Ramstad: ‘X-factor’ in unraveling Minnesota Paradox is building friendships across racial lines

On Lions Roar weekend in Osseo six years ago, someone put a trash can in front of the modeling school Denishia Moore was about to open.

Moore didn’t yet have a sign on the business, but she needed to get in the door. A woman from the Lions Club moved the trash can away and, after a few minutes of chatting, invited Moore to join the Lions, the only service organization in the 2,500-person suburb northwest of Minneapolis.

That’s how Moore became the first, and still only, woman of color in the Osseo Lions Club.

“I love my little town,” Moore told me last weekend as we watched the 48th running of the Lions Roar parade, the main event in the two-day festival. Her 11-year-old daughter marched with the local taekwondo school. Later that afternoon, the two of them volunteered in the children’s area of the festival.

“Participation matters to me,” she said. Moore grew up in Tulsa, Okla., as the daughter of Black and Cherokee parents. She spent her late teens and early 20s as model in New York and is known in the Twin Cities fashion community as MsDenishia.

A big part of Minnesota’s economic success after World War II sprang from connections that people built across occupations and politics. Today, civic bonding, friendship and connection is known as “social capital,” and researchers say Minnesota is still a place that has a lot of it.

Which makes the Minnesota Paradox — the difference between the state’s overall prosperity and the extremely unequal economic outcomes by race it has produced — all the more perplexing. The existence of the paradox signifies something wrong about the sociability of people known for being open-minded, generous and friendly.

The racism associated with practices like redlining, or racial covenants in housing deeds, was dealt with long ago in Minnesota. However, racist behavior and words still exist. What gets less attention publicly, I believe, is something that happens more frequently: expressions of division that spring from trying to avoid potential difficulty, discomfort or pain about matters involving race.

This avoidance is a mistake when the state’s population and economic growth rests more than ever on the prosperity of Minnesotans of color. It’s better to dive in, as the woman did who moved the trash can away from Moore’s modeling school.

“You can be part of a community and be on the outside looking in, right? Now, I’m inside. I’m involved. I’m doing my part for our community,” Moore said. “That’s amazing. It makes me feel great. It makes me a better person.”

John Phelan, the economist at the right-leaning Center of the American Experiment, based in Golden Valley, earlier this year produced a comprehensive report suggesting social capital may be the “X-factor” in economic well-being. He found that, while Minnesota and nearby states pursue different economic policies, their labor conditions are roughly the same and they all possess substantial levels of social capital.

Community cohesion and support for institutions is relatively high in Minnesota and its neighbors compared to other states, he notes, citing research led by Republicans in Congress called the Social Capital Project. Births to unmarried women are low and the percentage of married couples is high in Minnesota, leading Phelan to write, “However progressively Minnesotans might vote, they live conservatively.”

The same research shows Minnesotans are better with “bonding social capital,” meaning we have fairly high numbers of friendships, than with “bridging social capital,” meaning we struggle to make connections that go beyond a shared sense of identity. Or as Phelan wrote, we “like our neighbors in the abstract.”

This dichotomy has a negative impact on all Minnesotans of color, most especially Black Minnesotans. Decades of legalized injustice robbed them of the opportunity and time to build wealth. The legacy of that oppression is felt today not just in the economic data that shows gaps between Black and white Minnesotans but in the social capital of the Black community.

In conversations with Black business leaders in recent months, I heard many descriptions about how this has played out. One that stood out came from someone who is trying to create more connections within the Black community, Jhaelynn Elam, who earlier this year started the B Suite, a co-working and networking space for Black people in downtown Minneapolis.

Before opening the business, she gathered focus groups to ask Black professionals what’s missing in the Twin Cities. She heard from some that they travel a lot to other big cities, like Houston and Atlanta, where Black people are more deeply part of the community.

“They have what we’re looking for,” Elam said. “These are places where you can find thriving communities of Black professionals. These are the cities that don’t have to work hard to sell us to come there and move there. And so you find, even people who relocate here, make the time to travel to those places to just immerse themselves in it even just for a weekend.”

Elam moved to Minnesota in 2021 from Michigan for a job at General Mills. Within the company, she hosted brunches for colleagues of color, which grew to bigger gatherings beyond the company. After going through a fellowship program from the Minneapolis-based African American Leadership Forum, Elam said she felt “called to create some solutions” and decided to open the B Suite.

She perceives the need for Black entrepreneurs to have a space to create that “bonding” type of social capital. The efforts to create “bridging” social capital fall on white people, of course, the dominant culture.

After Moore joined the Osseo Lions, the club began to help her with charitable fashion shows and even sponsored some of the students at her modeling school. “Not only did they recruit me, they help support my business and my charity awareness, which, not only, but primarily serves minorities,” Moore said.

In the food tent at the Lions Roar festival last weekend, Moore introduced me to some of the other Lions Club members who recalled the trash can episode when they met her. One of them, Ed Columbus, said the club “is how we all help each other.”

This is one in an occasional series on breaking Minnesota’s patterns on race and money.