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Minneapolis city leaders have spent much of the past year talking about how to improve life for the city's minority residents. On issue after issue, the talk has come around to one word: equity.


 
• Arguing for more minority officers on the police force, Mayor Betsy Hodges said she understood that "diversity does not solve equity, but it can help get us to where we need to go."


 
• African-American leaders pressed Hodges to approve the Southwest Corridor light rail line in the name of "transit equity."


 
• City Council Member Jacob Frey promoted his plan to regulate ride-sharing cell phone apps by calling for "an ordinance that, one, allows innovation in this city, which is essential; and two, retains equity in this city, which is also essential."


 
Everything came back to equity. It's been one of the central themes of Mayor Hodges' administration.


 
"Whatever you want to call it," she said, "it's about making sure someone's race doesn't determine their outcomes in life. And the city does have a role to play in that work."


 
But the three council members who hail from minority communities are deeply divided over how to address racial equity.


 
The Twin Cities metro area has some of the largest disparities in the country between white and minority residents. There are vast gaps in education, income, homeownership and health.


 
Abdi Warsame, the first Somali-American on the Minneapolis City Council, is well aware of those disparities. But he's skeptical about the city's approach to the problem. As he explained to a sometimes hostile crowd at a budget hearing earlier this month, he's also not a fan of the word itself.


 
"What I fear most in all this argument about equity," he said, is "that equity might just be a new fad, the new buzz word, the new diversity, another time-wasting exercise and a promise with no substance."


 
The city's budget for next year includes a $150,000 disparities study and a new Office of Equitable Outcomes, with two staff members who will coordinate city efforts to close the gaps. Warsame thinks Minneapolis is spending too much money studying the problem and not enough fixing it.


 
"I think there are programs that need to be funded in the city of Minneapolis such as youth development, mentorship programs — those things that are needed to keep the inner-city youth out of trouble," he said. "But I think having people do research on the poor is not really going to have any difference. It's just going to tell you what's happening in the environment ... we want to change the environment."


 
Warsame also questioned Hodges' proposal to increase the city's outreach to non-English-language media outlets. He joined a slim majority of the council in voting to remove two new communications positions from next year's budget.


 
That put him at odds with Alondra Cano. She's the first Latina elected to the Minneapolis City Council and a strong supporter of the mayor's approach to racial equity. Cano took the vote personally.


 
"I was very frustrated and shocked and hurt by that move," she said. "I couldn't believe that the agents of this cut to services that would support immigrant communities was coming from two immigrant policymakers."


 
The other immigrant policymaker was Blong Yang, who is Hmong-American. He said the city already employs numerous language specialists, and he saw hiring two more as duplicative and unnecessary.


 
"It's my view of waste," he said. "We can do better, and that should be built into what we are already doing. And the fact that we don't do that — that's the problem."


 
The racial politics surrounding the equity agenda are especially complex for Yang, who represents the predominately African-American north side. He received a lot of criticism — from Cano, constituents and strangers on social media — for questioning the city's approach to equity.


 
"Some of the things that were said, I think, were offensive, hurtful, thoughtless —  this part about being a sellout, voting against the interests of my constituents in Ward Five, as if somebody who didn't live in Ward Five or in Minneapolis knew what the interests of Ward Five was," Yang said. "I received the brunt of it."


 
Yang pointed out the entire debate focused on a fraction of a percent of the city's budget. If Minneapolis really wants to achieve racial equity, he said, it will need to spend a lot more than that.

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Curtis Gilbert

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City leaders have talked a lot about racial equity, but not always to receptive audiences.

Minneapolis' quest for 'equity' doesn't please all

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