Minneapolis Was Burning Long Before It Was Ever on Fire
I’m numb to the fact that my city is in ruins
I grew up about 25 miles outside of Minneapolis. As a kid, going into the city was an exciting and welcome change from the tree-lined monotony of the suburbs. But my childhood memories felt convoluted this week as I watched my city and a beloved neighborhood turn into a war zone. I attended my first preschool just blocks from where George Floyd was killed. My mom once worked at the Target store on Lake Street, which now sits in rubble. But the truth is, the area was in ruins long before Floyd’s killing.
When I was growing up, the neighborhoods at the epicenter of the protests were in such dire shape that locals often referred to the looted Target store by using a disparaging name: “Targhetto.” This is a sobriquet that persists to this day. It’s in a neighborhood that has been blighted by decades of over-policing, mislaid economic policy, generational and systemic poverty, and drugs. The place where Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ended Floyd’s life presented much of the same. Both neighborhoods have been met with gentrification that puts a sexy facade of a band-aid over a deep and festering wound of inequality in every level of life for Black and brown residents of Minneapolis.
The precinct and surrounding…
