On July 7, 2016, Mark Dayton made a statement that no modern governor of Minnesota had uttered before, helping shift public opinion on the still-nascent Black Lives Matter movement. Dayton said that a black man who was killed the previous night by police would be alive if he were white. An officer in a suburb of St. Paul had shot Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old school-cafeteria worker, killing him during a routine traffic stop. “Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver and the passengers, were white? I don’t think it would have,” Dayton said at a press conference. “I’m forced to confront, and I think all of us in Minnesota are forced to confront, that this kind of racism exists and that it’s incumbent upon all of us to vow that we’re going to do whatever we can to see that it doesn’t happen, doesn’t continue to happen.”
The governor’s statement gave hope to black political leaders and local activists that their decades-old experiences of systemic racism had finally penetrated the state’s largely white upper echelons of political power. Castile’s death prompted the first widespread calls in modern Minnesotan history for the state legislature to pass wide-ranging policing reforms. The state’s handful of black lawmakers—a total of three in the State House and Senate at the time—began leading conversations in the legislature about the need for significant changes in local law enforcement. Four months later, in November, 2016, the effort foundered after Republicans, bolstered by Donald Trump’s candidacy for President, reclaimed control of the State Senate and expanded their House majority. Downplaying the need to reform police, Republicans introduced legislation to crack down on Black Lives Matter demonstrations, including allowing cities to sue protesters to recover the costs of policing their demonstrations.
Four years later, the state finds itself in a painful and familiar place. On Memorial Day, the police killing of George Floyd, like that of Castile, was captured on video and posted online. Floyd’s murder touched off the largest mass demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism in the United States in a quarter century. More than ten thousand demonstrators have been arrested in dozens of cities.
The turmoil in Minneapolis challenges the myth of Minnesotan exceptionalism, the widely held belief that the state’s innovative spirit and progressive policies have created a shining example for how other states should run. The Twin Cities region has long been described as a paradox. Minneapolis-St. Paul and its surrounding suburbs are home to more than 3.4 million people and one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the country, with good schools, verdant parks, well-paying jobs, and a low cost of living that all, theoretically, add up to a high quality of life. But academics, political leaders of color, and activists say this has primarily been true only for white Minnesotans. The state remains one of the least diverse in the country, and the Twin Cities metropolitan area has grown more racially segregated since the turn of the twenty-first century, despite a history of welcoming refugees and immigrants from East Africa, Vietnam, and Central America.
Off and on for the last decade, I’ve worked as a journalist in Minnesota, first as an intern for the St. Paul Pioneer Press during summer of 2010, before my senior year in college. For two months, I lived on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus, blocks from Cedar-Riverside, a largely Somali-American neighborhood. After growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada, one of the country’s most diverse cities, and graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2011, I reported for three years in Los Angeles, mostly covering business and the California economy for the Los Angeles Times. Eager to return to Minnesota, I took a job with the Star Tribune to cover state politics and government in 2014. The wide range of cultures represented here, as well as the beautiful summers, attracted me. I was sold on the promise of Minnesota.
But the longer I’ve lived here the more glaring the state’s racial blind spots have become, even among the most progressive-minded white Minnesotans. As many transplants learn, Minnesotans are tough to befriend. If you’re a person of color who grew up in less white environments, you might suddenly notice your race affecting how others treat you. During a press conference in 2015, a former State Senate majority leader responded to a question I posed by asking, “How long have you been here?” Capitol dwellers told me that I didn’t “look like a political reporter.” Once, a person seemingly lost in the complex mistook me for a janitor as I left work late one night and walked to my car. The moment caught me so off guard I barely had a chance to fully register what about my appearance—other than my skin tone—would have prompted it. The regularity of moments like these, some obviously racially rooted, others less so, made the Capitol’s gilded and marbled corridors feel like an uninviting and intimidating place to be a person of color.
Nonetheless, I endeavored to shed light on the experience of nonwhite Minnesotans through political reporting. I explored the various ways in which people of color, particularly black Minnesotans, have been historically excluded from the levers of power in state politics and government. Candidates of color, even those running as Democrats, face institutional hurdles from a political structure that favors white incumbents, for reasons ranging from lack of access to donors to the threat of political ostracism if they run against Party-endorsed candidates.
The demographic changes that have already occurred in other parts of the country arrived only recently in Minnesota. In 1990, Minnesota was ninety-four per cent white; three decades later, whites make up eighty-four per cent of the population. Even as people of color have arrived, they have failed to acquire political power commensurate to their numbers. Last year, the Minnesota legislature swore in its most diverse body ever. Yet lawmakers of color hold only twenty-one of the two hundred and one seats. All together, they could fit in a high-school classroom. Ninety per cent of the members of the legislature remain white. In recent years, the relationship between communities of color and the state’s largely white media have deteriorated, too. On January 22nd, black activists on a citizen advisory committee tried to bar journalists from covering a public meeting, citing the historical representation of their communities in the state’s media. The episode subsided after city leaders said that they would urge members of the advisory body that they should follow the requirements of the state’s public-meeting law.
Since the nineteen-sixties, black residents have been demanding a wide-ranging overhaul of law-enforcement agencies, including community policing, civilian oversight, improved training, and stronger accountability. Instead, policies enacted by G.O.P. governors and lawmakers have exacerbated mistrust of the police. In 1999, Rich Stanek, a former Minneapolis police captain and State House Republican, led a successful effort to revoke a law requiring Minneapolis and St. Paul police officers to live in the cities in which they worked. Nearly twenty years later, in 2015, about twenty-two per cent of St. Paul police officers called the capital city home, and, this year, roughly seven per cent of Minneapolis officers live in the city; many commute from largely white suburbs, such as Anoka, and exurbs, like the neighboring city of Hudson, Wisconsin.
When Democrats last took full control of the Minnesota government, in 2013, they enacted a series of progressive milestones, including the legalization of same-sex marriage, the passage of a tax on the wealthy, and the boosting of the minimum wage with future increases tied to inflation. Still, ambitious reforms championed by legislators of colors, ranging from policing to education, struggled to gain broad support—no major police reforms were enacted. Joe Soss, a University of Minnesota professor who studies poverty and racial inequality, said that progressive policies championed by Democrats failed to address bias. “What you had were generous policies that helped white people buy homes, help protect white people, invest in white communities, and lifted them up higher than people who were left out,” Soss told me. “When it comes to power in the state and in the Twin Cities, people of color have continued to be very marginalized.”
Two police shootings created public pressure for reforms. In 2015, a Minneapolis police officer killed Jamar Clark, a twenty-four-year-old African-American who worked for a local trucking firm. An officer claimed that Clark tried to take his weapon and, in the ensuing struggle, another officer shot Clark. Some witnesses said Clark was handcuffed at the time. Weeks of protests ensued. The Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, ruled the shooting justified and declined to press charges. In 2016, Philando Castile informed the officer who pulled him over, Jeronimo Yanez, that he had a handgun, which he had a license to carry, but Yanez panicked and fired seven shots at Castile. Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was in the car with her four-year-old daughter, broadcast his final moments on Facebook Live. Reynolds said Castile was reaching for his wallet, not his gun. Yanez was later acquitted of all charges by a jury.
In 2016, the Minneapolis Police Department issued a new policy that officers had a duty to intervene when they saw a colleague use excessive force. The department also rewrote its use of force policy to prioritize the “sanctity of life,” and made changes in its hiring practices. The former Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges appointed Medaria Arradondo as the force’s first black police chief, in 2017. Arradondo enacted some reforms, but partisan division in the legislature blocked the passage of significant reforms statewide.
After decades of being protected by the political power of police unions, the Minneapolis P.D. faces growing public support for drastic change, including a complete dismantling of the department. In a series of speeches on Sunday, nine of the thirteen members of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to start the process of “dismantling” the city’s police force, without offering specifics. The pronouncement came after some council members said that police retaliated against them after criticizing the force. In a Twitter thread, the Third Ward councilman Steve Fletcher accused Minneapolis police of intentionally slowing 911 response times in his ward after he proposed cutting their budget.
Republicans continue to be skeptical of calls for wide-ranging reform. This January, four months before Floyd’s killing, Senate Republican leaders criticized an uptick in homicides in downtown Minneapolis and in crime on its light-rail trains, saying that those trends had caused residents to fear the Twin Cities. Senate Republicans proposed hiring more police officers, despite calls from black activists to instead focus efforts on reforming the departments. After Floyd’s killing, Senate Republicans dismissed claims of systemic racism, ahead of a potential special legislative session this month, in which police reform will be on the table. “It’s not a difficult question to say that there’s racism,” the G.O.P. Senate majority leader Paul Gazelka, said four days after Floyd’s killing. “To say it is everywhere, if that’s how you’re defining systemic, I’m not so sure I would go that far.”
Public attitudes about police in the state compound the challenge. A majority of Minnesotans back police in the state, according to public-opinion surveys, but strikingly different views exist along racial lines. A Star Tribune poll, in 2016, found that six in ten black Minnesotans believed police were more likely to use deadly force against a black person than someone who is white, nearly twice the rate of whites. The same poll found that a majority of Minnesotans also viewed the Black Lives Matter movement unfavorably. “You have this idea that Minnesota is a great place, but it’s only a really great place for white people,” Lena K. Gardner, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis at the time, told me in 2016. “And then you have this Minnesota Nice which says we can’t really have open, honest, and frank discussions because they’re awkward, they’re uncomfortable, and conflict is a bad thing.”
Floyd’s death in broad daylight, on a busy Minneapolis street with multiple witnesses pleading with officers to let him breathe, reopened wounds left from earlier shootings. It’s possible Floyd’s death could prove different. People of color have recently begun to acquire more political power in the state. Those public officials include the Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a black Detroit native and longtime activist in Minneapolis. As a congressman from Minneapolis, from 2007 through 2019, Ellison played a key role in helping navigate the response of the state’s political establishment to Jamar Clark’s murder, in 2015. In the hours after Clark’s death, Ellison united different factions of the black community, and his stature in the mayor’s office helped him broker a sit-down between Governor Mark Dayton and the family of the victim, helping to ease tensions.
Five years later, Ellison now helms the prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. On Wednesday, Ellison elevated charges to second-degree murder for Chauvin, and charged three other officers involved—Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane—with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. The rare prosecution marks a victory for black activists who have long mistrusted the Hennepin County Attorney, Mike Freeman, who has repeatedly declined to prosecute officers who used lethal force. Five years ago, Ellison’s appointment to the role would have been unheard of.
Governor Tim Walz is also the second Democratic governor in the last five years to surround himself with a diverse administration, building on the progress black leaders made with his predecessor, Dayton. In recent days, Walz and his administration have acknowledged and decried systemic racism. In an unprecedented action, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights last week announced a civil-rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department, the largest law-enforcement agency in the state, to determine if it has used “systemic discriminatory practices towards people of color.” On June 8th, the agency finalized a court-approved agreement with the city of Minneapolis banning chokeholds by police.
Walz, a Nebraska native and former congressman who represented Minnesota’s rural First Congressional District, chose the former Minnesota House member Peggy Flanagan to be his lieutenant governor, making her the highest ranking Native American woman holding executive office. “What is clear is that tragedies like the one that happened to George Floyd do not emerge from a few isolated bad actors, but from patterns of misconduct,” Flanagan said.
Major changes this year seem unlikely. Republicans retain control of the State Senate, and Senators have said that the prospects of major reforms being enacted during a special legislative session this summer are small. As in 2016, the passage of significant reforms will depend on the outcome of the 2020 election. If Democrats can hold the Minnesota House and win back the Senate this fall, next year’s legislature could enact laws and programs squarely centered on the racism that people of color in Minnesota have long pointed out. In a matter of days, Floyd’s death has forced a societal reckoning on racism that is shaking many progressive’s views of their liberal home state. Activists say that the country—and Minnesota—should heed voices previously shut out of the political power structure, even if it means finally confronting a difficult reality: that for black Minnesotans, and other people of color, the state was never the utopia it has been billed as.
I want to believe we are on the precipice of systemic change, but my decade of reporting in the capitol makes me pessimistic. Minnesota’s work starts with, once and for all, giving credence to the marginalized voices whose expertise, ideas, and truths have been excluded from its largely white institutions. Without that recognition, we may find ourselves here again, lamenting the glaring racial disparities that white Minnesotan political leaders have spent years decrying, without reflecting on the roles that they, too, have played in perpetuating them.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
