PIEN HUANG, HOST:
There is perhaps no city in America that's been more central to recent public movements and tumults than Minneapolis, Minnesota - the era-defining summer of protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd in that city, debates over race and policing reforms, and more recently, protests over ICE arrests, federal troops and law enforcement and mass deportations.
But Minneapolis' reputation as a bastion of progressivism doesn't line up with the history. At least, that's the argument of a new book, "The Cruelty Of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is The Story Of America." Justin Ellis is the author of that book. He's also a journalist at the news site Defector, and he joins me now.
JUSTIN ELLIS: Hi there.
HUANG: So you're from Minneapolis. How did writing the book change your view of the city?
ELLIS: Yeah, I mean, that's honestly the - at the heart of the book. The journey that I took in writing this was one where I had to go back and think about all the things that I knew and also the things that I felt. I went back to write about George Floyd's death, and I felt that I was going to be writing specifically just about history and looking into the history of Black families, civil rights in the state, the treatment of people of color and marginalized people overall. And it's a history that aligns with the rest of America in terms of not just police violence, but when you see things like redlining and housing, tools, you know, used to basically control where Black families could live in the city's borders, discrimination and segregation in schools.
So again, you know, a lot of the things that are the same recipe that we've seen across the country - the part that I had to reconcile and work through in this book was this notion that I come from a family that seemingly did not find itself touched overly by violence. But all the same, you're living under this system that shapes your life in ways that white families will never ever know.
As much as I have a lot of deep love for Minneapolis, the way that I feel every time when I fly into this city and I look at the landscape, and I can pick out the parts that I recognize, the ways that I could draw the outline of the skyscrapers, you know, from memory as a kid, the way that I think about just summer mornings in Minneapolis as being this really beautiful and golden time - all of these things can still be real, but at the same time, they have to sort of be measured against the ways that Minneapolis has continued to let people down and specifically let down Black and brown families, as well as immigrants and other marginalized people.
HUANG: Can you share with us some specific examples of how those tensions about race showed up for you and your family?
ELLIS: Absolutely. You know, the thing that I found out very early on is that the path that my family took in Minneapolis mapped nearly perfectly with the way that housing segregation worked in the city. My great-grandparents came to Minnesota in the Great Migration. My great-grandfather came from Illinois, and my great-grandmother came from Alabama. They settled on the north side of the city, and there's this small pocket where Jewish families and Black families were able to live after effectively being locked out of the rest of the city.
And after my great-grandparents have children, they stay in that area for a brief period of time. My great-grandmother moves the family into one of the first public housing developments that the city created that effectively becomes the sort of blueprint that is repeated around the rest of the country. These are the areas basically that said that this is the worst housing, that these are the areas that should be ignored. You know, looking at this history, I saw these barriers that, before, I just really hadn't known and the fact that it had defined not just my life, but my mom, my grandmother and my great-grandparents.
HUANG: Your mom plays such a central role in the book, and I'm wondering, what did you learn about her and about her life in the research for the book?
ELLIS: I found with my mom that there was a lot that she talked about as being ordinary and ordinary in the way of, my grandmother really wanted to try to give my mom and my uncle this life that was sort of middle-class or sort of kind of approaching middle-class, you know, taking them to things like my uncle being in Boy Scouts. These summer camps, you know, were - in all these places, they are the only among a few Black faces. They have to sort of reckon with that, the ways that they deal with questions about - you know, whether they are innocuous or hurtful - you know, about your hair or about, like, what does your family do, or how is your family different?
And, you know, she would just treat it as like, well, that's just the way that it was. And to me, I think that's the thing that gets at what is the most American problem of it all, which is that we treat just surviving these type of experiences as normal. And we don't instead sort of say that you have endured, that you have this kind of resilience that other people don't have to have, and that a Black, ordinary life is still something to be celebrated, is something that is sensational, is a success story, given all the ways in which that - it can be unraveled.
HUANG: Do the people in your life understand when you point out to them that you do not think that this is normal?
ELLIS: Well, I think that everybody in our family knows that it's not normal. But I think one of the things that makes looking at Minneapolis fascinating and the ways that it tells this broader story about America is that people know it's not normal, but people sort of say, well, you have to put your head down and just go about your business.
And also more than anything, I think the story of Minneapolis and being Black in Minneapolis that relates to the broader part of America is that - this feeling that, well, Minneapolis is better because the North was better, and the North isn't the way things were in the South, that what people faced in Minneapolis wasn't as terrible as what was faced in Alabama or Mississippi, you know, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Obviously, that just sort of fails to recognize the wrongs and the hurt and the trauma that comes from just trying to survive.
HUANG: You started this book years ago, but so much has put Minneapolis in the spotlight this year. So Alex Pretti and Renee Good were both killed by federal immigration agents. And I'm wondering, how have these events changed how you're seeing the city right now?
ELLIS: Yeah, that's a really good question. We got through all of the edits. We got through proofing it, you know, fact-checking - all the last-stage stuff that you do with a book - and put it to bed basically in January of this year, which was right around the time the president started to send ICE agents and DHS officials to the state. It became clear very quickly that we were going to have to crack the book open again and that I was going to have to try to find a way to encapsulate some of the things that were happening while still making a book deadline for the book to be here today. But it made sense to me because looking at what happened with Renee Good and Alex Pretti, there was these parallels that jumped out to me immediately with the killing of George Floyd.
HUANG: Do you think that this time might be different, or do you think it's more of the same?
ELLIS: I think it's too early to tell. I think what's different this time around is that residents - you know, neighbors realized that the power was in their hands and that instead it wasn't with politicians, public officials, even the police. The ways that people were sort of saying, we are going to create these networks to keep families fed that cannot leave their home, the ways that we are going to make sure that children are either going to still be able to go to school or that alternative learning networks are going to be able to be set up.
I don't know what happens after that, though, because the way Minneapolis works - any city in America - is that, you know, the ways that you change things are through public policy. The way that you change things is through sort of laws and actions from politicians in the machinery of government. That conflict is playing out in Minneapolis right now, where you see a city council that wants to sort of push things forward with the spirit that they saw during the ICE raids and the occupation earlier this year, while you have a mayor who's sort of stuck in some ways.
There's this sort of question where - you know, how can you go forward when the power structures, the things that actually change systems, either are stuck or sort of are grinding their gears?
HUANG: Justin Ellis is author of the new book, "The Cruelty Of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is A Story Of America." Thank you for joining us, Justin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
