Minnesota Nice(Brothers Continued)?

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Last October, PatchofEarth.com confirmed what Minnesotans had been saying for years: Minneapolis and St. Paul are the best cities in the nation to live in. The lifestyle website aggregated the results of seven other “Best Cities” lists and found that the Twin Cities frequently took top spots by virtue of their green spaces, culinary scene and job market. High median incomes, low unemployment and poverty rates and affordable housing opportunities are also part of what The Atlantic deemed “The Miracle of Minneapolis.” “No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well,” announced the headline. “What’s its secret?”

The secret is you have to be white.

The Twin Cities, it turns out, are also home to some of the worst racial disparities in the country. In metrics across the board—household income, unemployment rates, poverty rates and education attainment—the gap between white people and people of color is significantly larger in Minnesota than it is most everywhere else. Earlier this year, WalletHub used government data to measure financial inequality among racial groups in each state and found that in 2015, Minnesota ranked dead last overall.

Now, with the death of Philando Castile in a Twin Cities suburb last week, and the shooting death of Jamar Clark last fall—also at the hands of police officers—people are starting to ask: What’s going on in Minnesota? It seems illogical that inequality could thrive in one of the country’s most liberal states, home to past progressive icons like Paul Wellstone and Hubert Humphrey. Not to mention to Garrison Keillor, who during his 42 years on the air as host of “Prairie Home Companion” described the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon as a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."



That self-assessment has consistently ignored the other half of the racial divide. Academics, activists and researchers offer different conjectures as to how Minnesota achieved the ignominious title of “Worst in the Country,” for racial differences in wealth, status and education. Their analyses told a story of misguided attempts at desegregation, ignorance surrounding the state’s racist history and a systemic negligence that prevents communities of color from partaking in the state’s prosperity. And to some degree, Minnesota may be paying for its own success; its consistently thriving economy has drawn thousands of blacks and migrants of color from other states and countries, and traditionally homogeneous Minnesota has been slow to absorb them.

But one thing is certain: Beyond the façade of general prosperity, something is rotten in the state of Minnesota.

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“It was a lot of self-inflicted stupidity” is Myron Orfield’s analysis. Orfield, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, wrote a report in 2015 called “Why Are the Twin Cities So Segregated?” In Orfield’s view, you can’t separate racial inequality from segregation. The same goes for segregation and police brutality. “It’s totally related. All of these incidents across the country are happening in places that are very segregated. In Seattle, in Oregon, in integrated places you’re just not seeing this kind of stuff.”

There was a time in Minnesota when smart government policy was helping eliminate segregation, says Orfield. In 1971, Al Hofstede (a future mayor of Minneapolis) became chairman of the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council and utilized the region’s low-income housing fund to promote integration. Before Hofstede’s tenure, only 10 percent of the region’s subsidized housing units were located in the Twin Cities’ homogenously white suburbs, but by 1979, that number had risen to 40 percent. Under the “Fair Share” policy, Hofstede and the Met Council had strong-armed suburban communities into accepting low-income housing (and by extension, black tenants) by threatening to withhold state funds for roads, sewers and parks if they refused. As Orfield notes in his report, the Council at the time described the suburban reaction to the Fair Share policy as “one of anger, hostility, and frustration.”

Suburban white residents, however, weren’t the only ones resisting the Fair Share policy. According to Orfield, housing agencies and urban developers in St. Paul and Minneapolis were eager for new projects, and therefore lobbied to keep affordable housing within the cities’ limits. They succeeded, and in 1980 the city governments of Minneapolis and St. Paul created the Family Housing Fund, a quasi-public nonprofit that aggressively financed low-income housing units in the inner city. In its first decade, the fund established 10,500 subsidized units in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a disproportionate share of which went to the cities’ most segregated neighborhoods. Today, low-income housing in the Twin Cities is a $300 million a year industry that employs 8,000 people. “We’ve created a business out of low-income housing,” said Orfield. “They’ve grown very big and segregation is their business plan.”

But even if these low-income housing policies reinforce segregation as Orfield says, can they account for police brutality and unusually high race disparities? Susan J. Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who has been researching distressed public housing for 25 years, offers evidence that suggests this isn’t the case. Popkin said that in the 1990s, “Housing authorities across the country were siting their housing in only minority, Latino, and African-American areas.” If anything, said Popkin, the Twin Cities has recently done a better job than most other states on placing low-income housing in suburbs. But generally, Popkin said with confidence that, “There is nothing unique about the Twin Cities in terms of segregation.”

Low-income housing, however, isn’t the only route by which Orfield draws a triangle between segregation, racial disparities and police brutality. When neighborhoods were becoming increasingly segregated in the Twin Cities, says Orfield, so were schools, and reformists in the Twin Cities hoped to solve the problem by adopting an open enrollment system and embracing charter schools. Those reformists argued that the ability to choose would open up schools to students from all backgrounds, regardless of where they lived. But it had the opposite effect, said Orfield. White students began using the program to move from racially integrated schools to schools without racial diversity. Many charter schools in the Twin Cities began to openly describe themselves as “culturally focused”, catering its operations to one race or another. “They never found an integrated model for charter schools,” Orfield said. Today, among charter school students in the Twin Cities, about 90 percent of black students, 80 percent of Hispanic and Asian-American students, and 70 percent of white students attend virtually segregated schools. Orfield called it a modern version of the “separate but equal” idea, one that systemically sustains inequity as well as the kind of discrimination that killed Philando Castile.

The school district in St. Anthony, whose police force employs the officer that shot Castile, has used open enrollment to achieve one of the highest percentages of white students in the Twin Cities. But again, it isn’t just a Minnesota problem. Studies have found that open enrollment and charter school systems across the country encourage racial stratification within and between school districts. Some of the most segregated cities in the U.S., like Milwaukee and Louisville, Kentucky, have open enrollment policies. School districts in Cleveland—the nation's most segregated city—get to choose whether they want to offer open enrollment. The result is that the Cleveland Metropolitan School District—whose students, according to state statistics, are 65 percent black and 100 percent economically disadvantaged— offers open enrollment, but not a single neighboring school district does. In effect, this allows wealthier white students from the suburbs to transfer into the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (which doesn’t happen), and prevents the reverse.

What makes Minnesota uniquely bad, Orfield believes, is how effective it has been in pursuing these open-enrollment policies. “We’re the most efficient segregators in the country,” he lamented. “These neighborhoods we create are very violent and troubled places. But they’re places of containment.”

Not everyone agrees with Orfield’s analysis. “Myron Orfield? Oh no.” Nekima Levy-Pounds, president of Minnesota’s chapter of the NAACP, groaned over the phone. “His perspective is interesting, but it comes from a place of white privilege.” The basic problem Levy-Pounds has with Orfield’s viewpoint is that it focuses too much on segregation as the problem and integration as the solution. “In terms of Myron Orfield’s perspective about integration being the answer, unfortunately we do not see that working for us as a people,” said Levy-Pounds. According to her, integration has been tried before, and it doesn’t work. Those who are affluent simply abandon the community and move elsewhere. “It’s unclear to me why people like Mryon Orfield think that spreading black people throughout the cities are going to solve problems,” Levy-Pounds said. “To me it’s a strange argument.”

In Levy-Pound’s perspective, it is a relative lack of investment, not segregation, that pushes black Minnesotans so far away from achieving equality. “If we had access to the proper resources, African-Americans could have thriving enclaves within the Twin Cities community,” Levy-Pounds said. Anthony Newby, executive director of the Twin Cities-based Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, tended to agree that investment is the answer. “All of these gaps would very clearly improve with more investment from public and private sectors,” Newby said. He used his own neighborhood in North Minneapolis as an example of what happens to a community when investment is absent: “There aren’t jobs. There isn’t a restaurant within two miles of where I live. There is no investment. You can’t buy a house because banks aren’t lending money.” Not only is there no investment, said Newby, wealth is extracted from black communities via finable violations that disproportionately target persons of color. Newby referenced an ongoing investigation in which early data showed that, “in black communities, cars are being towed at a rate of 3, 4, 5, to 1” relative to white communities. An American Civil Liberties Union analysis of policing data from Minneapolis backs up Newby’s claims. In 2014, Black people were 8.7 times more likely than white people to be arrested for low-level offenses, all of which are punishable by fines.

There is little agreement among experts on why Minnesota—despite its progressive reputation—has done so poorly on race. One theory is that Minnesota had been so white for so long it simply didn’t know what to do with the communities of color within its borders. Susan Brower, the Minnesota State demographer, said that until recent decades Minnesota didn’t have a large black community. Approximately 48 percent of African-Americans currently living in Minnesota emigrated from another state.

Another theory is that Minnesotans have forgotten the history of prejudice in their state, and because it’s gone unrecognized, it’s never been challenged. Rose Brewer, a professor of African-American and African studies at the University of Minnesota, remarked that historically, “Minnesota has a surprising connection to slavery.” One city in Minnesota, St. Cloud, was home to a small population of slaves before the Civil War. Slaves weren’t an uncommon site in the Twin Cities either, as Southern slaveholders were welcome to visit and bring their slaves with them. The problem, Brewer believes, is that few Minnesotans know about that history. “The history of racism here is unknown; it hasn’t been exhumed and challenged,” Brewer said. “And unless you root that out, systematically it remains.”

Ignorance of the past and present, however, cannot take all the blame for Minnesota’s problems. Teresa Nelson, the legal director at ACLU of Minnesota, described how Minnesotans, even when they know the facts, are often reluctant to act on them. “There is sort of this phrase that we’re ‘Minnesota Nice,’ that we’re nice to a fault, that we won’t say anything confrontational. So I think as a consequence we have a veneer of being tolerant and not racist, and that makes us unwilling to confront the implicit biases that exist,” Nelson said. She gave an example: “In 2003, the Legislature committed to collect data about traffic stops and the analysis showed significant racial disparities in almost every police department.” (Myron Orfield co-authored that study.) “But after the study was released, no action was taken. Nothing happened to reduce those disparities.”

Of course, the death of Castile gave the traffic stop debate new life when news agencies later reported that Castile had been pulled over 52 times in 14 years. When Nelson heard that Castile’s final and fatal traffic stop had been for a broken taillight, it didn’t surprise her. “Minor traffic violations are a pretty familiar narrative in Minnesota,” she said. Indeed, the previously mentioned ACLU report—which Nelson helped author—found that at 3 a.m., black drivers in Minneapolis are two times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over and arrested for an active driving violation. But at 2 p.m., when in the daylight officers can better identify the driver’s race, black drivers are nine times more likely to be stopped.

Philando Castile’s death served as a public and brutal reminder of something black Minnesotans already know: That the game is rigged. The protests that followed Castile’s death were an acknowledgment of the day-to-day reality behind the statistics of inequity, and so were the protests that followed Jamar Clark’s death last fall. Whether those protests or the incidents that precipitated them will trigger Minnesota to do anything about traffic stop disparities—or any other racial disparity—remains to be seen. But plainly there is trouble in this once-white paradise.




“Minnesota Nice” is supposed to be a source of pride. Perhaps the phrase is unfamiliar to you. Here in Minnesota, “Minnesota Nice” refers to our mild-mannered politeness, courteousness, and goodwill.

We pride ourselves on being different than the East Coast image of the pedestrian yelling to the taxi cab driver who almost hit them (“Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”). At an early age, Minnesotans learn in school that we are certainly different than the South. In our history books, it’s much more convenient to point out the shortcomings of others rather than admitting we have shared some of the same history, values and beliefs. If one were to take a deeper look into Minnesota’s history, one would find it to be not so ‘Minnesota Nice.’

In Mankato, nice Minnesotans hung 38 Dakota men and children. Nice Minnesotans were also instrumental in ensuring that slavery remained for an extra five years. The Dred Scott Decision, which was ruled on in Fort Snelling, determined that a previously enslaved African who escaped should not be free or considered a citizen, but instead property, even in Minnesota. What about the lynchings during the Jim Crow era? Nice Minnesotans in Duluth lynched three young black men in 1920 and celebrated with an outdoor celebration around the bodies [and no one was charged with murder]. (I can feel that right about now, I might lose some readers, so enough with the history lesson). The point I want to make is that perhaps we have not always been “Minnesota Nice”.

“Minnesota Nice” is not, and has not been so nice for everyone. For some, Minnesota Nice is not about cordiality; it’s about “keeping people in their place”. It’s about making sure that you put on a good face in order to maintain social order. It’s about being conflict averse and conflict avoidant. Minnesota Nice means that you display emotional restraint. If you must deal with conflict, you do so in a passive aggressive manner. There is even a book about it called “Surviving and Thriving in Minnesota Nice”.

In one article, a woman from Colorado who moved to the Twin Cities shared her experience:

“no one—not one neighbor—greeted her or said hello, much less invited her into their home (for two years and counting).” Another woman decided, she could no longer work for a Minnesotan because she never got feedback she needed to improve. Another shared an experience where he’d been advised “to tone it down” at work and not be so direct. The article goes on to share “the Minnesotan’s natural aversion to conflict and confrontation…keeps transplants [visitors] wondering what isn’t being said or dealt with. Why aren’t we allowed to talk about certain things?”

I am not surprised by this. In the Midwest, we’re more inclined to wear a safety pin to show that we are in support of diversity, rather than risk confronting racism or homophobia head on when we see it or hear it. We are more comfortable displaying our outrage on social media only when it is socially acceptable. We are more comfortable writing a letter to voice our concerns, rather than stirring the pot in that moment. But does being “Minnesota Nice” change anything for the people experiencing inequity? What does it really say about us as a society? Is that bad or good? Does everyone fit into this cultural norm?

From my point of view, in order to truly practice equity, we need to be willing to say something when we see or hear an injustice, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Moreover, we need to understand why terms like “Minnesota Nice” may not mean the same thing to everyone, and accept the uncomfortable truth that Minnesota Nice may not be so nice after all. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: “An injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”—even here in Minnesota.


It's no secret: Minnesota is a terrific place to live. We have excellent schools, great health care, wonderful arts and amazing entertainment options. There's just one problem. As transplants to our state quickly learn, we also have something called "Minnesota Nice."

To the locals, Minnesota Nice is truly nice. We wave our fellow drivers through four-way stops; we help dig our neighbors out of the snow even when the wind chill is minus 40, and we tend to be exceedingly polite. It's all good, right?

Not so fast. Talk to transplants from other states and countries and you get a different story. We should know; we've talked to a lot of transplants, hosting numerous discussions with newcomers and conducting dozens of interviews during the development of our website, "Surviving and Thriving in Minnesota Nice" and our e-book, "Minnesota Nice? A Transplants Guide to Surviving and Thriving in Minnesota."

Through all this we've gotten an earful about what we've come to call the shadow side of Minnesota Nice.