When police officers murdered Minneapolis resident George Floyd in 2020, and America went through what some people called a “racial reckoning,” a portion of the population seemed ready to have that “talk” about power and privilege that they had been avoiding. As fleeting at this moment was, it did create a cultural shift in business as usual that would’ve been unlikely years before.

Some of the changes didn’t last long. Corporations and colleges quietly removed positions at their organizations that were created to guide their organizations toward “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Once a major part of the political discourse, the term “police reform” seems to have vanished from the conversation. Despite calls to “defund the police,” most cities gave them a raise in 2022, according to a Los Angeles Times story.

The more substantial and lasting changes, however, may have been the symbolic ones. Sports teams named after Native Americans finally got new names. Confederate flags were taken down, along with statues of soldiers and generals who fought beneath it. Musical acts, such as Lady Antebellum and Dixie Chicks, shed their old monikers. And so did a lot of public schools. Including two in Shenandoah County, where School Board representatives recently decided they want the old names back.

This week, the Virginia NAACP filed suit against the Shenandoah County School Board for, in a sense, re-upping on racism when they decided to rename schools after Confederate leaders Turner Ashby, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

The board’s unfortunate decision is a sobering reminder that while events of 2020 made people start to think about racism, making real change takes years of work. And that we’ve come too far to turn around now.