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How Minnesotans are seen by others, and how we see ourselves, is changing. For some of us who embody less dominant identities, this is a positive development. For others who have probably seen themselves as magnanimous and even-keeled for generations, it is surely more than a little painful.
As a circa 2002 transplant, I arrived in Minnesota in my late 20s after graduate school in the hopes of putting down roots in a community deeply committed to the arts. Born and raised in Ann Arbor, Mich., I was no stranger to Midwestern mores. Decorum and the values of discipline and “good honest hard work,” were instilled in me at a young age, as was the gospel of moderation. What was new to me, however, was this peculiar culture of “Minnesota Nice.”
Everywhere I went, Minnesotans extolled the virtues of being nice to your neighbor … at least on the surface. In this state, being polite, quiet and passive-aggressive were inherently worthwhile values beyond reproach. As an opinionated Black woman with a penchant for telling the truth and a dark sense of humor, I found myself often misunderstood in those early years.
I still encounter white Minnesotans who view “Minnesota Nice” as a good thing — a benevolent indicator of the state ethos of kindness. But I have yet to encounter a Black person or person or color who doesn’t roll their eyes when the phrase is uttered. For us, “Minnesota Nice,” has nothing to do with kindness, but rather the performance of it in service of maintaining the status quo. It is a way to label someone who is different from you as “other,” “inappropriate” and “not really Minnesotan.” It is a thin white blanket covering centuries of microaggressions and just full-on aggression.
But something interesting has been happening over the past six years or so. The murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings cracked open the veneer of propriety that had kept Minnesotans’ true emotions contained and largely inaccessible. The video of Floyd’s violent and cruel murder on an everyday Minneapolis street, on an ordinary Minneapolis day, finally woke a large swath of the population up to the fact that state violence is very real and targeted and indiscriminate at the same time. It is also deadly.
Suddenly, white people had to contend with the realization that the stories their Black and brown co-workers, neighbors and family members had been telling them for years about racial profiling and excessive use of force by those who have sworn to protect and serve us were, in fact, true. Six years later, we may have forgotten that Floyd’s murder led to large worldwide protests, that the National Guard was called in to quell the civil unrest while we worried about things like white nationalists invading our neighborhoods (they did not, by the way), that upwards of 40% of the city voted to replace the Minneapolis Police Department afterward, and that all of this occurred in the context of a worldwide pandemic that killed millions of people.
