It s not that Jordan Kennedy gets emotional talking about the stress of 2020. The words don t run together; the voice doesn t get louder. But what s noticeable is that an hour into the conversation, he s still going.
His sister lives in New York, where some of the grimmest images of the pandemic played out. His hometown of Burnsville, Minnesota, is just minutes from where George Floyd died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. Even the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha didn t seem far away, sparking protests across the state. Literally, for a person of color, these are matters of survival, said Kennedy, a junior studying finance and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.