Well here’s a rant from out of nowhere.

Several times during my time in the Twin Cities, I’ve heard, or seen online, the following statement: “There are no black people here / in Minneapolis / in the Twin Cities.” This happened most recently just the other day, and since it’s one of my pet peeves I decided it was time for me to work myself up into a semi-informed lather and sound off about it.

I know it might seem absurd that anyone would actually say there are no black people (or Hispanics, or Asians) in a metropolitan area like the Twin Cities. But I am not expending 800 words on a straw man argument. I assure you that I really have heard people say this—bright, progressive, conscientious people—about not just blacks but the other groups I mentioned.

I’m not sure what the people who utter this statement are trying to say. Well, that’s not entirely true—I think what they’re trying to say is that this part of the country is so provincial, so culturally and ethnically homogeneous, that persons of color and other minorities are all but invisible.

There is some truth to this—the Twin Cities are, like much of the United States, still predominantly white. Maybe the people who make this irksome declaration are bothered by what they perceive as a lack of diversity in the Twin Cities. But this dismissive claim does nothing to further diversity, and it is not only inaccurate, but insidiously harmful and patronizing.

Because guess what? There are black people in the Twin Cities. Quite a few, actually. And they’re not just confined to North Minneapolis or Cedar-Riverside, though yes, you will find quite a few African-Americans and Somali immigrants living there. After all, Minneapolis saw a 127% increase in foreign-born residents between 1990 and 2000, and is home to the one of the largest U.S. Somali populations, and St. Paul has the largest U.S. Hmong population—though I have heard, appended with a straight face to the “There are no black people here” formulation, the corollary, “and Somalis don’t count.”

Just a few of the African-Americans who apparently don’t live in the Twin Cities

Even if we concede whatever semantic or anthropological gymnastics are required to arrive at that dubious conclusion, there are many, many non-Somali African-Africans in the Twin Cities. Yes, they are mostly segregated into specific parts of the Cities, far away from the boutiques of Uptown and the massive homes along the chain of lakes. Yes, their neighborhoods are generally poorer and their schools are in trouble. Yes, the foreclosure, crime, and murder rates are higher in those neighborhoods. Yes, they get harassed a lot by the city’s white cops. It is, in other words, the sadly typical predicament of urban minority populations all over this country.

Which is all the more reason why saying “There are no black people here” isn’t doing them any favors. You are rendering them even less visible than they already are. Maybe your dismissal is, perversely, made in an attempt to appear more liberal, worldly and cosmopolitan; maybe you moved here from Chicago, or New York, or LA, whose minority populations apparently register on some arbitrary metric of demographic legitimacy whereby a given group has to reach a certain percentage of the greater population before it can be recognized, and against which Minneapolis’ 17.7% African-American composition is statistically insignificant.

Some more non-existent black Minneapolitans

(What I really suspect is that, when people say there are no black people here, what they really mean [but of course would never admit] is that there aren’t enough [and I get nervous even typing this] of the right kind of black people: You know, the urbane, put-together, educated kind. The safe kind. Not the “thugs” that make too much noise on the bus and cluster on corners in the run-down parts of town, but the smart, dapper, professional articulate kind. You know, the Malcolm Gladwells and the Cornell Wests. And this gets into precisely the sort of subtle institutionalized racism that makes me so uncomfortable to even write about that I’m going to end this paragraph before it goes any further.)

Minnesota’s chimeral Fifth-District Representative.

Here’s another question, existence-of-black-people-deniers: Would you still say there are no black people here if a black person was actually in the room? Of course not. Because it would be a logical absurdity.

Well, guess what? It still is a logical absurdity, because while they may not be in the room, they are not too far away. They’re in the apartment next door, in the office where you work, in the stores where you shop and yes, in North Minneapolis. They’re in the classes I’ve taught and the places I work and the concerts I go to. They’re even in (gasp) the suburbs, like Deborah Watts, the cousin of Emmett Till, who I interviewed for a magazine article. So stop saying they aren’t here. It’s insulting, and racist, and you should know better.

(End rant. I promise to go back to blogging about innocuous topics like sensitive indie pop and 1998.)