Minnesota Nice?

Engraving on wall at the National Lynching Museum, Montgomery, Alabama

When my husband and I returned in 1974 to Minnesota, our home state, from St Louis where Bruce had gone to medical school, and I had taught high school English in an inner ring suburb, we couldn't figure out what was wrong. Something was missing. 

Soon we realized what was missing were Black people. We had become used to living and working in a much more integrated environment, and returning to Minnesota, we were struck by how white our state was. 

And remains.

But, I admit, with time I stopped thinking about that fact. I acclimated easily to the culture in which I had been raised--that of white privilege. 

I shudder now to remember that one of the classes I was assigned to teach at Webster Groves High School was called "The Outnumbered." I vaguely remember a series of paperback textbooks with stories and poetry and essays by minority writers. I don't think I had studied or been introduced to any of those writers in any of my college courses, but maybe there had been a Langston Hughes poem thrown in there now and then. And I certainly remember hearing Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have A Dream" speech, but my awareness of anything beyond white male literature was severely limited. 

Many of my students were African American kids whose families had been able to move out of inner city St Louis into a suburb, where they hoped to find better schools and better living conditions. Now I wonder what business did I, a white woman educated at a small liberal arts college with a Scandinavian background, have teaching content so foreign to what I knew about life. I hope I was sensitive. I hope I was open. I hope I listened. I hope I learned as much, if not more, than my students. 

In recent years, all these decades later, I have despaired at the statistics about life for African Americans in Minnesota--the disparities in income, employment, education, health, and housing ETC. ETC, and yet Minnesota always scores high in church attendance, as well as  philanthropic giving. I have wondered, "What is our problem?" Aren't Minnesotans nice people? Do we not deserve our reputation as a progressive state?



The last few days I have seen many different lists of resources to read or watch. Several titles on the lists are books I bought before or after the Civil Rights Tour we went on the fall of 2018. I read some during that time, but it is time to return to that shelf. One of the books recommended, especially for Minnesotans, is A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin and published in 2016. 




I had read some of the essays already, but decided to begin again, reading with the eyes of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd.
I started with an essay by David Mura,  "A Surrealist History of One Asian American In Minnesota," in which he includes several explanations for why racial disparities in Minnesota are so great. 
             * The white people here are very white. To be white
             in Minnesota is different from being white in the South.
             A Southerner, whether a racist or not, knows that black
             people have lived in the South as long as white people;
             their history is intertwined...The issues of race don't 
             exist in Lake Wobegon, and that's the way white
             Minnesotans want to think of their state.
             * The white people here don't like controversy or
             conflict. They like insisting that things are just fine...
             So many white people here subscribe to the following
             tautological wheel: The only time we encounter racial
             tensions is when the subject of race comes up. So the way
             to keep away tensions is to not talk about race. If no one
             is talking about race, then that must mean racism no 
             longer exists.
             * The white people here like to think of themselves as
             nice people. ...The southern white author understands 
             that evil exists and evil has existed in their world. They 
             understand not only that white Southerners are capable 
             of being not nice but that they have been capable of
             great cruelties. But the Duluth lynching? That's an
             anomaly here. It's not really reflective of who Minnesota
             was, much less does it have any connection to what
             Minnesota is... pp. 53-54.

Ouch! 

I remember when dinner table conversation turned political or even if anyone disagreed on a given topic, my mother would say, "Now we are just going to have happy talk." 

Apparently, that's Minnesota. 

We have a lot to overcome, and I hope we will help each other do that. 

An Invitation
What beliefs about yourself get in the way of creating positive social change? I would love to know. 

NOTE: I also recommend a more recent book by David Mura, A Stranger's Journey, Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing.