…continued

Researchers at the University of Minnesota digitized these covenants in a project called Mapping Prejudice. This celebrated project visualizes the way in which non-white populations were squeezed into just a few locations in northwest and south Minneapolis, effectively making it impossible to buy or even rent land in the suburbs for non-whites. This was a version of segregation just as racist, and just as effective, as overt Jim Crow legislation or other more explicit forms of separation in other parts of the country.
This history has been denied and willfully forgotten for decades, and through the activism of dedicated researchers, students, NGOs and individuals is now being brought to light in a widespread fashion with the use of digital tools.

In July 2020, dozens of boarded-up shops and burnt husks of buildings tell a history of the recent unrest on Lake St. Hundreds of tents dot city parks in the wake of an emergency decree stating that overnight camping was acceptable (since rescinded). Blocks away, masked market-goers eat Moroccan food at the bougie Midtown Market, and cyclists whizz along the midtown greenway bike path. Several blocks west of George Floyd's memorial, paddleboarders jockey for position with kayakers on the waters of Bde Maka Ska, one of the "chain of lakes" near downtown famous for its public beaches and nearby boutique ice cream parlors. The divisions are real in the city, and attempts to placate critics of city policy (by, for example, "defunding" the police) are more complicated and drawn out than some had expected.

The sad reality is that nothing about Minneapolis is unique. Racism is endemic, systemic, and baked into the very concrete upon which American cities are built on. Bringing to light the designed architecture of exclusion in cities is a first step towards justice and promoting harmonious urban practices in the future.
Unequal Scenes supports Black Lives Matter, the fight for justice for the killing by police of unarmed men and women, redistribution of wealth due to historic disenfranchisement, and above all else a heightened recognition of the reality of the ground truth as seen from above.