FEATURING SHANNON GIBNEY - Nearly six years ago, the people of Minneapolis took center stage in unprecedented protests against racial police terror after George Floyd was videotaped being murdered. Now, the Twin Cities area is once more ground zero for a similar kind of organized racial terror at the hands of armed agents of the state. As ICE agents have run rampant across Minneapolis and St. Paul, killing, maiming, and violating, how have locals responded and fought back?
Shannon Gibney is a member of Minneapolis Families for Public Schools. She is also a professor of English at Minneapolis College, where for over fifteen years she has worked with refugees, ex-offenders, international and in-country immigrants, indigenous and communities of color, and students from all walks of life to tell their stories. Her most recent book is “We Miss You, George Floyd.”
Gibney spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about how Minnesotans are done playing nice.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, the way in which Minnesotans, people in Minneapolis and St. Paul have been responding has certainly made the news for those of us outside. But give us a sense of the, of the tone of the resistance on the ground. I understand that you wrote a story for the Minnesota Star Tribune called Minnesotans seem to be done playing ‘Minnesota Nice.’ What does that mean?
Shannon Gibney: Yeah, so I moved here as a transplant more than 22 years ago, in my late twenties after graduate school, because the state has a wonderful artist’s community and infrastructure for artists. And it's been great for me and my family overall to be here. But I'm a mid-westerner. I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But, coming here you find this thing called “Minnesota Nice” which is basically like, “oh, we're ‘nice’ in quotes to everyone,” at least on the surface.
But for communities of color and folks from historically marginalized communities, we have a very different experience historically with “Minnesota Nice.” It sort of has been this way to ‘other’ people who don't sort of fit into this kind of old school white Minnesotan rural idea of what it means to be a Minnesotan.
But, I argue in that piece that you mentioned that appeared this weekend in the Star Tribune I argue that since George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings and then now going through the federal agent siege of ICE agents, but also Customs and Border Patrol folks, we're developing a new state ethos. And it's less around Minnesota Nice. And somebody outside the region told me it's like Minnesota Good.
