by Steve Timmer
Nov 5, 2017, 11:30 AM

White flight, racial covenants, and sundown town

White flight suburb, racial restrictive covenants in deeds, and sundown town. If you have lived in Edina a while you know these terms have been hurled at the city, including recently. And they are a part of its history, a history that the city is still laboring to overcome. I chafe at these descriptions, and I know a lot of my fellow citizens do, too. These epithets are among the reasons that Katherine Kersten and the Center of the American Experiment’s attack on the Edina school system is so odious and sickening.

Response to this attack by leading citizens in the community has been dishearteningly muted. The best ripostes have come from a couple of — admittedly pretty articulate — Edina High School students, Charles Heineke and Tanner Jones.

I hope everyone is saving their outrage for the voting booth.

I quoted Ibram Kendi here recently, who observed, “racial progress is always followed by new and more sophisticated racist progress.” You’ll have to admit that a glossy “magazine” that cost $60,000 by one estimate, and $100,000 by another, to produce and carpet bomb the city is a pretty advanced technique to deliver a racist message.

But don’t let the media sophistication fool you. It’s still demagoguery; it’s still being pitched to benefit candidates who want to take us back to the bad old days. And it’s still a variant on Katherine Kersten’s decades-long whine to be tolerant of intolerance.

SD49GOP says that claims of coordination between the CAE and the three GOP candidates are unjustified.

The tweet points to an article written by an SD49GOP activist (the GOP has activists? Horrors!) from Bloomington, and who won’t be voting in the Edina school board election, complaining about my writing on this subject. I already responded once, but since they keep tweeting about it, I’ll keep writing about it just to annoy them.

And to remind you, my Edina peeps, to get out and vote, but not for the Republican-touted Owen Michaelson, Chad Bell, or Faisal Dari.

We don’t need another epithet to climb out from under.

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