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Last week, showing how the COVID-19 crisis is making racial inequality worse. Since we published that newsletter, protests erupted in Minneapolis and spread throughout the nation 鈥� with marchers shouting "I can't breathe," the dying words of , who was seen in a video with the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on his neck.
So, about Minneapolis... we found it, and the Twin Cities area more generally, has some of the most abysmal numbers on racial inequality in the nation. Here is a snapshot:
+The median black family in the Twin Cities area earns 鈥� which is less than half of the median white family income of . This income inequality gap is ; only nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin is worse. The state of Minnesota as a whole has between blacks and whites in the entire nation; only the District of Columbia is worse.
+Before the pandemic, the black unemployment rate in Minnesota was at, but it was still double the white rate. In 2016, the Twin Cities area black unemployment rate was the white unemployment rate.
+According to , the black poverty rate in the Twin Cities area was 25.4%, which is over four times the white poverty rate of 5.9%. The Twin Cities area black poverty rate is significantly higher than of 22%, while the white poverty rate is significantly lower than the national one of 9%.
+While about of white families in the Twin Cities own homes, only about of black families do. The area had a long history where "" made it hard for blacks to become homebuyers and live in white neighborhoods.
+In 2019, the incarceration rate of blacks in the Twin Cities area was that of whites.
+ The state of Minnesota has one of the nation's worst education achievement gaps between blacks and whites. In 2019, it when it comes to racial disparities in high school graduation rates.
These data aren't about police bias directly. Instead, they are the persistent, troubling numbers that sit underneath the rising sense of unfairness, frustration, desperation and anger that we've seen over the last week. Keep in mind all these numbers were a snapshot of the situation *before* the economic collapse.
Special thanks to Timothy O'Neill and the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development for helping us dig through the numbers.
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