Former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges took to the pages of the New York Times to explain the city’s current state of civic dissolution in the column “As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change.” Subhead: “But this revolutionary moment is inviting us to be a part of the solution.” The Star Tribune republished the Hodges column yesterday under the same headline. I would have preferred Suicide’s not painless. Hodges writes:
As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.
These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.
In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.
Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.
Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and our property.
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Whatever the result, a sustainable transformation of policing will require that white people of means disinvest in the comfort of our status quo.
We are in a left-wing asylum where the inmates require straitjackets to prevent harm both to themselves and to others. Hodges is a clinical example of the phenomenon.
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