It is complicated. There are wide racial disparities in virtually every social and economic indicator in Minnesota. The numbers are easy to locate: graduation rates, homeownership rates; loan denial rates; mortality rates, suspension rates; wage and salary incomes; unemployment rates; child abuse and neglect report rates, traffic stops, even drowning rates. These disparities are not unique to Minnesota. The disparities are often larger in Minnesota than elsewhere, and white Minnesotans enjoy better measures of many of these social and economic outcomes than whites elsewhere in the country.
The coexistence in Minnesota of wealth and plenty for the majority group with wide racial gaps faced by minority groups has come to be known as the Minnesota Paradox. Resolving this paradox is complicated by the fact that large numbers of white people in Minnesota do not think the observed documented racial disparities are due to race.
The matter is further clouded by the unfortunate implication that if an analyst concludes that the problem of racial inequality cannot be explained away without taking account of race, then the analyst must be falsely accusing white people of being racist and racial discriminators. In Minnesota, it is not very nice to accuse anyone of being a racist. If a Black person claims racism, that person is labeled a race-baiter or other terms that are not appropriate for reproduction in a family newspaper.
Fixing the Minnesota Paradox will be difficult as long as people disagree that something needs to be fixed.
A serious problem we face in Minnesota – recognized by many of the young cheering spectators and peaceful demonstrators camped outside of the Hennepin County Government Building, George Floyd Square, and adjacent to the Brooklyn Center police department – is the failure to understand how structural racism can coexist among good white people who do not harbor overtly racist views or perceptions.
There are many reasons whites can be in denial about racism embedded in institutions, rules, laws and operating procedures.
One might be the lack of understanding of the difference between individual racism and institutionalized or structural racism.
Another might be the lack of awareness of how racist views and perceptions can operate subconsciously and affect people’s behaviors within organizations like police departments or welfare agencies or schools or prisons, even when people are not consciously and intentionally exercising racial animosity or hostility.
People who don’t think any racial disparities in Minnesota are worth trying to remedy often raise the following – often contradictory — objections:
1) The problems are due to recent immigration from Africa;
2) The problems are due to migrants from Chicago, Gary, Indiana, and Detroit seeking welfare benefits (and not hard-working immigrants);
3) The problems are due to Blacks having babies out of wedlock, their inability to forgo immediate gratification, and bad decisions that cause them to be locked in concentrations of poverty; and
4) The problem is the DFL and policies that have hurt rather than helped.
It would take a whole book to respond to and address each objection, even though it is admittedly a digression from fixing the problem.
Fixing the Minnesota Paradox, however, might not require that we confront racism directly.
In my studies of anti-racism programs, I have discovered that many of the participants in these programs are already committed to anti-racist ideals. Many nonparticipants, meanwhile, are unrepentant and unable to see the need for anti-racism training (or diversity and inclusion training or other modern human resource management tools).
Racial and ethnic minority group members often conclude that eliminating racism is an elusive goal, often placing an unreasonable burden on racial minorities themselves to educate and train their colleagues about microaggressions, historical facts that frame the nature of long-term disparities and inequalities, and even educating their peers about cultural differences in mannerisms, speech patterns, and body movements.
Many racial minority group members – according to my surveys – want to focus on measurable things like unemployment rates, wage and salary incomes, educational achievement, and the like. They are impatient about waiting for whites to figure out the difference between race, racism, racial discrimination, and simply exercising white privilege.
Fixing the Minnesota Paradox might be as simple as instituting racial equity audits throughout every budget cycle, every major transportation or construction expenditure, every vaccination priority system, every school board decision, even funding decisions for higher education; every policy change that on its face might appear to be unrelated to race.
Racial equity audits are a means by which to measure the impacts of policies on disparities. Things as simple as driver examination rules, bus routes, and bicycle lane construction would require a racial equity audit before implementation. Just as we must do environmental assessments or historical preservation analyses for many public projects, so too should we undertake unbiased, objective, empirical measures of potential or actual racial disparities.
Econometricians have a toolbox for distinguishing among disparities or disproportionalities that arise because of legally or economically meaningful intergroup differences and those that occur because of perhaps unintentional differences in treatment between identically situated groups.
One of the unique advantages of pursuing the public-sector goal of routinely conducting racial equity audits is that we might learn something positive — and we might reimagine ourselves as not as a deficient state but one that has much promise for creating opportunities for everyone, regardless of race.
An illustration comes from a recent analysis of unemployment statistics in Minnesota vs. the rest of the nation:
In 2013, the white-male unemployment rate was about 6.8 percent nationally, whereas it was only 4.8 percent in Minnesota. The Black male unemployment rate nationally was about 14.2 percent, whereas it was around 14.7 percent in Minnesota. Thus, the Black male unemployment rate was nearly three times that of Minnesota’s white male unemployment rate, but only twice as large nationally. The larger racial gap in male unemployment in Minnesota made people think that Blacks are worse off in Minnesota than elsewhere.
The larger racial gap in male unemployment in Minnesota in 2013 was not due to Black Minnesotans having higher unemployment rates than Blacks elsewhere; instead, it was due to white Minnesotans having lower unemployment rates than whites elsewhere.
A similar finding arises when one explores overall unemployment rates in other years. However, there is evidence that both the Black and white unemployment rates in recent years are lower in Minnesota than in the rest of the nation. Before the pandemic in 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported white unemployment rates of 3.3 percent nationally but 3.0 percent in Minnesota. The Black unemployment rate was reported as 6.1 percent nationally but 5.5 percent in Minnesota. A racial equity audit on unemployment in the state would have revealed that the racial gaps in unemployment rates in Minnesota were narrowing — good news that could help buffer negative stereotypes that might feed into subconscious racialized beliefs.
The conclusion, then, is that things can get better.
We don’t need to cure racism to fix racial disparities.
However, fixing racial disparities requires knowing and measuring those disparities and being open and transparent about them.
Various state and local agencies and departments already regularly collect data on disparities in law enforcement, sentencing, housing, lending, wages, test scores, suspension rates, graduation rates and the like. Even major banks, foundations, corporations are considering reasonable approaches to undertaking what might be called racial equity audits. These audits or assessments would be essential in measuring how good a job we are doing in meeting our goals to reduce racial disparities in the economy.
For public sector audits, these measures would be critical for enforcing mandates that program expenditures must not have an adverse impact on racial indicators. The racial equity audits needn’t be expensive. They can often utilize existing databases. Using the unemployment statistics as an illustration, pro-growth investments that lower overall unemployment rates would also need to narrow the racial gap to pass the racial equity audit. Likewise, minimum-wage hikes would need to show no widening in racial unemployment disparities in order to pass muster via racial equity audits.
Racial equity audits need not replace proposed legislation like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 or bans on chokeholds, or limiting qualified immunity and pretextual traffic stops.
Racial equity audits – that are both forward looking and historical assessments of prior interventions – hold promise for elevating accountability levels in all matters related to racial disparities.
Doesn’t it make sense to mandate that instruments of public investments and expenditures must not exacerbate observed racial disparities?
While it may be contestable whether the underlying causes of these disparities are rooted in historic, structural, or systemic factors, current ongoing discrimination, or other factors that are independent of past or current disparities, doesn’t it seem very Minnesotan for us to agree that we should never undertake policies that will make things worse?
Samuel L. Myers, Jr. is the Roy Wilkins Professor of Human Relations and Social Justice at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. He has a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Morgan State University. More information about the comparative unemployment rates he refers to is at https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/MNSAC_Unemployment_Final_3.pdf
