I’ve spent years doing engineering work in both Silicon Valley and the Twin Cities and the anecdotes are apt. This take on Minnesota life (and peoples’ reaction to it) is spot on.
It was hard for me and my partner to get over the passive aggressiveness and silent racism so we left the Twin Cities but it still sure as hell beat living in Bay Area from a quality of life standpoint.
In my personal anecdotal experience, I found the US Midwest culture's handling of conflict shares a lot in common with what I saw in Japan. It is not too surprising to me the homogeneity enforcement follows similar structures in both cultures.
This has a good side to it, though. Once you the friendship of an individual deeply embedded into that culture, beyond that surface niceness, though it may take decades, it is a firm friendship, and they'll give you the benefit of the doubt to give you time to prove your point.
I’m sorry, but I read all 3 of those links and I didn’t find a single one convincing. They rely on largely anecdotal experiences which dont appear to be any different than many that come out of non-Midwestern states, and yet don’t get roped around the regions neck the same way. George Floyd dying in Minnesota is somehow a reflection of “Midwestern nice” gone wrong, but Trayvon Martin being killed in Florida, or Eric Garner strangled in NYC, or Rodney King being beaten on the streets of LA are only ever contextualized as “America’s racism problem” and not the problems of California, New York, or Florida.
When these articles actually provided hard numbers, they only served to under,one their argument even more. The Midwest is decried as being overwhelmingly white at 81% of the population, compared to the nationwide average of… 76%? That hardly seems enough of a difference to have as monumental of an effect as claimed. What’s more, while the Midwest is decried as hostile to black Americans due to their overwhelming whiteness, in reality, most major Midwestern cities actually have far more black Americans than most West Coast and Northeast cities. One article cited that only 10% of the Midwest is black, compared to 13% nationally, but this ignores that the region that drags the average up is the equally pilloried South, not the “diverse” West or East Coasts, which are often have the same or less black representation in their population. For example the proportion of black people making up the population of Indianapolis is 3x as much as LA, and even more than places like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston.
In one of the articles, it states that in the Midwest, the median income for black Americans is $36,000 or lower, compared to $38,000 nationally. Not only is this difference minimal, but it ignores that the median wage for all people, regardless of race, is less in the Midwest than it is nationally. Another article says Midwestern states have noticeable differences in employment and other outcomes between black and white Americans, as if this is some differentiating feature of the region and not true of literally every single state in the nation.
Here’s the reality. Systemic racism pervades this country. However certain areas of the country (the coasts) have an outsized voice on national discourse, and therefore depict their ills as everyone’s ills, and the ills of the rest of the nation as unique to them and evidence of their inferiority. Therefore, it seems to me less like there is lots of evidence Midwest is genuinely, uniquely backwards and racist, and more that our society has decided that the Midwest is backwards and racist from the get go, and then works backwards finding whatever evidence is available to support that claim.
It was hard for me and my partner to get over the passive aggressiveness and silent racism so we left the Twin Cities but it still sure as hell beat living in Bay Area from a quality of life standpoint.