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By: Alice Rapacz & Cameron Garcia-Nelson

Environmental racism is a big problem in Minnesota. Environmental racism is when neighborhoods of color and indigenous neighborhoods are at a higher risk to environmental harm. These neighborhoods are at a 91% risk of above air pollution guidelines. There are many neighborhoods here in Minnesota that are affected like the Rondo neighborhood and the East Phillips neighborhood. The harmful pollution can come from factories, waste facilities, construction, and vehicles. White neighborhoods have much better health compared to neighborhoods of color and indigenous neighborhoods. The pollution causes people to have asthma-like symptoms and heart disease. Nitrogen dioxide is what pollutes the air and causes people to have these symptoms.

For my final capstone project in my Critical Ethnic Studies class, my partner and I decided to do our project on environmental racism because it is a very real and current issue that affects people all over Minnesota. For the project it contained our final product, a paper, and an evaluation of what we learned from our project and the class.

For our final project, we decided to do a website that would be able to inform Highland Park students, staff, and community about environmental racism. We did a lot of research learning about what environmental racism is, who is affected by it, how, and so much more. We read stories from people who suffered from the harmful pollutants in the air and how their health was at risk due to it. We learned about different forms of pollution and what areas they affect. We put all this information on our website so that people reading it would be informed.

Here is the link to our final capstone website. There is some of the information above and so much more so that you can be educated on about environmental racism. We also included how you can help and make an impact on changing this issue.

By: Siri David

As a sophomore at Highland all students are required to take critical ethnic studies. There is a semester project we do where we have to find a topic with local significance and share our knowledge about the topic and an action plan of how we’re going to get the information out into our community.

For my project, I wrote a poem about being multiracial and how society sets up these stereotypes that create insecurities and mental health issues for multiracial people all over the United States. This is a topic that is really important to me because I am multiracial and for the longest time this was something I was insecure about, so I wanted to bring more light to the topic.

Over the whole semester I have been researching the history of multiracial people. Multiracial people first came to be when European settlers would take Native women as companions, and once settlement increased, marriages and unions between European settlers and Natives became more common. For a long time multiracial marriages were illegal in the United States though. In 1967, the bill Loving V. Virginia was passed which allowed interracial marriage all over the nation.

Along with learning about history I also learned about the current issues that multiracial people struggle with. There are many stereotypes and issues set around multiracial people and these cause a lot of mental health issues. A lot of people imply the idea that multiracial people don’t belong anywhere since they aren’t 100% of a specific racial group. This leads multiracial people to struggle with their identity a lot. The mental illness that is related to this is called imposter syndrome. This is just one example of the effects from the negative ideas people create around multiracial people.

For my poem, I chose to write it about the current issues and not the history of the topic. I wanted to really show how multiracial people feel and the raw emotions that come with it. I also wanted to show how these ideas and ideas around putting people into “groups” start when we are so young. In my poem I don’t state that I am talking about multiracial people because I wanted people to have to think about it. I want them to think about who they think is affected in our society like this. After they read the poem there is context behind it that is shared. For example this article.