Justin Ellis Brings The Cruelty of Nice Folks to Minneapolis on June 22, Examining the City's Hidden History of White Supremacy
MSR writer Charles Hallman previews a free June 22 event at Magers and Quinn where Minneapolis native and journalist Justin Ellis will discuss his new book The Cruelty of Nice Folks with local activist Lissa Jones, examining how Minneapolis has hidden its history of racial inequality behind the veneer of Minnesota Nice.
Minneapolis native and journalist Justin Ellis and local activist and speaker Lissa Jones will discuss Ellis’ new book, “The Cruelty of Nice Folks,” at Magers and Quinn Booksellers, 3038 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, on Monday, June 22, at 7 p.m. The in-store event, free to the public, is part of the Black Market Reads podcast, a project of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature.
Ellis, who now lives in New York City, is co-owner of Defector, a worker-owned media company. He has published work in several national publications, appeared on ESPN, and has TV credits with Netflix and HBO.
Jones is a regular on Black radio and a sought-after speaker, interviewer, facilitator and moderator.
Ellis’ book is an extension of an essay he penned in 2020 for The Atlantic on George Floyd’s murder. He uniquely examines Minneapolis, historically known as a liberal ally in the fight for civil rights, while telling his family’s story of surviving “Minnesota Nice” and the city’s seldom-discussed history of white supremacy. Using archival material from many sources, including the Black Press, Ellis reveals how racism has long shaped the city’s housing, education and political policies. Inequities that existed long before Floyd’s death.
Asked why he chose the title, Ellis explained during a recent MSR phone interview: “The initial idea for this book was the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that kind of exposed the conflicting ideas of what it is actually like in Minneapolis and what it is like in Minnesota. What is the reality for Black people there versus the broader white community? I think that instead of directly talking about what is ‘Minnesota Nice,’ and the levels of passive aggressiveness, I think we wanted something that was a little bit deeper that we could talk about. So I think that’s why we settled on ‘The Cruelty of Nice Folks,’ because ultimately the image of Minnesota is one where its people are looking out for each other, and it’s really this veneer for so many years that masks the ugly truth and some of the persistent inequality.”
Ellis said he grew up in Minneapolis not fully understanding its history: that most Black families were systemically cut out of prosperous neighborhoods. His research proved that Minneapolis has rarely been forced to confront its racial history, hiding under its Minnesota Nice cloak.
Six years after Floyd’s death sparked global protests and a period of racial reckoning, Ellis says the city is still wrestling with its true identity.
“One of the things that was just incredibly shocking is the ways in which the history of Black life is just not really well documented,” he said. “You find it in the families that were able to save some papers or have had books written about them. You find a lot of it in the old archives of the Minneapolis Spokesman. Cecil Newman, the paper’s late founder, was so important because he took the lives of Black folks seriously, and it is one of the few places where you can actually find how many of our families were living for decades.”
In his epilogue, Ellis poses a pointed question: “What normal will you seek to rebuild?”
“I think what was interesting is looking at the period after George Floyd. All the promises for the ways that the city needed to change, how America needed to change. None of those things even came to pass, none of those things really happened,” he said. “There’s a very real urgency there. All the structural inequalities still exist. Does Minneapolis want to return to what life was like before the ICE raids, or do they want to try to imagine a different future?”
“One of the biggest takeaways I would hope is just that this is the book I wanted to try to draw a picture of ‘what the lives of our families were like across generations’ for many of us who lived here,” Ellis said, looking ahead to his discussion with Jones on June 22. “This myth of Minneapolis was manufactured in some way… that this is not necessarily a perfect city. To me, this book was trying to shed light on reality.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.
Copyright © Charles Hallman