I am African American. For the past year, we have been at home due to the pandemic. During this time, I have done a great deal of walking around the neighborhood with my daughters. I have noticed that at the beginning of the pandemic, people (white) were more neighborly and I started to get a sense that we were all in this together and after the Black Lives Matter movement, things were going in the right direction. As the year has gone on, I have watched my neighbors return to their old ways of speaking when they felt like it and acting as if they didn’t know us when it was convenient. I was hopeful and I guess foolish enough to think that the pandemic would help bring us together, but I guess it’s going to take more than a pandemic to overcome racism.
