Racial Diversity and Racial Disparities in Minnesota

Hubert H. Humphrey and Martin Luther King in 1964

Racial Diversity and Racism in Minnesota "Then": A Personal Perspective

When I was born, African-Americans constituted only about 13,000 of the 3.05 million residents of Minnesota, less than one-half of one percent of the state population. In south central Minnesota, where I grew up, African-Americans were even rarer. In my hometown of Mankato, with a population at the time of 20,000, I was told—and assume it to be true—that there was only one fulltime black resident of the city, a well-loved veterinarian. As unimaginable as it might seem to most Americans today, I distinctly remember the day, at age 7, as I walked through the Minneapolis airport with my family to board a flight for a trip to see relatives "Back East," when I saw my first African-American, a friendly-looking man who was shining the shoes of someone who I assumed to be a traveling businessman.  I can still close my eyes and see him there by his stand to our left as we walked through the concourse.  I grabbed my mother and started to say, "There's a . . ."--and my mother quickly responding: "Shushhh."

Perhaps because the African-American population was so small, and could hardly be seen as “a threat” by anyone in that place and time, I do not remember ever experiencing the personal racism so common in other parts of the country. None of my friends told racial jokes; I never personally witnessed an African-American subjected to racism. I do remember a babysitter reading what, even then, was considered a racist children’s book (“Little Black Sambo”), and I watched the television show, “Spanky and Our Gang,” which engaged in what seems obviously today to be racial stereotyping, but that’s the closest I got to racism.

Of the current events of my boyhood, two stick out most clearly in my mind: the assassination of President Kennedy and the killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi (the killings on which the movie “Mississippi Burning” was loosely based). To me, a boy of twelve, the notion that three young men, two white and one black, could me murdered simply because they were working for equal rights seemed almost utterly unimaginable. Such was my innocence. I followed the story of the Mississippi killings as closely as I’d ever followed a news story. I read everything I could about it in the Mankato Free Press and began watching Walter Cronkite's evening news for updates. (Decades later, the “Mississippi Burning Trial” became one of the first trials I included on my “Famous Trials” site.)

By far the most important political figure in the Minnesota of my youth was Hubert Humphrey, the Senate’s leading champion of civil rights, and HHH succeeded, it seems, in making me understand at early age the absolute moral rightness of equal rights. Through my high school years, I was proud of Minnesota's reputation as a place where civil rights were honored and promoted.  I'm sure the state had racists--every state does--but they played no leadership roles that I was aware of.

How much has changed in Minnesota in the slightly over half-century since. Racial discrimination and racial inequality were big issues in Minnesota in the years leading up to Floyd’s death. Now, and likely for some time, they are likely to be the biggest issue.

Racial Disparities in Minnesota Now

Minnesota ranks at our near the top of states ranked by metrics such as quality of life, health and fitness, life expectancy, and literacy.  It is a prosperous, well-educated state, but for African-Americans, not so much. While the median household income for whites in the state is about $70,000, for blacks it is only $40,000. The family poverty rate for white Minnesotans is about 5%, for African-Americans, it is over 25%. Well over 70% of white Minnesotans live in a home they own, but less than a quarter of blacks can say the same thing. The unemployment rate for whites in the state (before the pandemic) was 3%, for blacks it was 8%. White students in Minnesota schools do extremely well, sometimes tops in the nation, on standardized tests. However, the gaps between the test scores between white and black students ranks second highest among the 41 states where comparisons have been made. Minnesota is a well-off state, but the differences in the living situations of African-Americans and whites are among the greatest in the nation.

Minnesota has seen an explosive growth in its non-white population in the last three decades. Between the censuses of 1990 and 2010, the population of people of color in the state tripled, from less than 6% to nearly 17%. In 2020, the non-white population of Minnesota is estimated to be over 20%.

In the Minnesota of my boyhood, racial injustice could seem like an abstraction. Today, it is very real. People in the state keenly are aware of the suffering of people of color and understand how it diminishes the quality of life in the state as a whole.

State political leaders have for some time now hoped to see a narrowing of the many racial gaps Minnesotans have been hearing about for years — income, educational attainment, homeownership, life expectancy. But they remain.

Why are the gaps so stubborn? Among the reasons cited is the fact that a substantial amount of the growth in people of color in Minnesota has come through immigration, especially Hmong people and Somalis Assimilation has proven more difficult, for a variety of reasons, for those populations than for many other immigrant groups. It is also true that some numbers of new residents of the state in the past few decades have come to the state for the generous welfare and other social benefits the state offers, at least compared to the states they’ve left. Many of these new residents lacked the skill sets making success readily possible in the new economy. Some, such as New York Times writer Thomas Friedman (himself a native Minnesotan) have pointed to the generally high “social capital” and trust the state has historically enjoyed and which has contributed to its success, but which is likely to be less a part of the experience of the newcomers, usually people of color, from other parts of the country. Finally, the nature of the state’s economy—with its strong reliance on healthcare (Mayo Clinic and United Healthcare, e.g.), agriculture, the medical device industry, and retail (the Twin Cities are home to Target and Best Buy), does not produce the sorts of middle-class entry jobs that are more common in states with large manufacturing bases. Of course, these are explanations for disparities; not justifications for them.

A different sort of explanation for the success gap, sometimes called “the Minnesota paradox,” was offered in a 2018 book co-authored by Prof. Samuel L. Myers Jr., of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Myers attributes the gap to special benefits enjoyed over time by the white population, especially benefits in securing bank loans, which produced substantially higher wealth for them than blacks. “How is it possible for poorly educated whites to have homeownership that is higher than middle income, well-educated blacks?” Myers asked. He says the reason for these disparities have roots that go back decades.

Whatever the reasons for the gap, the more important questions are what to do about it and when can change be expected? State demographer Susan Brower said of Minnesota’s persistent achievement gap: “We have had many people working on these issues for a long time. But the regular processes of change haven’t been effective enough, or quick enough. Even when people at the top are sympathetic and paying attention, we’re still not seeing the movement people would like to see. That’s what a lot of people are reacting to now.”

Brower’s predecessor as state demographer, Tom Gillaspy, suggests that disparate responses to the state’s growing non-white population have widened the state’s rural/urban and red/ blue partisan divides. “Some attitudes become more entrenched in the face of changes like this,” Gillaspy said. Gillaspy notes that in Minnesota, the population of millennials surpassed the population of baby boomers by 2014, sooner than the nation generally. “A lot of boomers are thinking, can we make this any better?” and seem perplexed that their efforts have done so little to reduced racism. On the other hand, according to Gillaspy, “Millennials have certainly become a force, some fairly strident.” he said.

Quoted in an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Brower says she expects the state is now undergoing major political change: “The movement of the millennial generation into adult roles is foundational to understanding this as a moment that’s ripe for some social movement to take place. It’s the foundation that helps today’s movements find fertile ground.”

A Washington Post story on Minnesota’s racial disparities suggests that Minnesotans, perhaps more than most Americans, really want to believe they are not racist and therefore fail to see the racism that still exists here. The Post story quotes Doug Hartmann, chair of the sociology department at the U. Hartman says, “Basically we so want to believe we are not racist, we are blind to color. We don’t even see the way that race still matters.”