In November 2018, Keith Ellison was elected attorney general for the state of Minnesota, becoming the first African American elected to statewide office in that state, and the first Muslim person elected to statewide office anywhere in the United States.
“We need to ask ourselves: Can we have a system of security and violence reduction, which keeps people safe but doesn’t have these attendant human rights abuses, which have marked American policing since the beginning?”
Previously, beginning in 2007, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives. He also served as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wayne State University and a law degree from the University of Minnesota Law School.
In early June, as Minnesota’s attorney general, Ellison took over the case of the murder of George Floyd. At that time, charges had been brought against only one officer, Derek Chauvin. Ellison increased the charges against Chauvin and also charged the other three police officers involved in the murder of Floyd, where Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck until he killed him.
Ellison, who spoke to The Progressive by phone in mid-July, says the cases are heading to trial next March but otherwise could not comment on the case, citing a court gag order. But he spoke freely about his career, concerns over climate change, defunding the police, and what candidate Joe Biden needs to do to win the November 3 election.
Q: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Keith Ellison: Well, if I may say, I read your publication, and admire y’all tremendously.
Q: Thanks, I appreciate that. Let me start with national politics. You left your seat in Congress, a safe seat, I think, to run for attorney general of Minnesota. What made you make that transition?
Ellison: Well, I like to do good for people, and I thought I could do more good here than there. I mean, look, Congress is a wonderful job. I was proud to be there, honored to be in that position. But you can’t really do anything unless you get about 218 people in the House to go along with you, and then the Senate, and then the President. It’s just a Herculean task to try to respond to the needs of the people.
I mean, look, Americans believe we need health care for all. Do we have it? No. Americans think we need sensible gun laws. Do we have them? No. Americans think we need to take climate action. Do we have that? Not really. But there are laws on the books that, if enforced, could help Americans and Minnesotans. So that’s why I ran for attorney general.
Q: What does Joe Biden need to do if he wants to win the 2020 presidential election?
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison
Ellison: He needs to focus on issue-based campaigning and reaching out to every single American, and put the issue of relationship-building as the front-and-center principle. The fact is, we should literally use politics to build community. And the problem has been the Democrats have used politics to just win elections.
When you just go for the election, you signal to people that you want to be in a transactional relationship with them: “If you vote for me, I promise you . . . .” But what I prefer is to say, “Let’s build a strong, durable community together.” And, of course, voting then becomes one of those things we do together, in addition to community meetings, freedom of expression, and a whole range of civil activity. Voting really should be a cultural expression of our solidarity as a society.
Q: How should Biden and the Democrats go about doing this?
Ellison: You need to put a lot of money into the field. You need to put a lot of energy into getting small-dollar donations. You need to listen to the people, what they’re telling you their needs are. We haven’t seen the minimum wage go up in ages.
People need to have a voice on the job. They need a union. People need climate action. People need to be respected for who they are, whether they’re Black, or whether they’re gay, or whether they were born in another country, or whether they live in a rural area.
Government needs to make sure [people who live in rural areas] have broadband access. We need to do what President Roosevelt did with rural electrification. That’s the kind of presidency we need. Joe Biden could be the most progressive President in American history since FDR, if he’s willing to step up and do that.
Q: You are currently suing ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute, over what you’re describing as a “campaign of deception.” You are saying that Minnesota law was violated, state laws against consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices. Tell us about that.
Ellison: ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute set out on a fairly robust campaign to deceive the public. They knew, many decades ago, that their product, burning fossil fuels, caused catastrophic climate change. When this issue was brought to light, they put out campaigns basically accusing people of being “Chicken Littles,” and they had a whole public campaign to say that [climate change] was not true. We have documents that they paid for, published documents. They clearly just deceived the public.
Q: The lawsuit talks about global warming as disproportionately impacting people in poverty and people of color.
Ellison: Well, it hurts everybody who lives on the planet and every living thing. But it hurts some more than others. So for example, if you are an Indigenous person on Ojibwe land in northern Minnesota, your ability to grow wild rice, a sacred crop of your people, has been dramatically curtailed because of climate change. If you’re an African American person, you probably own a lot less fossil-fuel-burning material than others, but you have to breathe more of it.
So African Americans are less likely to have a car, less likely to own a home, less likely to have one of these big mansions, which uses a lot of energy, and then more likely to have to breathe it, more likely to have to ingest it, because you live near a coal-fired power plant, or you live near a highway, or something like that. And so that poses an undue burden on you, based on your race and your income. That’s really unfair. We think it should not be allowed to continue.
Q: What are some of the ways that climate change is already impacting people in Minnesota?
Ellison: Well, flooded fields. The growing season has been dramatically altered. Loss of species. Catastrophic weather events. It’s really been dramatic.
Q: One issue shaping the national conversation right now is about defunding or abolishing the police. Can you talk a little bit about that, and particularly the model that’s come out of the city council in Minneapolis.
Ellison: Well, one thing I want to say is that when the advocates are calling for abolition or defunding [the police], what they really mean is refunding the community. They know domestic violence is not going to stop, sexual assault is not going to stop. People in low income communities will shoot each other sometimes. There might be school shootings, employment shootings. They need to try to protect each other. It’s not going away. In fact, the call of some of these leaders is for more protection. So it is about safety.
We need to ask ourselves: Can we have a system of security and violence reduction, which keeps people safe but doesn’t have these attendant human rights abuses, which have marked American policing since the beginning?
That’s what they’re really saying. And I will tell you that many of them have said, “Look, we’ve been calling for reform forever, we never get anything. Reform’s too mild, too lightweight. We need to call for some stronger transformation, and a real re-imagination of what it means.”
That’s what it’s all about. I think some people want to glom onto the phrasing of “abolition” or “defund the police” to discredit what these young people are asking for. But I think what they’re saying is, “Do you really need four guys with guns to investigate a fake $20 bill? Is that what we need?”
In Chicago, more than sixty people get shot in a weekend [as happened July 10-12]. How can it be that we have this system of policing where the police get huge, huge budgets, and they’ve been getting bigger every year, and yet we still see sixty people a weekend getting shot in Chicago. Something’s not working.
Q: Some communities are canceling their contracts with police departments for so-called school resource officers—armed police officers in schools.
Ellison: I mean, they turned the police against schools. When I was a kid, we got into fistfights. Nobody ended up getting a record because of it. Now you’re going to jail if you get into a shoving match, because there’s school resource officers who are going to cuff you and take you to jail. Is this the right way to get a school environment to be safe? What if we tried things like peer-to-peer counseling? What if we tried violence reduction and peer mediation?
Or take a situation where you’ve got a bunch of people living by the roadside in tents, which is a reality in every American city. What if we took some of the budget that we put into policing and the military and put it into housing? You go from people being essentially criminalized because they’re poor, to people having a place to live.
Would that make us safer? Probably. Would that make them safer? Absolutely. And it would probably save us some money. And it would improve test scores for kids in school. We know that when kids are not housed well, that’s when their scores really plummet. Housing immobility is a huge driver for poor school outcomes.
Q: Tie this back to the police.
Ellison: Our society will not house people. We’ve got a housing crisis. We won’t pay people fairly and we won’t give them a voice on the job. Our society won’t give people health care when they’re sick, and we certainly won’t provide any mental health care. And then what we say is, “Hey, cops. We’ve created all this social dislocation and economic displacement. You just make sure those people don’t come near the nice neighborhoods. You could do to them whatever you want.” That’s what it feels like we’re doing.
Q: How can people turn these ideas into substantive, legislative change?
Ellison: There is a big issue in Minneapolis. We need activists to help spread the word about the importance of amending the city charter. That is a meaningful change that could happen in the next three or four months.
We need that protest energy to convert to electoral gains, but not be stuck in electoral gains. Activists should always keep their feet in the street. If they leave the street, then maybe the system would just say, “Well, we’re not going to do anything now.” So that’s why we’ve got to be strong, and have strong activists in the street.
One thing we need to do is pass the Police Accountability Act in the Minnesota state legislature and accountability bills in Congress. It is absurd that we really can’t even count up how many deadly force encounters with police are going on. We don’t know. Because even though we passed a law, we still don’t [report and tally these encounters]. So we need activists to make those clear demands.
Q: How did growing up in Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, in a family involved in civil rights, influence your views on the current movement for racial justice?
Ellison: If growing up in Detroit teaches me anything, it is that people can come together. They can make great changes in their lives. But a society that wants to prefer profits over people, to prefer white skin over every other, to prefer people who were born here over people who weren’t, to prefer men over women, and heterosexual people over people who are different, it doesn’t want to change. It wants to stay how it is.
So we need the protesters in the street to demand that change, and that change needs to be sustained. It needs to be strong. It needs to not quit or relent, and not leave the headlines. If people will stay out there, stay strong, we can make things different. And we can do it together.