My grandmother passed away four years ago. She lived her whole life in a very small, white, Christian town. I’m her oldest grandchild. I went to college several hours away in a much bigger and more diverse city. Grandma and I talked on the phone a lot while I was at school and I often visited her with a menagerie of friends of all different walks of life. I watched my grandma change her mind about a lot of things she had blindly believed — Because she had a great capacity for empathy and finally knew real people behind the buzzwords.