Twin Cities, Split Politics: Crisis, Antiracism, and Reparations in the Twin Cities

Abstract

Twin Cities, Split Politics is a comparative case study exploring how the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul came to incorporate conflictual notions of reparative justice into their community and economic development efforts following the mass protest movement for Black lives (the "Minneapolis Rebellion") in the summer of 2020. Leveraging historical institutionalist methodology, textual analysis, and ideological analysis, Twin Cities, Split Politics tells the story of how competing political grammars of antiracism have shaped the character and content of local reparations in the Twin Cities -- how one city came to embrace a politics of recognition while the other came to embrace a politics of redistribution.