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Minnesota Is One of the Best Places to Live in America. Unless You’re Black.

Rogue Valley

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4/16/21
MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota is one of the best places to live in America. It has good schools, excellent housing and low unemployment. It regularly appears near the top of indexes for livability. But all of that matters much less if you’re Black. Across a whole host of measures — unemployment rates, wages, incarceration rates, test scores, homeownership rates — the gaps between white Minnesotans and Black Minnesotans are among the widest in the country. Take automobile ownership, for example. Nationally, 9 percent of households have no vehicle. The rate is 7 percent in Minnesota. Among African-American households nationally, 19 percent have no vehicle. Among African-American households in Minnesota, the rate is an astonishingly high 24 percent. So while Minnesota is a great place to live for white people, for Black people, it’s just like everywhere else — and sometimes worse. This is what I’ve termed the Minnesota Paradox: huge racial disparities masked by aggregate outcomes. For many Americans, this does not amount to racism because the individual decisions are not motivated by racial animus. What make Minnesota different from many other places in the country, though, are its explicit policies intended to create equity and equality. The state boasts a unique form of property tax equalization designed to equalize funding for local public schools.

But the structure of many of Minnesota’s policies and institutions — like police policies, housing policies, even regulations about driver’s licenses and renewal of tags — has a disproportionately adverse impact on nonwhites. These effects are not overcome by Minnesota’s progressivism. Unfortunately, the small number of Black people who lived in Minnesota in the early 20th century and through the postwar era faced brutal redlining practices from real estate brokers and lenders and racial covenants limiting where they could purchase homes. Redlining has left a lasting impact of racial disparities in wealth. In the 1990s, Minnesota’s child welfare and public housing policies simultaneously served as magnets for the dispossessed of other Midwestern cities like Detroit, Chicago and Gary, Ind., while reinforcing white welfare and housing authorities’ negative views toward the new migrants. The public employees who enforced these policies were not racist, or at least they do not view themselves as racist. After all, this is Minnesota: the liberal and progressive state that opens its doors to the poor and downtrodden. Instead, they were creating and perpetuating racial discrimination that baked disparities into the structure of life in Minnesota. Some of these structurally racist rules have been revised or abandoned — a good and necessary step — but their effects linger on.


Better than a lot of states. But Minnesota still has a high degree of systemic racism baked into its society.
 
Maybe out in the country?

A $500 Million Bill Comes Due in Minneapolis


Preliminary estimates of the property damage caused by the riots, lootings, and arson in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota come to about $500 million across more than 500 businesses, according to the Star Tribune. This potential price tag represents a dramatic increase from an earlier cost of $55 million cited by officials for Minneapolis.


The half-billion figure, if it holds up, would make the Twin Cities riots the second most destructive civil disturbance in the country’s history. The 1992 Los Angeles riots cost the insurance industry alone $775 million at the time, or around $1.4 billion adjusted for inflation. About half of small businesses in the U.S. aren’t insured.
 




Better than a lot of states. But Minnesota still has a high degree of systemic racism baked into its society.

In the City OF Minneapolis, most of the racial tension comes from the corrupt Minneapolis Police, particularly the Third Precinct, which has always been a playground for bad rogue cops.

Outside of the City of Minneapolis, like in the outer suburbs and up North, you see a good deal more old school racial discrimination and more of the kind of "polite" style Northern racism, and "polite" is in quotes for a reason. Cities like Duluth, for example, only have about two percent black residency, it is 87% white.
The suburbs of the Twin Cities is where you find the kind of nonsense normally seen down in the Old South.

I'm speaking as someone who lived in the very neighborhood in South Minneapolis where George Floyd was murdered.
 
Minnesotans have long been known as racist and anti-black. It comes from their Norwegian ancestry and white power Viking roots. I just wonder why it took the woke community so long to come to this conclusion.
 
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