Racial Inequalities and Minnesota: A Long Thread (Sorry). The police killing of George Floyd and the protests demanding justice have both brought renewed attention to the deep and durable racial inequalities in Minnesota. I have some thoughts.

The NYT has a good article today on “The Minnesota Paradox” (MP). MN and the Twin Cities have “one of the country’s highest standards of living by many measures [but also] some of the largest racial inequities in the U.S.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/briefing/minneapolis-coronavirus-tara-reader-your-monday-briefing.html

. @DLeonhardt does a good job of recapping leading ideas about MN and racial inequalities. I’m especially happy he quoted my colleagues Samuel Myers and Doug Hartmann! But as someone who studies racial inequalities, politics, and policy, I’d like to make a few observations.

1. The image of a puzzling “paradox” partly rests on the expectation that higher living standards will get shared across racial groups. But when has this been the case in U.S. history? In this sense, the MP idea tells a comforting story about the larger society.

It obscures the long and defining historical relationship between good standards of living for whites in the US and racial projects of dispossession, exclusion, and predation. Chattel slavery, the stealing of Native lands, predatory housing and lending practices, and on and on.

2. Puzzlement over the MP also reflects an assumption that more progressive value commitments (including race-related attitudes) should logically co-exist with more racially just policies and social outcomes. “MN is so progressive… How could this be?”

But decades of studies in political science and sociology have illuminated “principle-policy gaps” in U.S. politics. White Americans routinely say they want racially just outcomes and, in the same surveys, decline to support any serious policy effort to achieve those outcomes.

And then there’s the question of how much people's attitudes actually influence the policies we get. (Powerful, organized groups matter a lot, the rich matter a lot, and so on.) And how much, in the end, do policies influence the racially unequal outcomes we see (more slippage).

Here again, what we see that MN emerges as a “paradox” only once we make some questionable assumptions For many of us who study politics for a living, there is nothing especially newsworthy about the long-term coexistence of progressive attitudes and unjust policies and outcomes

3. The MP is also not much of a paradox from the perspective of what scholars know about race and progressive policy development in the 20th century (see e.g., Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White).

Progressive social policies were frequently racially exclusionary or designed to regulate labor in racist ways. Such interventions--mostly benefiting whites--were stronger in MN than in most states. So, progressive policies actually contributed to MN's racial-disparities

The MP today reflects a two-way relationship. Racial injustices have been central to MN’s progressive policies and the high quality of life for MN whites. Conversely, white-focused progressive policies have fueled racial inequalities and shaped MN's racial politics.

4. The MP story also reflects a troubling feature of the approach to racial injustice that predominates in political, policy, and academic circles today. The story addresses racial justice solely in terms of racial disparities: Who gets what and is it fair?

Two problems here: First, the disparity focus turns white outcomes into normative goals and standards for other groups. Never mind, for example, that white health outcomes in the US are awful (partly b/c racism helps undercut healthcare for everyone: Metzl, Dying of Whiteness)

Second, as Iris Young and others have explained, when we reduce racial injustices to distributions, we often ignore the underlying relations that produce them (oppression, domination, exploitation, expropriation...). From this perspective, there really is no Minnesota Paradox.

MN is 83% white and has a very deep history of oppressive and extractive racial projects. We should not be puzzled that it’s overall quality-of-life indicators look good (based mostly on white outcomes) while its racial disparity indicators look terrible.

5. Another problem with discussions of the MP: Too often they’re based on bad interpretations of racial-disparity numbers. Black-white disparities, for example, can go up or down based on differences in either group's outcomes. But people often ignore variation among whites

So, we see disparity-based reports every year that proclaim MN and the Twin Cities are among the “Worst [Places] for Black Americans.” We never see reports declaring MN the “best place to be White in America” because whites do so much better than black ppl https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/11/05/the-worst-cities-for-black-americans-5/

One reason is that most of the time, white people exist as an invisible category when people think about race. (As when people say, “this black guy was…” but leave out “white” and simply say, “this guy was...”) This tendency leads to a distorted view, particularly in MN's case

6. In many areas of life, MN has close to average black outcomes by US standards but has high scores for whites in comparison to other states. As an example, consider state incarceration rates in 2017. https://www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#detail?state1Option=Minnesota&state2Option=0

Across all US states, the white incarceration rate was 275 and the black rate was 1408 (per 100,000). So the avg black-white ratio was 5.1.

Alabama (AL) has a lower black-white ratio (3.3) than the national avg (5.1), NOT because black people there do better (1417 vs avg=1408) but because white people do worse (425 vs avg=275). Now compare Minnesota:

MN’s has a very high black-white ratio (11 vs avg=5.1), even though its black incarceration rate is below avg (1219 vs avg=1408). MN’s high level of disparity—more than 3 times the size of AL’s—is driven mostly by its low rate for whites (111 vs avg=275, AL=425).

So... We need to be careful about what's hidden in all of this racial-disparity talk. And as many have said before, we need to be skeptical of accounts that treat deep racial inequities as if they were puzzling anomalies or paradoxes.

In the US, they have long been a feature, not a bug--including in places that pride themselves on being progressive.
Many thanks if you made it this far. I guess I had a few thoughts I needed to vent. Now, back to demanding justice for George Floyd and a just society for all.