Transcript of remarks by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz after five days of civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder by a police officer - May 31, 2020
Before I was in elected office, I was, I’m a public school teacher by trade. I spent 20 years doing that.
One of the things I was most proud of--and I think as Minnesotans, many of you across the world maybe getting your first look at who we are and that’s unfortunate but it’s real, and it will take that look--but one of the things of public schools I’m most proud of--our public schools consistently rank at or near the top. We’re a state that extends from the Canadian border. We have lakes so clear and pristine, they’re 40 foot deep and you can see the bottom and drink from them. We have iron ore mining that the steel was used to build this country. We’re a top agriculture producer. We’re home to a higher concentration of Fortune 500 companies than almost anywhere else and we’re home to the Mayo Clinic. We Innovate. We’re passionate people. And again, get back to that statistic, as governor, I like to talk about this in the things that we say, we don’t just rank at the top on educational attainment, we rank at the top on personal incomes, on home ownership, on life expectancies, things that make this—and one that came out a while back, we ranked second in a survey of the 50 states, second in happiness behind Hawaii.
“We rank at the top on educational attainment, we rank at the top on personal incomes, on home ownership, on life expectancies—All those statistics are true if you’re white. If you’re not, we rank near the bottom.”
But if you take a deeper look and peel it back, which this week has peeled back, all those statistics are true if you’re white. If you’re not, we rank near the bottom. And what this week has shown all of us is those two things can’t operate at the same place. You cannot continue to say you’re a great place to live if your neighbor, because of the color of their skin, doesn’t have that same opportunity. That will man[ifest] itself in things that are the small hidden racisms. It will manifest itself in a child of color not getting the same opportunities or a black community not being able to acquire wealth through home ownership because of lending practices. And as we all saw last week, the ultimate end of that type of behavior is the ability to believe that you can murder a black man in public and it is an unusual thing that murder charges were brought days later.
So what I would like to say and, again, I want to thank everyone who participated in our ability to restore trust to our streets. It was incredibly complex. It was incredibly difficult. But that simply gets us back to a place that we were before and that place is not good enough. That place is not one that will get us the solutions.
So I am going to leave the details of the operation—and I will be of course answering questions when we’re done—to those commanders on the ground who executed this. But it does fall to myself, other elected leaders, community leaders, and others that, if we do not get to that systemic problem, eventually this will get us back to a point that led to our communities on fire, our security and safety in question, and us searching for who we are.
So I could not be more proud of who we are as a state. I could not love this state more. And in doing so, that tough love means things have to change. We have got to figure out how to make sure that justice is served. And the groups of people that asked for this, the groups of people that were part of that message with Lieutenant Governor [Peggy] Flanagan leading it in her elegant words, as an indigenous woman, who understands what that means, watching Representative Omar on the streets begging people to come home.
And receiving a call last night, to understand how big this was, from Jay-Zee, not international performer, but Dad, stressing to me that justice needs to be served and that as he’s listening and hearing it, that this is a place that wants to do it. That this is a place that does it, but we have to follow through.