On Topic: R.T. Rybak Episode Two

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R.T. Rybak is the former mayor of Minneapolis and the President of the Minneapolis Foundation. Sanjit and R.T. talk about the unfinished work of disrupting police culture in Minneapolis, R.T.'s past, and how to correct inequities for today. 

"There have been times in these past couple years where I have been in such deep mourning for my country and worried so deeply about it. But I think the fever is breaking and it can't happen soon enough."

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this episode, you can explore events, writings, and more episodes. 

R.T. Rybak, is the president of the Minneapolis Foundation. Previously, he served as executive director of Generation Next, a public-private coalition focused on closing education gaps for children of color.

During his twelve years as Mayor of Minneapolis, Rybak led efforts in economic development, affordable housing, and transportation. As mayor, he claims the launch of the STEP-UP summer jobs program, which has employed 22,000 young people, as his proudest achievement. Previously, he worked in journalism, marketing, commercial real estate, and Internet strategy.

A graduate of Boston College with a degree in Political Science and Communications, he is the author of “Pothole Confidential,” a book about his years as Mayor.

 

More from R.T.: 

• I Was Mayor of Minneapolis. I Know Why Police Reforms Fail.

• Former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak Shares His Hope For the Future

Full Transcript: 

Sanjit: You know R.T., I wanted to start with your past experiences and your evolution of going into journalism. If you could start there and talk to me about what drew you into journalism as a field of study and how do you reflect on journalism now?

R.T.: You know I was talking to my mother the other day about these kind of weird conversations you have with your parents about formative moments. And she reminded me that they had a dinner party one night and about an hour into it somebody reached down to tie their shoe or something and realized that I had been under the couch the whole time. I think I was like 6 or something, I've always loved listening to people's conversations. And at the State Fair, my favorite thing to do is just sit there and watch humanity go by and make up stories about them. So I always really had this incredible interest in just trying to figure out what makes someone or something tick. But then also I was a Watergate kid, I was very political and followed things closely as I was getting to be college aged and I had wanted to get into politics. So then along came Watergate and I recognized that there was also this great ability to use journalism, to not only be under the couch listening to people but probably more important to move policy. And so there was sort of this nexus between being in media and being in politics and I sort of crafted my college education. I picked the college I went to cause I could take political science and urban affairs and journalism all together and create my own curriculum. And that's what I wound up doing for my life, oddly enough. It didn't happen the way I planned it but it has been this idea of trying the best you can to understand people and then trying to somehow make their situation, our situation better.

Sanjit: I like the idea of the under the couch kind of philosophy.

R.T.: It’s kind of pathetic isn’t it?

Sanjit: No, I think it's kind of great I think that it's kind of a nicer way of thinking about investigative journalism so can I--

R.T.: I’ll get under your couch

Sanjit: Yeah exactly, well it seems like in part to that desire to investigate-- and it makes me wonder. For you, if I’m not mistaken you go from Breck to Boston College, a private school, certainly a degree of affluence and privilege at that institution and then going to another institution which has a tremendous degree of privilege. I'm wondering at what stage you were shifting your mindset into thinking about looking at racial or social or economic disparities which you focused on when you were mayor of the City of Minneapolis.

R.T.: Well you know privilege is an interesting word to introduce into that, because I think all of us as we grow and hopefully our eyes open, you begin to understand the privileges you had. And I grew up with an enormous amount of privilege, I also grew up with a pretty good sense of where I was on the continuum of privilege. Because I came from a middle-class family, my parents owned a corner drugstore and their big priority was to send us off to the school. But my dad died when I was ten and so my mom had to run the drug store which was on Chicago and Franklin. And so my experience was to wake up in the morning, go to school with people who had a lot more money than me and then the delivery guy from our store would pick us up at school and bring us down to Chicago and Franklin, which is a neighborhood where everybody had a lot less than we did. And so we’d finish the day delivering prescriptions around the neighborhood and I went from feeling I was poor during the day to feeling I was rich during the day too. And that was really a pretty formative period for me. That's where I really begin to understand my role in the continuum of privilege you know. I didn't use that kind of language then but just like what is this, why is this world so unfair, unjust, what can I do about that. So I think that was really where privilege started to come in. I mean once I got to be mayor and you live out that kind of thing in a very public way, where people are often confronting you rightfully with the question of ‘do you understand you are privileged?’ ‘do you understand your obligation to address that?’. And that's you know a very different experience, which connects to my work now at the foundation which is focused almost exclusively on equity issues and in between being mayor and that, I ran something called Generation Next which is about closing equity gaps in education. So on some level I've been around that issue and trying to figure out what role I can play to close those gaps while understanding that I come into it with my own obvious amount of privilege.

Sanjit: R.T., when you were at the Minneapolis Tribune and I think that was right after you came back from when you were Boston College. What was your beat, what were you focusing on, what were the stories that you were kind of most interested in? What were the stories that you wanted to cover that you weren't able to cover.

R.T.: Well I only chuckle there because as I said I was very planful and I went off to college, went to Boston College to study all this stuff. I really got to understand cities and I thought really well. So when I interviewed for the job, Terry Murphy, my editor, said ‘what would you like to write about?’. So I gave him this whole thing about how I had a pretty deep knowledge of politics and government and I really understood cities, I wanted to cover architecture and all of that. And finally after I rambled on he said ‘what's the one thing you don't want to cover?’ and I said ‘Crime. I absolutely do not want to cover crime’ and my first day in the office I was assigned to the crime beat. Which was horrible on some level because my job was at night you know I'd start at like what 3 o’clock I guess, three to midnight or something like that. And I’d have to go out and cover the worst thing that happened in the city that day, night after night after night after night and you get really immersed in all of it. Yeah, I hated it and it wound up being absolutely foundational to the way I was able to navigate when I was mayor. And I recognized I was so over my head that the only thing I could honestly do was to show up. And so night after night as mayor just like back when I was a reporter, I would show up at the worst thing that happened in the city that day. And people tell politicians don't do that, people will blame you for that and that's sort of the going line and I did exactly the opposite, I just showed up. And I think that had a lot to do with what I wound up eventually writing about. That was what I care a lot about, which is cities and how they’re planned, how they develop, how they grow, how people interact in them and that became what I wrote the most in. But it was crime that really I think, strangely, I learned the most from.

Sanjit: And I'm sure you're seeing it probably laid bare, kind of a lot of issues regarding inequity and especially since we started to talk earlier about as you start to evolve your own thinking about privilege. Were there specific cases when you were a crime reporter that you thought kind of really laid bare explicitly what you thought were disparities? Whether it was in community support or infrastructure.

R.T.: Oh yeah, well there was first off, it was the idea of the address. Because you would know, you would hear something happened, a murder happened, a kidnapping happened, a domestic abuse, you know whatever. And then you'd wait for the address and you'd wonder if it was south or north and then you'd wonder whether it was south of this street or north of that street. And it became so routine that you knew where you were going to be sent and those are just data points. But very quickly you begin to recognize that crime or any sort of disparity isn't the cumulative impact of disparity, it builds on all of these things. So it's not like there has to be bad people living in this piece of geography, it happens to be where the cumulative impact of poverty and racism and environmental injustice and on and on on has this cumulative impact of poverty, and racism, and environmental injustice and on and on and on as this cumulative impact. And so when you're doing reporting on that, part of what you need to do is to keep stripping back those layers and not allow people to get the news through the prism of ‘oh it happened at that address, I knew it was going to happen there’. You also knew that your story would get played differently in the paper if it was in a neighborhood people expected the crime to be in, versus another one where there was still outrage and the fact that there wasn't outrage in some neighborhoods became increasingly outrageous, especially when even within your own organization of very aware people. A crime in North Minneapolis wouldn't get covered to the degree of crime in Southwest Minneapolis would, because you didn't expect it there. Well that creates this whole self-fulfilling set of things that happens out of that too.

Sanjit: Yeah, and I can imagine that starts to then, working the crime beat, trying to see how these disparities are being enacted in the newspaper that you're working on. It had to have had a profound impact on the way you started to look at your own role as you assumed executive leadership of the city.  

R.T.: Yeah and you know it came out in different ways. One of which is, one of the things you do as a mayor is you are the person in charge of the police department. There's a police chief, but ultimately you are responsible and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we can disrupt police culture. And I think it's probably the single thing that I feel was most unfinished because I felt there were some things we did that helped but, my God, no where near what we needed to.  But you do a ride-along with the cop for a few nights and you look at them, put into situations that you know, into those neighborhoods that I used to cover. And when you lose your ability to be outraged, to be upset, when you begin to assume that it can happen there, you lose a lot of your ability to be a reporter, a police officer, a political leader, and you lose a piece of your humanity and we collectively lose the ability to, or we begin to normalize behavior that we should not accept. And I think that that may sound abstract but in reality what it means is, it goes back to that idea of whether the story gets played on the front page if it’s in North Minneapolis or not.  The idea of what we are willing to accept, plays out on so many levels, like education disparities. The fact that we accept them and nobody's going to say ‘oh yeah I think it's fine to have education disparities’ nobody says that, but the acceptance through passive understanding. We should be outraged every moment of the day that right now there's a kid who is getting an education that is less than, a  black kid is getting an education that is less than their white counterparts. We should be outraged constantly that this community with all of its assets is still one where you can predict the likelihood of a child's success by looking at the color of their skin. The fact that we're not outraged by that and we get really upset about whether Harry and Meghan are moving you know whatever. That, I think that outrage is something that's super important to use as a propellant to action. 

Sanjit: And this idea of talking about disrupting police culture seems like it plays into a significant role in that. And I think of that, within everything from kind of a Black Lives Matter movement, to broader notions of critiquing the notion of what community policing’s intention really was, versus kind of how it's been enacted within communities. So, relationships to stop and frisk, and everything else. I guess I want to know, when you start talking about something like disrupting police culture in relation to looking at issues regarding equity. That's not an easy sell in certain sectors of a community. And how do you make that argument and how do you go ahead and start to talk about those platforms to the people that feel like that maybe rocks the boat a little too far?

R.T.: Yeah well you know one of the things that Ferguson and many of the other issues related to it, came after I was mayor. But it was so evident these issues were not being dealt with, enough on it. And part of the thing that became really clear to me is there's a very big difference between police officers and the dominant police culture. People always begin conversations with ‘I know very good police officers’, well I actually do and I actually know a number who are highly enlightened, are extremely proximate to the issues, and grow with the encounters with the community as opposed to diminishing them, I know a lot. I also know the dominant police culture is so incredibly unsupportive of that and so us versus them and this is universal in police departments. Across the country it varies a lot, but I've done enough compare and contrast and conversations with other people who’ve been in businesses like mine and others. Where the us versus them mentality--and think about this for a second, you know we're safe because somebody else's family member is willing to put themself on the line and okay I don't have to worry about that because somebody's protecting me. So that when you talk about privilege, those of us who don't do police work have a privilege. However when you think about being immersed in it like I was as a reporter, going to the worst thing that happened every day and you begin to normalize that there’s stuff that happens. And when the culture of the department gets to be no one understands us and therefore you begin to detach yourself from the communities you're protecting, that's dangerous.  I remember when there was a woman named Melissa Schmitt, a really great police officer, who was killed my first year in office and it was in the middle of the night, it was like 3 a.m. when we went to announce, maybe it wasn't quite that late, but when we went to announce that she’d died. And there's a big staircase in City Hall, and the lights were all down, you know it was the middle of the night and the police chief and I were walking down the steps to do this makeshift press conference and in the low light I saw these shadows down there. And what I began to make out of it as I came down the steps, was that the atrium of City Hall was jam-packed with hundreds of police officers. And you looked at them and the swagger that you often see with cops was gone and there was, what I interpreted to be, real fright and vulnerability in their faces. That they recognized, at that moment, how vulnerable they are. So there’s all this stuff that goes on in police culture and I can't say I cracked the code on it but I certainly got to know enough about it, to say that we are on a way wrong track on how we provide safety and partnership with our communities.

Sanjit: Talking about community policing and talking about disrupting police culture does seem like it gets at, if it's not the jugular vein, is certainly one of the jugular veins regarding cultural equity and disparity. I guess I'm wondering, how do you start to reflect on what needs to be done in the future? Certainly you've committed yourself to looking at Youth Development and then now with your role with the foundation, a significant series of initiatives that are trying to deal with these types of disparities. Sometimes to me it seems like it's how do you hug a cloud? There are just so many different ways that you can do this. I'm wondering what's your philosophical approach as to where you start?

R.T.: Well one of the reasons I was really excited to be able to work at the Minneapolis Foundation was because it allowed me to work full time in a 360 holistic way on the idea of finally having one community. You know going way back to the way I grabbed them bouncing between people who were wealthier than me, poorer than me, in and out of neighborhoods. What I tried to do was put it all together into one Minneapolis and one world, that's what the foundation does. And then it was even more exciting when I was able to convince Chanda Smith Baker, who is really one of the great community leaders, to be my partner at the foundation and she's done a number of things that have really been the north star for what we've done. Beginning with work that we're going to be leaning into even more deeply on Criminal Justice Reform, partnering on that with the education work that I'm doing, and looking at connections between those two. But she has led work not only about these things and these policies, but values. So we started a series called Conversations with Chanda in which she helps create the space for some of these very difficult conversations about race and equity and culture. And to say it's okay to have these tough discussions but to create the space for it. So we're doing a number of things with the foundation on equity and inclusion, but I think the most important thing we're doing is we’re seeing communities as assets that are not universal; that we all bring different things to the table and that's exactly what makes us strong. And that sounds like a cute little greeting card you read somewhere but it happens to be the truth and it's the fundamental underpinning of all of our work.

Sanjit: Well you know it seems like you were talking about disrupting but we were first talking about disrupting police culture. I wonder what you think is the ways one starts to disrupt philanthropic culture. Cause it seems like there's a lot of, I don't know if I want to call the colonial mentality, but there's still a lot of power structures that exist when one starts to think about how that support is given. And I'm wondering if you start to think about what's agitation and disruption in this arena regarding philanthropy? And how does your work as a journalist and then as a civic leader either provide you with maybe a degree of insight? I'm thinking about that crime beat you know but I'm wondering, what are you able to bring to the table that can at least talk about some of the disruptions that either need to occur or are occurring?

R.T.: Well you know you use that term colonial and I’m fine with using it because it's one we’ve used. We brought in the author of Decolonizing Wealth, which if you can imagine a foundation bringing in somebody to talk about how foundations get and manage their money, that's the kind of conversation we want to have. So you know, unpack that for a second, that this community is incredibly blessed that over a hundred and four year period, we’ve had the Minneapolis Foundation where people have put resources to help build the community, that's amazing. But it also means we've got to really rethink that, for where we are going forward so here's an example: in philanthropy land, a lot of times, especially a few years ago people were saying ‘what's your theory of change, you have to have a theory of change’. Meaning that the foundation would articulate what they thought would make a difference and then if you fit that philosophy you would get money. And that made a lot of sense, it seemed at the time, because we wanted sharp outcomes and you need to be able to measure things and it was very target.  But the challenge with it was, it really sets up the notion that somehow those of us sitting in the IDS Center, which is a very comfortable place to be, have all the answers. Meanwhile there are people out on the ground doing the work and we have asked them to fit into our quote-unquote theory of change. Well at the Minneapolis Foundation, we've thrown out the idea of the theory of change and instead our theory of philanthropy is that we should invest in the partners who are out there doing the work and have them bring us their ideas on how to solve issues. It doesn’t mean we don’t want outcomes, if we want this outcome we can tell you that will give you money if you do it our way or we can say ‘we want this outcome, how would you get there?’. And when you're dealing with equity, that's a really really rich pivot, because what it allows you to do is to recognize that there is no one solution to equity in America. Inequity is America, I mean it’s as old as the country and to unpack that you’re going to have to go on multiple levels. So different people, with different strategies can come forward in criminal justice reform, in the arts, in health and wellness, in food systems, in climate, name it. And our job is to hear those and move those levers, including in a period of time that we're facing as we record this right now with the pandemic as it is growing and we rightfully wanted to really get dollars out into the community but instead of saying our theory of how to fix the community impacts of this virus is X Y and Z. We had a very broad ask and people with a very wide range of options came forward and we've funded them and a lot of times gave them a lot of latitude and that's very different than a the colonial philanthropy strategy of the past or even the sharp period of change philosophy that we don't adhere to anymore.

Sanjit: Well you know I think I just achieved a record just now, I think it's the first conversation I've had with an adult for at least 35 minutes where Covid-19 hadn’t been brought up yet. So I feel like that it's a personal benchmark and I was actually just kind of holding my breath. I certainly have a lot of Covid questions I wanted to ask and I appreciated the fact that I had a 25-30 minute break. But that being said, I think I was probably running out, I was probably done with holding my breath so I’m glad you kind of brought that up. You know it seems to me and then we'll move on to talk about cultural leadership. It is kind of a segway to that, I think the pandemic is that perfect fulcrum. I think because, it seems to me, it's really making a great degree of clarity on the types of disparities that we've always known have existed. And I think you certainly see those in healthcare, you certainly see those in education, and I think you certainly see those just more broadly with socioeconomically previously disadvantaged communities. In terms of access to culture, access to support, access to a psychological and cultural wellness. And I wanted to know, what are some of the radical repositionings that you're thinking about that need to be done on some level in the city and beyond?

R.T.:  Well I'm glad you mentioned repositioning, because often the conversation these days is ‘how do we get back to normal?’. And I paused on this a lot last weekend when I was writing the preface to a report on education equity in the time of distance learning. Because I sort of set up this idea that the overall momentum is to return to normal, but in the case of education we do not want to return to a normal that has massive inequities in education. So the really brilliant research team we have from the University of Minnesota led by Dr. Michael Rodriguez, who is really a gift to the State, brought in a report that you can find on the Minneapolis Foundation website that really impacts this idea of using this as a moment to think very differently.  Here's an example: it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that one of the reasons we had these huge inequities in education is that a kid of color will go through much of their education without seeing hardly any teacher of color. It's also very likely they will see no teachers of color. So if day after day, year after year, the people you see in leadership do not look like you, it again doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that's going to have an impact on education inequities and if the curriculum is drawn by people who have very different life experience in the teaching etc.etc. Pause, now we have this moment where parents are suddenly thrust into this idea of co-teaching with the teachers and you know parents, there's so much on parents right now. But one thing that is happening, is that that kid of color whose entire education experience with leaders teaching them things who don't look like them, who don’t have the same lived experience, now all the sudden have their family, who have the same cultural experience, who understand relevance much more. So a small piece of this is to have families and parents learn much more in cultural relevance in schooling and this is an issue of race and a lot of other things about learning styles, don't walk into this and try to replicate the classroom in your home. There may be some kids like our daughter who follow a lot of rules who would be at, if they say to be at the desk at 10:15 studying math, that's where she would be. And there'll be others who would get it done but not on the same clock, that matters in a classroom but it doesn't matter as much in the online world, especially if you have platforms you can feed into a different time. So the point I'm making is that we're doing this research in real-time but we're going to be continuing to work with our team to look at what we've learned to disrupt the system, we don't want to go back to normal. And it's the same reason why I love the idea that there are swans and jelly fish in the canals of Venice, you can see the Himalayas or what L.A. looks like without smog. We're learning from a climate standpoint, what's happening from this moment, will do the same with culture. What does it mean when fathers are more woven into families, which they are right now, what does it mean when these other things? So I don't mean to give happy talk, this is a horrible thing that we're going through. But every moment of disruption leads to moments of innovation and let's do it.

Sanjit: Right, and I mean I think I that notion that especially from a perspective of higher education, there is no returning back to the way higher education was before. I think this is an opportunity to go ahead and really examine historical inequities and examine ways that you address them and use the chance to start to really think about what it is one's trying to deliver, so I share that sentiment.

R.T.: What are you, when you’re thinking about that, what are you drawing out of that you know? You’re gonna at some point be back in a building presumably with students and all of that. What normal do you not want to go back to or  what do you want to change?

Sanjit: Well you know I think that part of it's the really critical evaluation of what a four-year degree really means. How do we go ahead and take degrees that I've always seen as less than 50% of a undergraduate degree, like the associate's degree and actually consider it to be a meaningful vehicle for someone's professional development? Which really kind of knocks the kneecaps of a lot of institutions of higher education that are based upon an operating premise of someone coming to an institution and staying there for four years. And I'm not entirely sure my CFO wants me saying this right now too but I think that's an example, another example is to really kind of revise the way our financial aid structure is completely. MCAD’s been fortunate to have a high percentage of eligible students and that's phenomenal for the growth of our institution and for the type of cultural diversity you want to see but there's more to be done.

R.T.: Oh I was just going to say, I just finished a really instructive experience, where for the past 6 months I was working with a group in the advisory panel with a new Chancellor of Minnesota State. So you got all the foreign two-year institutions around the state and where do they need to move, so we did a lot of listening and heard different experts from around coming in, traveled around the state. And that point you were making about unpacking the four-year degree is obviously something that's very very hot right now in education and probably going to get hotter. You know you talked about your CFO, they were talking about the idea that the institution lasts off the four-year student who's not maybe going in the 4-year sequence but you pick that up by the lifelong learners, who are returning. So that's sort of that macro-financial pitch about what it means, it does mean there's going to be a whole rethinking this but I love the idea that before this happened in education getting closer to the lived experience. And now when you really think about it, the idea of mixing education and apprentice and hands-on experiences becomes much more viable with some of these distance learning strategies we have, with you know zooming in and out of everywhere else. When you think about how much we spend on transportation or being in the same place and are in these places that separate from the experience. I think there's a lot of really exciting things especially in the idea of creative fields like the ones you have that allow us to not wall ourselves off as much.   

Sanjit: I mean I think that that notion of creativity is a great segway for us to talk a little bit about the notion of cultural leadership. You know I've said that in some ways MCAD’s really not in the business of educating artisan designers, rather they’re educating cultural leaders that have incredibly strong underpinnings and in these historic and innovative traditions whether it's animation or painting or drawing or product design. Because I think they're going to go on to be leaders in their fields but also ideally address some of the most pressing issues of our times. I want to know what your thoughts are when you hear that term cultural leadership, what does it mean to you, what does it bring up for you and what are the kinds of questions you have about it?

R.T.: Well first off it's really good to hear you describing MCAD students that way. It's certainly been my experience with them not only when they're students, but 10, 20, 30 years later. I rarely have the experience and I think somebody went there as a vocational school and instead went there with that deep creative underpinning beneath a really strong cultural lense. To me I think cultural leadership is trying to find ways to, I don't think it needs to be created I think it needs to be uncovered, I think we are naturally creative people. I finally got around to reading Sapiens, which I'm still in the middle of but you know it's a really great book about what’s our natural way and what are the ways that we constrict ourselves. And reading that or like walking into the caves and let's go and seeing what you know, cave people we had anticipated to be like Fred Flintstone are really creating these amazing works of art. We are naturally cultural people and I think we've siloed culture as being on this is how my art goes, and over here is, this is how I relate in a way that deals with this one side of the brain to these sorts of people. The world and the brain to the degree I understand, and I'm no expert on either believe me, is much more connected. So I in my political life always spend a lot of time trying to hold up art and culture, as woven in and integrated. Not that it needs to prove itself or any other reason cause art so often is like we believe art is important because it's a good way for a kid to learn math or something you know. Yeah but that's not the point, the point is that it's an end in itself and it's not an isolated end in itself. So that relates to a physical place, that I would love somebody from MCAD to be in the engineering department at the City of Minneapolis, so that when the road is laid out you look at things differently. I just think it’s every single person is a cultural person and the reason that they don't show up that way is because we put constrictions on people's creativity. We are, you know if we aren't messed around with, we naturally bring culture and especially creativity in every part of our lives unless this world beats the hell out of us. 

Sanjit: Well you know it seems like oftentimes what you see is, creative practitioners are brought in once quote on quote, the problem is solved. They are brought in for that kind of epidural or sorry uh kind of not epidural they’re kind of the kind of like surface-based you know what kind of coding if you will and oftentimes.

R.T.: Epidural works cause it’s numbing. 

Sanjit: It is numbing, exactly I know I was like you know it does work. You know I meant epidermal I realize now upon further reflection. But I think that one thing I'll tell people is that artists and designers should be part of some of the more critical problem solving we see, in part because of three main reasons. One is that they are able to think about the world and embrace the world as an asymmetrical environment; it's not something that always exists as a number and a profit and loss statement. The second reason is that they really understand the iterative process regarding failure in a much more haptic and fundamental way then you can in maybe a poli-sci class. And the third thing is that they approach almost each and every problem as having a cultural dimension to it and whether you're designing a road or a bar of soap or you're looking at food deserts in an urban environment and there's a significant cultural dimension to all of those. And in some ways the reason why I mentioned this too is that one thing that struck me about you and your career was when I think it was in August 2013. Where on the steps of city hall right after midnight, you married that first couple after the marriage equity bill had been passed in the state. And I thought it was really powerful for me and that's an example for me, where a culture and community come together and also where one's taking a stand on things. I wasn't sure if you saw that as a reflection point as well. 

R.T.: Yeah I still get choked up about that night cause it was so cool but it was I think one of the things when you go back to this whole idea about what is our natural state. Our natural state is creative and inclusive and we create these human constructs that isolate these things. So the idea that people with many different backgrounds and orientations and expressions would be part of the quote unquote mainstream should be the most normal thing in the world, it’s a human construct that it's not.  So that night you know I did I think 46 weddings that night if I got that number right and we went from 11 at night said the first I do at midnight and then went all the way till 7 a.m. I think. And the just one after the other after the other after the other other, no two people in a couple were the same and the physical expression, the verbal expression, the movement, everything else all so different in the only thing they had in common was that before midnight they did not have the same rights as my wife and I. That’s the only thing and what I thought was so wonderful about it was it wasn't like okay now let's all have this whole other group get the rights this one group had, no it's really about it so many people from so many different cultures and so many different ways with this one true line that was a human construct. Sexual orientation is a continuum not an absolute and yet we treat it by law as being a you're in or you're out and that's you know we know that's not how these things work. So I do think we need cultural leadership to be based in the idea that the more the merrier.

Sanjit: Right, that kind of notion of inclusion but also it seems like it's about the articulation and the fight for that inclusion too.

R.T.: Yeah, certainly that comes in very dramatic ways and on the shoulders that we all stand on, on every person who broke down every barrier. Sometimes it comes in really small ways, I'll give you one that I think is a strange thing. But like one of the things that's considered one of the, by political folks, as a huge faux pa I did in in my time as mayor is, if you Google Ryback and artist designed drinking fountains you'll see this whole scandal that I tried to create these artist designed drinking fountains. Well the backstory was, my wife had come across a really wonderful production at Heart of the Beast theater and Sandy Spieler did something about water and where it comes from and their drinking fountain was broken. What did that mean? That sort of led to a bunch of things and my wife really came up with this great idea, what we should really do is get artists to design drinking fountains around the city. So I took this in, led the whole thing, got some money from this fund to that. I made a stupid mistake in having it all new drinking fountains so you had to pay for all the plumbing, so the price per unit was expensive. It breaks up into this huge scandal, everybody's freaking out about it and I was sort of holding the bag on this and there was no support, not in public. Now meanwhile I had put a bike coordinator into the budget and somebody tried to take it out and the bike community rose up and defended that and thankfully no one will ever fight having a bike coordinator in Minneapolis again. I tell that story because these seemingly little fights, about trying to weave creativity and other you know these other elements in, there are battles sometimes. And sometimes they’re big values battles and all that but sometimes they're like in the weeds, in the you know when somebody's trying to do something that's about our piece of infrastructure and having creativity woven into it and you gotta fight for it. And so I think too often those who look for a creative world are not willing to roll up their sleeves and fight in the uncreative places where those battles are sometimes won and lost.  

Sanjit: You know R.T. there is always and I think probably more apparent now, kind of disparities especially within creative practitioners who have access to affordable studio spaces. Who have the ability to go ahead and feel like their work or their voice is represented at major cultural institutions, who have a pathway into looking at ascending into leadership and then representation roles within cultural organizations. Have you thought about ways that those systems could possibly shift? Are there specific things that you think the foundation is doing to try to nudge that along or to propel that? Is this partially an issue about mentorship and opportunity or is this about kind of more significant policy shifts?

R.T.: It's a really good question. I mean there are huge doctoral theses and a billion people taking this thing on for years, so I mean take my thoughts with a grain of salt and all of this. I think the one thing I've been thinking about more on that topic, cause I think a lot about that, and you know I'll see some great things, like the amazing exhibit at the institute with native women. I just say oh my God this can be done so well right now.  So take visual art and then put it up against popular music, why has there been such a clear established through line in popular music that has acknowledged that well let's get real the best music emerges from places where cultures mix and especially in the United States out of African-American culture. Okay you don't question that in music, that's just sort of a given; why not in visual art, what's the difference? And I mean you could look at it and not only music, but all sorts of trends in fashion and everything else. What’s often I think dismissed as a street cultural issue or this or that is really the idea that if you look at popular culture in America, African Americans have driven an enormous amount of it for a whole long time.  But why this thing about the museum, why is it so different? I perceive it to be even with museums really trying and all that, and I don't exactly know how to crack that code but it's really different than what we call popular music and is not translated as much into popular art. Not pop art, but popular art you know so I don't get exactly how to crack the code but I do think there's something to be said in why music, more than others; is it there are gatekeepers, is it there is a bigger cost of entry? I don't know but it's definitely the question to ask now, what is the foundation doing about it? One of the things we're doing is certainly in institutions like Juxtaposition for instance is a great one, Pillsbury House Theater you know you can go on with organizations like Theater Mu. People who for years have been in this, Mixed Blood Theater, Jack Riller has been at this for decades. You know so lots and lots of people are doing lots of really great work but I don't think we've cracked the code on that one yet.

Sanjit: Yeah, and I mean I think it's an ongoing struggle and it’s an ongoing place for growth. I am conscious of time but you know it's hard for me as we start to talk about where we are now and thinking about covid-19 but also just thinking about the past 3 years of where we've been as a country. And I was thinking about the lengthy Facebook post you put up in January of 2017 where I think you were in Washington D.C. and just down the street from where I was working, I was at the Corcoran on 17th and E. And it looked like you just had a meeting with Barack Obama and if I'm not mistaken you're also part of the Obama movement, and I guess it seemed like that post had a degree of optimism to it at the national level, Do you still share that optimism, has that optimism been contorted, altered, changed, or reaffirmed?

R.T.: I am right now optimistic about where we're going. Between that post and now, I couldn't ever have possibly imagined how bad it would get and I believe our country is as close to losing what is, as it's ever been. I believe we've uncovered and made normal hideous racism, denigration of Human Rights, hate, I mean I could go on.I'm not going to do any kind of sugar coating over what I think has been absolutely hideous leadership that has exploited our weaknesses and divisions and done everything humanly possible to rob what is special about the country that I love. I'm not going to get any happy talk about it. I do think, I see there is, I know that it's not just me feeling this, from you know from polling etc. etc. etc. that the vast majority of this country does not feel that way. And there have been times in these past couple years where I have been in such deep mourning for my country and worried so deeply about it but I think the fever is breaking and it can't happen soon enough.

Sanjit: I think that may be a perfect note to end on. Thanks so much for joining me today, I really appreciate it.

R.T.: Thank you.