Transformation, not tinkering, needed for real equality

For years Minnesota has been thought to be one of the most livable locales in the U.S. That is true for European descendants living and working in the land of 10,000 lakes. There is another, harsher reality for African Americans.

A June 29, 2021, article in U.S. News and World Report by Joseph Williams calls this phenomenon the Minnesota paradox. In the words of Prof. Samuel Myers at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School: "Minnesota's reputation as a great place to live has overshadowed the struggles of Black and other people of color in the state."

The typical Black family in Minneapolis earns less than half as much as the typical white family. And homeownership among Black people is one-third the rate of white families.

Many Minnesota corporations espouse a socially conscious agenda. A significant number of forward-thinking philanthropies articulate the need to address disparities. These corporations and philanthropies, as well as federal, state and local governments, have spent many millions of dollars to close these gaps. Nonetheless, disparities stubbornly continue; gaps widen.

Much of the problem is that many groups tasked with fixing Minnesota's disparities do not embrace a transformational vision of civil rights. They chip at the edges of inequality but accept the fundamental geographic racial divisions in our neighborhoods. They see a region in which many forces resist the integration of Black residents into white suburbs and schools, and turn away from this foundational injustice.

In a divided society such as ours, the empowered majority, consciously or inadvertently, ends up exploiting the less well-connected and resourced minority. That is what has happened in Minnesota, where many services designed to lift up Black communities have profiteered off those communities instead.

Consider the affordable housing industry. Affordable housing is often built in the wrong places by the wrong people. Federal, state and local government invests tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in housing, but that money goes to developers who are much wealthier and much whiter than most communities in need. The housing that is built goes in places that reinforce historic racial segregation, closing the door to suburban opportunities for thousands of Black Minnesotans.

One 2016 study shows that while 55% of Twin Cities housing units are in very white neighborhoods, barely a fifth of the region's subsidized housing is in these places.

Although this system is bad for the people it is intended to benefit, it is often profitable for the people running it. Monumental projects like the Pillsbury A-Mill in Minneapolis, Schmidt Brewery in St. Paul and the planned development of Fort Snelling can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The subsidized housing industry supports thousands of jobs, but those jobs are filled by white workers.

One paper, relying on industry surveys, found that 78% of employees and 85% of managers of so-called "community developers" of affordable housing were white. For comparison, over 80% of residents of affordable housing receiving the largest federal tax credit subsidy are people of color.

Notably, when civil rights lawyers brought a federal complaint against Minnesota for reinforcing racial segregation, many of these white-led developers intervened — on the side the state, the source of the subsidies that pay their salaries.

Decades ago, Black sociologist Kenneth Clark saw this problem clearly. He described Harlem as a "philanthropic, economic, business and an industrial colony of New York City." According to scholar Mitchell Duneier, Clark felt that Black residents' "social and community agencies did not create power because their money came from outside." But Clark ultimately recognized that the problem with these places was not just one of powerlessness, but exploitation. A neighborhood like 1960s Harlem was "not merely a dependent colony, but a vehicle through which both the state and capitalism pursued continued growth at the expense of the most vulnerable."

Fixing long-entrenched inequality will require supporting groups that seek transformation, not groups that tinker around the edges while collecting subsidies. Only then will we see true prosperity and justice benefiting all members of the village.