The Star Tribune has been teasing an upcoming special feature for a few weeks called "Ghost of a Chance." Their first podcast series, it's about the house in Southwest Minneapolis where one of their writers lives, and where a Black couple named Robinson lived a hundred years ago.
The writer, Eric Roper, started researching the Robinsons shortly after moving into the house five years ago. He dug into various archives to find out about them and what happened when "200 of their neighbors gathered in 1920 to rid that corner of the city of about nine Black families."
I was looking forward to the series, and I think I will still listen to the podcasts. However, in the intro to the series, which ran on the front age of today's Sunday paper, I was taken aback by the "I'm not woke" disclaimer Roper included:
I had not spent much time talking or thinking about race, perhaps because my social circle is largely white. I actually bristle at elements of today’s culture that reduce people’s identity to their race, gender or sexual orientation.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remained quiet as the world scrutinized Minneapolis. The message seemed to be that something was rotten here that had left Black people behind. Police brutality, racial covenants, destructive freeways — a lot had happened in the city. But it also felt like I was being asked to accept an oversimplified narrative about the past.
My curiosity about the Robinsons provided a path for me to investigate the history on my own terms and really dig into the details.
Well, duh, Eric. Perhaps! All the other things you're still ignorant of because you're a white guy also have those details — you just don't know them. Those "oversimplified narratives" have lots of details you haven't looked for.
It was embarrassing to read those paragraphs. I wondered if including them was Roper's idea, or his editors' — required to make the article palatable to suburban white readers, the Strib's core audience. They're an apologetic for even covering a "race" topic in the first place, especially in the latest age of Trump.
The paragraphs made me distrust what the podcast will contain. So if I do listen, it will be with a critical ear. Already the use of the word race, as in "the history of race in Minneapolis" irritates me, when clearly what he's talking about is the history of racism in Minneapolis.
So we'll see.
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Here's the location of the podcasts. The first one will be posted on Monday, January 13, and then weekly on Mondays through February 10.
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