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Mapping Prejudice History — from Website <br />Our history <br />Mapping Prejudice began in 2016 as an experiment. The team wondered whether a new awareness of <br />racial covenants could help people see what Ibram X. Kendi calls the "racism behind those racial <br />disparities." We drew on the tools of the digital humanities and tenets of public history to develop a <br />methodology that mobilized community members to read historical property deeds and transcribe the <br />information necessary to locate racial restrictions on a digital map. <br />The resulting maps have helped to change popular understandings of structural racism in Minnesota. <br />The dataset has opened new avenues for researchers seeking to document the harm wrought by racist <br />policies. <br />This work was born of community need in Minnesota, which has some of the largest racial disparities in <br />the nation. These inequities are most pronounced in the area of housing, which is foundational to health <br />and well-being. The Twin Cities has the highest gap between black and white homeownership rates for <br />any major metropolitan area in the country. While 78 percent of White families own homes in the Twin <br />Cities, only 25 percent of Black families are homeowners. <br />After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Mapping Prejudice found itself at the epicenter of a global <br />movement for racial justice as people from around the world tried to understand why this started in <br />Minneapolis. <br />The work ahead <br />Our map of racial restrictions in Hennepin County was the first -ever comprehensive visualization of <br />racial covenants for an American city. In 2020, we expanded our focus to include neighboring Ramsey <br />County, where we are working with our sister project Welcoming the Dear Neighbor? to engage <br />community members around this history and data. <br />At the same time we are processing property records from geographies around the country. We are <br />actively identifying and mapping racial covenants in Dakota and Anoka counties in Minnesota, and <br />in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. We are working toward building a comprehensive database of racial <br />covenants in the Twin Cities metro area, and are building collaborations in other counties across <br />Minnesota. <br />We are developing our technical platform so that we can give it to any community that would like to <br />explore this same history. <br />At the same time, we are rooting ourselves more deeply in our local context, cultivating our <br />relationships with community partners in Minnesota that can translate the enhanced awareness of <br />history into meaningful change. <br />