In late 2020, during the Covid pandemic, just months after the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Justin Ellis learned that his mother had cancer. Ellis had already published an essay in The Atlantic, “Minneapolis Had This Coming,” discussing how the persistence of state brutality against Black people, and the city’s ability to elude a true racial reckoning, were at the root of the Lake Street riots. By the end of 2021 he would return to his hometown to care for his mom and begin work on the book that would become The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America, out now via HarperCollins.
Part memoir of growing up in south Minneapolis, part reevaluation of the myths white Minnesotans tell themselves, The Cruelty of Nice Folks traces the ways Minneapolis has repeatedly come to the brink of addressing racial disparities, whether during Hubert Humphrey’s mayorship in the ’40s or following the racial unrest in north Minneapolis in ’60s, and then backed away.
The story of Minneapolis in the 2020s, Ellis argues, is just the latest example of civic backsliding in the face of crisis. Then, in an epilogue, he wonders whether Minneapolis’s response to the ICE occupation is a sign that things are changing at last, or the harbinger of another pendulum swing back…