The Atlantic Daily: Minneapolis Faces a Reckoning
The death of George Floyd has turned the world’s attention toward the city. One writer argues that his hometown had this coming.
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Minneapolis faces a reckoning.
Justin Ellis, who grew up in the heart of the city’s Lake Street corridor, found Floyd’s death, and the violence that followed it, “inevitable.” The city’s progressive reputation masks its long history of racial inequity, he writes:
The conditions that led to this moment didn’t spring up overnight; it’s been in the making for generations. No group of protesters could devastate south Minneapolis more than years of disinvestment and abandonment already have. Lake Street was hollowed out long before the flames came. …
Living a black life in Minneapolis means sitting in disparity between your good-natured neighbors and a system of structural racism and disenfranchisement enforced through policy, white silence, and police violence.
His essay is worth reading in full.
One question, answered: What does it mean now that the financial crisis caused by the pandemic has been officially declared a recession?
Derek Thompson, who writes about economics, explains:
Sometimes economic reports teach us new things. Sometimes they just make official what everybody already knew. The pandemic crisis triggered a recession earlier this year. What no government agency can tell us is: How long will this pain last? This is already the strangest economy in American history, with the sharpest increase in unemployment ever corresponding with a total recovery in the stock market. Investors seem to think the worst is over. For many workers, the pain might just be beginning.
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