rates.
Word that Minnesota made another list, which has occurred often, has become a practice in picturing extremes. At one extreme there’s the North Star fairytale, which describes the state as a bastion of jobs, world-class education, organic markets, venues that host national acts, and downtown public transit that almost looks like an actual public transportation system.
But, while the state basks in such details of domestic bliss, at the other extreme is the creeping sense of a dark underbelly. The cold climate and speciousness of “Minnesota nice” aren’t the state’s only drawbacks for African Americans.
The numbers are damning. White poverty, says the study, is plenty lower in Minnesota (six percent) than the rest of the country (10 percent). Black poverty, though, at 32 percent, is higher in the state. That’s compared to a national rate of 26 percent.
Minnesota’s Black households, at just over $30,000 a year, make less than half of what White households make. White homeownership is at 75 percent, while only 24 percent of Blacks own a home.
The study points to the lasting effects of pre-war housing redlining that physically segregated Blacks and Whites. Resources like education and job training are also allocated along those neighborhood — and thus, racial — lines, said Minneapolis NAACP President Leslie Redmond.
The way out is through bypassing quick political wins and making Black livelihood a priority at the city and state level, said Redmond, adding that reports exposing Black disparity help.
“Black people have been preaching this for decades,” she said.
Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sentiment of the racist potency of the northern moderate White, even relative to the lynching southerner, Redmond said the problem manifests in Minnesota as an indifferent, fake “Minnesota nice.”
“When we tell Minnesotans we don’t have jobs, no one wants to listen,” said Redmond.
The challenge, said Mahmoud El-Kati, Black historian and professor emeritus at Macalester College, is to “harp on the fundamentals.” All of the things plaguing Black life — police brutality, job discrimination, preposterously high rates of incarceration and voter suppression, to name a few — stem from a “doctrine of White supremacy,” said El-Kati.
“There is no other competing ideology in this country,” he said. The idea of the negro didn’t exist before the slave trade, he pointed out. It’s a created idea that is “deep and visceral” and predicates “all American institutions.”
Racism, like anything, has variations, said El-Kati. “Minnesota has its own style.”
El-Kati, who lived in Georgia and Florida before moving to Minnesota in the 1960s, said Midwest redlining has been a pernicious issue for Blacks since it began and is only now making the new rounds. “White people don’t even think about it.”
That sort of frigid, systemic-based racism is the byproduct of the liberal White, said El-Kati. “I’ve seen segregation, overt racism, and covert racism like you find here, largely in liberal communities of Whites who are after values they themselves cannot commit to.”
He said the way through it, to stick to fundamentals, is to take the historical approach, to educate and remind Whites and Blacks that White supremacy started with the country and is the nation’s enduring tradition that seeps into everything.
White people need to “acknowledge White supremacy” and “take some ownership,” added Redmond.
“It’s everyone’s responsibility to pour resources into the Black community,” she said, “specifically the offspring of the slaves who literally, and spiritually, built the nation.”
So, El-Kati argues, energy is best spent beheading the dragonhead, the “American ethos” of White supremacy, instead of appendages like a single police department. “The police are not the source of it,” he said.
Tittle hopes to see such change sparked by the new Black and Brown waves of leadership.
“We’ve got strong leadership at the director levels of all of these critical areas, [from] social work to human services to health to public safety. This next group of commissioners, new leadership, attorney general, Chief Rondo — you’ve got a ton of people who are at the table who are focused and cognizant of the issues and they’re smart enough and they’re in leadership positions,” said Tittle.
“If we can’t deal with this right now with who we’ve got in place, shame on us. The World, the county, the community is depending us to do it right, [and] we’re positioned to do it. We just have to coordinate and communicate.”
To view 24/7 Wall St. report, visit bit.ly/2018WorstCities.
Stephenetta Harmon contributed to this article.
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Since the colonial settler creation of white America, white supremacy has been used to maintain a mythological history of America by denying our wealth is almost solely based on stealing the land of and committing genocide against our indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans brought to America in chains and incarcerated on plantations to provide free labor for white land owners. Since our nation’s founding, the terrorism and mass annihilation of native and black people by horrific acts of white supremacy must be recognized as an American form of fascism.
White supremacy remains an effective way to greatly limit the power of working people by using racism to inhibit multi-racial movements for economic justice. Throughout American history, with some notable important exceptions, white working-class people rejected creating alliances with black and other people of color because they were so indoctrinated with the lies and falsifications of racial superiority. Far too often, this engendered white hatred and violence rather than solidarity with people of color in common struggles to improve the well-being of all who suffered from oppression.
To this day, white supremacy supports structural public and private policies and practices allowing white people who rule this country to unfairly benefit from and maintain their power through a concentration of wealth. This reality exploits and harms all working people, but its consequences for people of color are particularly brutal. And yes, in “nice” Minnesota, what is called discrimination, disparities, or the lack of equity is in fact a long-standing, intentional racial and economic apartheid.
The selective manner that we have no black night clubs for all of our ages, an over abundance of churches and 501c companies (non-profits do not ad to the tax base), The purposeful delineation of black men in elementary education and administration, the glorification of single parent hood has destroyed the power of marriage and increased the prison population for both male and female. The Minnesota nice plays right into divide and conquer approach that has increased with the overt admission that one parent families are the norm (%70) and therefore what you see is what you get. Most planes have more than one engine. If one fails the other one gives you a chance to live, if you only have one engine (single parent hood) you have a %70 percent or higher level of dying. It is more than “The Worst Cities for Black Americans” Quit glorifying single parent hood and embrace civil unity.
Thank you for such a powerful article. I hope that everyone is reading this article. Living in Minnesota is sometimes a struggle. Millenniums don’t understand this it seems. If you don’t agree write a reply!!