"I Don’t Know How You Can Look at Minneapolis and Say They Are Better for Choosing Reform Over Revolution"
A conversation with Justin Ellis about "The Cruelty of Nice Folks"
No American city has been as central to this decade’s struggles for social justice as Minneapolis. George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020 set off the biggest civil rights protest surge in our national history. Five and a half years later, ICE decided to make an example out of Minneapolis with a quasi-military invasion—which prompted a shockingly effective organized grassroots backlash that will be studied for years to come.
For the rest of the country, which associated Minneapolis more with “Minnesota Nice” than with fiery uprisings, the city may have seemed like an odd epicenter for our violent racial strife. But as Justin Ellis shows masterfully in his new book “The Cruelty of Nice Folks,” the history of race in Minneapolis makes a mockery of all that niceness. Ellis, a Minneapolis native who now writes for Defector, moved back to his hometown in order to do the research that allowed him to tell several intertwined stories: his own family history, George Floyd, the legacy of police violence, and Minneapolis’s long and sordid record of Nice White Liberals who failed to meaningfully reckon with the injustices growing on the other side of town.
I interviewed Ellis about Minneapolis, the failures of white liberalism, and whether defunding the police is possible. Our conversation is below.
How Things Work: Early on in this book, you mention a dynamic that I’ve definitely witnessed in newsrooms, which is that when some big story with a strong racial element happens (i.e. George Floyd), editors tend to try to pull in every black writer to write about it. On one hand, this can pigeonhole black writers. On the other hand, your writing about George Floyd led directly to this book. How did you make the decision to pursue the book project?
Justin Ellis: I struggled with this from the jump, even as far back as writing the essay for The Atlantic that ultimately led to the book. I’ve worked in journalism and media for over 20 years, I’ve seen the way newsrooms pursue and abandon diversity inside the house, then scramble when they feel the urgent need to tell stories about black life (only in someone’s death). It’s all exhausting and insane, and by the time Floyd was murdered I thought I was done with my journalism career.
Everything with Floyd hit so much more personally for me. I lived a few blocks away from where he was killed while I was in middle school, I could tell you what the inside of Cup Food looked like from memory. More than that, I felt really motivated by the dissonance a number of people had over such a brutal police killing happening in Minneapolis. That people would believe a crime like Floyd’s murder couldn’t happen in Minneapolis says a lot about the myths and lies perpetrated in the city’s name. Ultimately, I thought a book would let me explore that more in my own terms with my own understanding of the city.
Hubert Humphrey is mostly remembered today as a guy who lost a presidential race to Richard Nixon. But you have a fascinating section on his time as mayor of Minneapolis, where he was kind of the prototypical Nice White Liberal. What can the nice liberals of today learn from Hubert Humphrey about the limitations to that governing style?
Ellis: Humphrey really became the template for what we’d now call a standard bearer moderate Democrat. You do not get an Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, even a Joe Biden, without him. At the time when Humphrey became mayor in the 1940s he saw the threats to Black and Jewish families in Minneapolis in stark terms and he often was willing to personally intervene on the behalf of people, whether that was trouble with the police or being able to walk into certain restaurants or businesses. He saw the power in organizing committees and outside groups to offer policy ideas or create pressure around fixing employment disparity and housing segregation. He was also a model technocrat. He fully embraced this idea of giving things like “the race issue” serious study and finding solutions through lengthy reports. He was one of the earliest local politicians to believe that you could fix policing through better education and training. Credit where it is due, Humphrey could have won office without doing any of this, but saw it as a bigger moral calling.
But ultimately Humphrey’s legacy on the local level is creating the theater of equality. Every single one of those things I mentioned above are from the playbook we see today. It’s a lot of measures that help reassure white liberal voters without giving up any of their standing, while leaving marginalized groups always waiting, saddled with this expectation of fealty to one party because the men wearing blue ties acknowledge racism exists, even if they never want to take responsibility.
It’s telling that all of Humphrey’s grand ideas are all for nothing because of his ambition for higher office. He won two terms as mayor and jumped to run for Senate, and in the process left Minneapolis essentially the same as he found it for black families.
Your book, like Elizabeth Hinton’s “America on Fire,” delves into a decades-long cycle that’s played out in many US cities: Police violence, followed by uprisings, followed by promises for reform and blue ribbon commissions that ultimately produce only “modest change and a photo op.” Did you come out of your reporting with a solid idea of what a better process would look like?
Ellis: I don’t know how you can look at Minneapolis today and say they are better for choosing reform over revolution. The mayor reorganized the public safety department, then there was turnover in the leadership there. The chief who was supposed to lead the transformation of the police force recently resigned in disgrace. Like most police departments in the country, the budget continues to balloon thanks to overtime costs. And at the moment the city is failing to even meet the basics of its court-mandated reforms. By definition this is insanity, right?
I think like anything in local government, having a process for the community to guide designs and offer feedback is important. But I think the starting point has to be a total tear down, not a rebuild. That sounds simplistic, but look at where making changes on the edges has gotten us? Revised training standards and use of force policies have amounted to departments that are effectively the same. The aim needs to be so much higher.
After George Floyd, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end the city’s police department as it was constituted. Much of your book follows the long and ultimately unsuccessful fight over trying to achieve that vision. Do you think that was always doomed, or were there strategic changes that could have been made that would have allowed the city to end up in a better place?
Ellis: I really go back and forth on this. The machinery of so many cities like Minneapolis makes it seem near impossible to break up modern policing. The city’s charter commission, an unelected board whose only job is to give guidance to the city council on proposed changes to the charter, basically a kind of local constitution, was able to stall the policing referendum for one year just by pulling some procedural bullshit over a Zoom meeting.
I do think there were flaws with the proposal Minneapolis residents had to vote on in 2021, namely that it was a loosely defined black hole that voters could fill with their fears. It more or less was a ballot question that said “do you support ending policing and giving the city council space to come up with a better idea over time?” To succeed in a movement like this you need something like a diorama, a model people can wrap their heads around to visualize community safety, showing specialists in dealing with unhoused populations, domestic violence, addiction, and maybe even a violent crimes unit. And you have to get people to understand one thing: “this is a starting point,” because it’s going to take time, and most likely the current police will remain in place over the transition. Because people vote scared. There’s a reason why the final weeks of almost every election we’re all inundated with ads barely above grindhouse movies.
I think my most naive or idealistic belief is that you need a mayor willing to stake their career to support this kind of transformation. In Minneapolis you had a mayor—and even police chief—who actively campaigned against rebuilding the police department. It shouldn’t be a political calculus to say “the police as currently constituted do not really work for this city or for you.”
Somewhat related question: it has always bothered me that the debate over defunding the police (which, to be sure, was never a genuine goal of the Democratic establishment) always devolves so quickly into bitching over the term itself, rather than substantive discussions of the underlying issues. Based on Minneapolis’s experience, do you see a path forward for the defund movement?
Ellis: We live in the most absurd era of bullshit rhetoric. It’s infuriating to see how “defund the police” became this weapon that could be so easily used against anyone who wanted to point out that law enforcement budgets operate on the same logic as a venture capitalist’s wet dream of hockey stick growth. Overtime costs for most departments only go up while case clearance rates mostly remain low and black people keep dying. Yet it’s wrong to say “maybe we could use that money in better ways,” because then you wind up as a chyron on Fox & Friends.
It’s now as bloated and captured as “woke.” The problem is “police reform” is the worst of all these terms because of how easily it is co-opted and can provide cover for cynical moderate liberals and the revanchinists on the other side. In the years leading up to Floyd’s death, local activists in Minneapolis were actually successful in clawing back or diverting money from the city’s police budget. And then Floyd was killed. And Dolal Idd. And Amir Locke. I think the way forward increasingly is going to mean bending light in the direction of an abolition people can live with in their communities. I think it will amount to all the ways police departments can have responsibilities, equipment and people peeled away. Or, to quote Grover Norquist, “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Your own life—growing up in Minneapolis, moving away, then returning home in 2020 to both take care of your mother and to explore your own family history—is woven into this book. How do you think Minneapolis has shaped your life personally, in a way that wouldn’t have been the same had you come from another city?
Ellis: One of the things I really wanted to get at in the book is the liberal tendency to think that things will get better over time, that change can be incremental. That everything works through the often invoked and misquoted “long arc of the moral universe.” This is something that got ingrained in me at a very young age, that society is an ongoing group project that we can make better, but the results likely won’t arrive in your own lifetime. There’s an incredible chapter in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics Of Liberation in America, that picks apart all the ways traditional coalition building is a busted premise because it works off the belief that institutions are inherently legitimate and can be salvaged if they break bad, and that you can have a working alliance between people who have always been on secure footing in the country and the people who have been traditionally vulnerable.
Now we’re seeing all the ways these traditional political teamups are failing and have so much evidence that incrementalism is ultimately bullshit that helps serve entrenched power. I think growing up around this kind of thinking helped me ground the book in the fact that a belief in good intentions or some unseen moral horizon ultimately contribute to a different, but just as devastating, form of white supremacy.
The book’s epilogue is about the recent ICE invasion of Minneapolis, and people’s remarkably successful fight against the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts. In my modest amount of reporting in Minneapolis this year, I repeatedly heard activists talk about the ways that the 2020 uprisings laid the groundwork for the actions against ICE. Do you think that’s true, and if so, how?
Ellis: Yes and no. I think on a practical, or maybe tactical level, the groundwork definitely came out of the pandemic and the period after Floyd’s death. Yes, it’s organizing through apps like Signal, but it’s also the growing influence of mutual aid. I think it’s also devising alternative methods for block-by-block safety without police. Before there were people on corners with whistles, there were protectors and watch shifts in George Floyd Square. In the aftermath of Floyd one neighborhood in south Minneapolis started an armed patrol and filed a class action lawsuit against the city because police response times to 911 calls was negligible.
More broadly, what I saw in Metro Surge made me think about the toll of the immediate years after Floyd’s death. It’s true that for many people it was a wake up call to police abuses or the underlying rage over the city’s neglect. Could that make people feel more prepared, or more outraged when ICE arrived? Yes. But something I also wondered about was, frankly, white guilt, which can be just as animating. This is a city that had the eyes of the world focused on it for a year after a black man died under a policeman’s knee and then failed to change its police department. For some people, this likely represented a second chance at completing a white savior action.
But in my talks back in Minneapolis while promoting the book, something that kept coming up in conversation is that the outpouring to support immigrant families, while noble, quietly whistles past all the same needs that have been unaddressed in the city’s black community. I do think it’s true something did crack in the city’s psyche because of Metro Surge, because there was a new willingness to use the protective powers of whiteness to aid migrant families or just face down masked goons. But it’s hard to reconcile all that effort, to say nothing of the near-universal praise the city received, with the persistent systems of inequity that made both immigrants and black families vulnerable in the city.
You can order “The Cruelty of Nice Folks” from an independent bookseller, or wherever books are sold.
Also
Related reading: Talk Louder About Defunding the Police; The Consequences of Rejecting “Defund the Police.” In January, I covered the general strike in Minneapolis and ICE’s murder of Alex Pretti.
A lot of people in Minneapolis are still reeling from the effects of the ICE raids. You can find a vetted list of mutual aid organizations to donate to right here.
You can find an archive of previous How Things Work interviews with authors and other newsmakers here. The archives are free to read, and this entire site is also free to read. That is possible because readers—people just like you—kick in a few bucks to make it economically possible for me to run this place without a paywall. If you can afford the small price of $6 a month or $60 a year, please click the button below and become a paid subscriber to help keep us alive. Thanks for being here.
A fascinating interview with thoughtful questions and answers. Much to ponder here. Ellis’ book sounds great.
Lots to agree with but slogans matter and you don’t need rightwing propagandists to work very hard—or at all—to suggest that “defund the police” means “no money for police and thus no police at all.”
Some actually seem to want this literally. Good luck with that. Most, however, mean “rebalance investment in prosocial ways, making things better for all—including police.”
I also see no point in bashing heroic work against ICE by Minnesotans. How, exactly, are we going to defeat, say, the carbon burners, who will literally destroy civilization—literally—with this kind of attitude?