Listen to Dr. Marcia F. Robinson, SPHR, SCP who is a Doctor of Business Administration share her experience as a Black Jamaican American living and working in the Greater Philadelphia Area during the Covid-19 pandemic that caused her high blood pressure as an HR professional navigating leadership and staff. She asked questions like: “If this person can’t be here at this time, because they have to be homeschooling their children, what’s wrong with us splitting up the [work] day? Exactly why can’t we do that? We had to challenge a lot of what we took for granted…”
Dr. Robinson shares about losing two cousins in Queens, New York — one in 2020 and one in 2021 — and attending ten funerals on Zoom and YouTube, due to restrictions to the number of people gathering to prevent the spread of the virus. She says, “I always think about my two cousins…they’re a year a part [in their Covid-19 deaths], so you know…it hasn’t gone away. ”
Dr. Robinson talks about the social justice movement that sprang up out of the George Floyd killing during the pandemic: “I try to see what’s good that’s come out of [the pandemic]. I think that there’s a promise that we can be a different kind of country because we realized that we were all kind of suffering through Covid together and we all observed the George Floyd situation And Ahmaud Arbery and we saw them all in front of our faces and people couldn’t deny it…”
The pandemic made us feel like “We were all in it together.”
