Justin Ellis TELLS ALL About Minneapolis Life In This EXCLUSIVE Interview

In late 2020, months after the murder of George Floyd, our colleague Justin Ellis moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis to begin work on a book about black life in the city, where promises of racial harmony have gone unkept to generations of black residents. The city's good, neighborly intentions are alluded to in that classic phrase, Minnesota nice . "But good intentions find a way to devastate Black lives all the same," Justin writes. His brilliant new book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America , is in bookstores now. It asks readers to consider what nice really means. Floyd's death, Justin writes, is less a departure from nice than a consequence of nice , a culmination of too many conversations avoided and too many problems swept under the rug. Inevitably, this became a personal project for Justin. He spent his year in Minneapolis also taking care of his mother, Viki, as she underwent cancer treatment. (You might recall reading his beautiful tribute to her at Defector a few years ago.) As Justin sought to understand how his family's "insistence on an ordinary life could be a skeleton key to understanding Minneapolis," Viki became a vital source. Woven through this rigorous urban history about the city's constraints on black life is the moving personal story of how three generations of the Ellis family lived in and adapted to them: "When the world was not enough, or it asked for patience, they found a way to make it work." Last week, the busy father of two was generous enough to grant Defector an interview. We talked about the "actively managed" myth of Minneapolis, the challenges of writing such a personal book, the legacy of the summer of 2020, and what lies ahead for Minneapolis in the wake of the monumental anti-ICE protests that swept the city earlier this year. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.