George Floyd’s death: what is the “Minnesota paradox” and what it says about racial discrimination in the United States

Following the death of African-American George Floyd while in police custody, the streets of Minneapolis and other cities in the United States have become the scene of protests and violent riots.

The fury, which has spread to more than 30 US cities and has led authorities in several of them to enact curfews, was unleashed after a video was released showing the 46-year-old man in the He is hard-breathing while a white police officer presses his knee against his neck.

Floyd tries to ask for help and repeatedly yells “I can’t breathe.” Subsequently, the man appears motionless in the images, before being put on a stretcher and transferred in an ambulance.

• The wave of protests over the death of African-American George Floyd in police custody that led to the burning of a police station
• How African Americans live in Minnesota, the thriving progressive state of the USA where George Floyd died under the knee of a police officer

Derek Chauvin, the policeman pictured here, was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday for his alleged responsibility in the victim’s death.

Three other Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers were fired. The FBI joined the investigation into the events.

Protesters denounce Floyd’s death as an act of police brutality that highlights racial discrimination in a city that, compared to other metropolises in the US, has a better standard of living.

That is what is known as the “Minnesota Paradox“: a place that seems prosperous and peaceful on the surface, but that hides profound racial differences.

“A racially segregated city”

The incident that sparked the protests “is a metaphor for a racially segregated city,” he tells BBC News. Myron Orfield, Professor of Civil Rights and Freedoms at the University of Minnesota, Director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity and former researcher at the Brookings Institution.

Minneapolis, he explains, is a city considered “progressive” in political terms, but at the same time harboring “severe racial discrimination.”

“It is not a right-wing city, the whites here are quite progressive. We don’t have Donald Trump-like figures on the local political scene,” he explains.

“The elites are dominated by decent groups of people, very liberal politically, here is not the Ku Klux Klan,” he says.

According to his research, the origin of racial discrimination stems more from a paternalistic vision and from a series of errors in the development policies of neighborhoods and schools that have opened deep territorial divisions.

“This has been a disaster. Segregation of neighborhoods has caused racial discrimination“he points out, strongly criticizing the placement of social housing exclusively in poor neighborhoods and the creation of schools that do not integrate the different social groups.

“We live in a more segregated country today than in the Martin Luther King era,” says Orfield, a phenomenon that is present in cities like Detroit, Chicago or New York.

• Who was George Floyd, the African-American killed in police custody in Minneapolis (and what is known about the agent involved in the incident)

The professor argues that racial segregation problems improved in the country for a few decades, until in the late 1990s the idea that integration measures were unconstitutional.

And what is happening nowadays in big cities, he points out, is that there are white police officers who live in a world different from that of the poorest people, which does not allow them to understand the desperate circumstances in which many people must survive.

The economic gap

The African-American community in Minneapolis has incomes that are equivalent to about a third of the income of white residents. Its members have higher unemployment rates and a lower level of entry to higher education.

“The Minneapolis flags are generally very good as long as you’re white. “Kevin Ehrman-Solberg, co-founder of the organization, tells BBC Mundo Mapping Prejudice Project.

Although the city has a good standard of living in general, he explains, the gap in home ownership, for example, is the largest in the entire country.

While 74.8% of white families in Minneapolis own their homes, less than 25% of black families own, says Ehrman-Solberg,

Those kinds of racial disparities, analysts say, are behind the riots that have spread this week after the death of George Floyd.

The paradox is that in both the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, the indicators can be very different depending on the glass you look at.

Minnesota ranked second in 2018 on the “Best States to Live In” list, while that same year the state was among the last places in the ranking which measures the racial gap in terms of employment and income.

As the academic Samuel Myers wrote, who coined the expression “the Minnesota paradox“Racial gaps are not only present in income and employment levels, but also in other areas such as incarceration rates and educational outcomes.

From that perspective, although Minnesota has many advantages in terms of quality of life, what some indicators show and the fury unleashed by the protests is that the benefits of living there are not always the same for everyone.

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