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What that represents is that policymakers did high-minded things, but they did not push down that sense of enlightenment into the body politic. Policymakers and the body politic lived in parallel worlds with regard to race relations. By the end of the century, the reputation of Minnesota across the nation was that Minnesota at least was racially tolerant, but what was not being addressed was the fact that the black population in Minnesota is exceedingly small. And what that meant was there were not a lot of black people around to test the social customs that permitted segregation to continue, and discrimination to exist. Taiyon J. Coleman, assistant professor of English literature at St. Catherine University in St. Paul: After I moved to the state, I wrote an essay, "Disparate Impacts: Moving to Minnesota to Live Just Enough for the City," which appeared in the anthology "A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota." At the end of the essay, I say, "There are Confederate flags everywhere, even if you can't see them." That's what I would say about Minnesota. There are good people here. It's a good place to live: There are parks, and recreation, and this notion of public interest for the public good. But there's this undercurrent of Minnesota niceness that is very homogenized. You see that in housing, in education, in employment, in net wealth, in incarceration — we have the largest racial disparities in the nation. And with those disparities, there's a culture that people don't want to look at it. You can't imagine how frustrating it is. I have all the degrees, all the things that U.S.A. society has said I need to have in order to access citizenship — what I loosely call whiteness, because whiteness is a constructed identity — but that is still never enough. That still never protects you. And that's what the paradox is. You've achieved all this, and you have these things, but it doesn't make you safe. Even with my privilege, I still don't have access to that. Green: People are surprised by the depth of anger and grievance when a police officer abuses an African American or kills an African American and there's a human cry in the community. Many people in Minnesota and even in Minneapolis are surprised at the intensity of the anger. What that tells me is that to a large extent, even though this is, for the most part, a progressive/liberal city, it's also a city in which the races live in parallel universes. It is possible for white people to have no contacts at all with blacks unless they have kids in the schools, or at my university, or they're in the military, or prison. Kirsten Delegard, co-founder of Mapping Prejudice, which tracks racial housing covenants in Minneapolis: In the early part of the 20th century, Minneapolis was not trying to market itself as a model progressive metropolis. It was quite the opposite: In 1946, the city was named the "anti-Semitism capital of the United States." It actually had a profound reputation for intolerance, and there was a very powerful group here that brutally repressed all labor organizing. It was in response to that very bad publicity in the'30s and '40s that you have this young mayor by the name of Hubert Humphrey who's elected and makes his political career on trying to change the racial climate of Minneapolis. He launches what was hailed at the time as this really innovative sociological experiment with these black sociologists and tries to get every Minneapolitan to do a self -audit of their own feelings about race, and all their organizations' practices about race. This experiment really puts Minneapolis on the map as this progressive metropolis — but it was all about feelings, it was all about attitude. It did