Monday, June 1, 2020

The Statistics behind the protests


             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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