It
has not been a quiet week in Minnesota.
The murder of George Floyd, an African-American man, by Derek Chauvin, a Caucasian man while
three other police officers were nearby has affected every person in the Twin
Cities Metro area. George Floyd has
become another name in a long line of African-American men murdered by police.
It’s important not to forget their names--Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown,
Philando Castille, Freddie Gray are just a few of many names.
Everything that has happened has exposed at a deep level
the rawness of racial pain and lack of opportunity that exists in Minnesota.
Governor Tim Walz said something in his news conference
yesterday morning that grabbed my attention. In fact it grabbed me by the shirt
and caused me to pay attention.
We
[Minnesota] don’t just rank near the top on educational attainment. We rank
near the top on personal incomes, on home ownership, on life expectancies.
Things that make this… Oh, and one that came out a while back. We ranked second
in a survey of the 50 States, second in happiness behind Hawaii. But if you
take a deeper look and peel it back, which this week has peeled back, all of
those statistics are true if you’re white. If you’re not, we ranked near the
bottom.
And
then he said this:
You cannot continue to say you’re a great
place to live if your neighbor, because of the color of their skin, doesn’t
have that same opportunity. And that will manifest itself in things that are the
small hidden racisms. It’ll manifest itself in a child of color not getting the
same opportunities, or a black community not being able to acquire wealth
through home ownership because of lending practices. And as we all sudden last
week, the ultimate end of that type of behavior is the ability to believe that
you can murder a black man in public, and it is an unusual thing that murder
charges were brought days later.
His
comments made me explore the statistics that caused him to say this. This is
what I found.
According
to a report done by Minnesota Housing, a state government agency, dated May 4,
2017, home ownership among races in Minnesota is the following
White/Non-Hispanic 76.1
Asian/Pacific
Islander 58
American
Indian 48.6
Hispanic 45
African-American 22.8
The
national average for home ownership among African-Americans is 42 percent.
Wow!
According
to census data
In
2015, white households in Minnesota reported an average income of $67,000
compared with $30,300 for African-Amreicans and $43,400 for Hispanics,
according to census data.
A
USA Today article from this past November rated Minneapolis/St. Paul/Bloomington
as the 4th worst place for an African-American to move.
Among
the data that was shared in this article was the following:
“while
95.9% of white adults in Minneapolis have a high school diploma -- the largest
share of any city in the country -- just 82.2% of black adults in the metro
area do, below the 84.9% national black high school attainment rate.”
The
protests are important, but eventually they will stop. And we will be left with
statistics that reveal an unseen racism that have fueled the events of the last
week. Minnesota might be a place of Lake
Wobegon for Caucasians, but it’s not for African-Americans. We have a lot of work to do, Minnesota!
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