| Sumario: | The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented changes to the way people work, study, and communicate. With many businesses and schools closed, and millions of people forced to work and study from home, access to high-speed internet has become more critical than ever before. However, the pandemic has also exposed deep-seated racial inequalities in internet speed, with people of color experiencing slower internet speeds compared to their white counterparts. We find that neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents tend to have better download speeds but worse upload speeds. Notably, upload speeds are especially important for video communication, which massively proliferated during the pandemic. Further, upload speeds in Black neighborhoods have consistently fallen relative to white neighborhoods during the pandemic. This trend has substantial implications for racial inequality in the digital age.
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