Katrina, a 47-year-old Black woman participating in a December 2019 focus group of Black middle-class women in Wichita, summed up her feelings about the violence and inequality that Black people face in the U.S. rather succinctly, “Just the general state of the world; it's just very depressing.” [i]

In a pre-COVID world, Katrina, the mother of a 17-year-old son, admitted that not getting a text from her son when he was out would make her “a nervous wreck.” “There was a couple of times I drove to the school to be sure he was there because once he got in the school, he turned his phone off, and I couldn’t get in touch with him... So I’d just drive to the school to see “‘Okay, his car’s here.’”

During a May 2020 follow-up interview, Katrina admitted to having coached him on what to do if he was ever stopped by the police as he drove school. Katrina shared that every morning, “he has to text me when he gets to school, and he has to text me when he’s leaving,” adding that “every now and then he forgets. Like, when he was going to school, he’d get to school, and he’d forget to text me.”

For this worried mom of a Black son, one of the silver linings of the pandemic has been that, because of remote schooling, she doesn’t have to worry about her 17-year-old driving across town to school for a while.

Katrina also described how her perspective on racial inequality — and police killings in the U.S. — had changed. There was a time when she believed that “as long as your kid’s not doing something wrong, it’s going to be okay.” But then she began to realize that “people that weren’t doing something wrong started getting killed, and then it’s like, “‘Oh, okay, it’s just because he’s Black that I’ve got to worry now.’”

The extrajudicial murders of Ahmaud Arbery by Gregory and Travis McMichael while he was jogging in his South Georgia neighborhood followed by the high-profile murders of Breonna Taylor in her home by plainclothes Louisville police officers Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove, and the death of George Floyd under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin heightened the awareness of the injustice we had all been living with.

“In the last few years, it’s just been… I don’t think it’s changed, I think all these things have been going on before, it just wasn't brought to the forefront as much as it is now. So, there's a lot more concern, especially for a Black son. I think about it a whole lot more than I ever thought I would have years ago. Just because what's been going on with Black kids being killed by police.”

“And we moved into a predominantly white neighborhood,” Katrina shared. “We live in a neighborhood association, and they have a little lake with a thing you can walk around.” Now, she feels anxiety every time her son, who plays baseball, football, and runs track, wants to go outside to run. “It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, God! You don't even feel safe with him going in the neighborhood running?’”

Katrina is not alone in her anxiety or her mistrust and fear of the police. According to a May 2021 poll, these feelings are shared by many others. Almost one-third of Americans (32%) reported thinking that the police in their community treat people of color more harshly, an increase since 2015. Just over 60% of Black people reported often or sometimes experiencing discrimination because of their race, and nearly two-thirds of Americans (67%) think that current policies surrounding police use of force should be reformed.

The COVID-19 pandemic shined a necessary and painful light on American society, revealing long neglected health inequities and exposing longstanding deep fissures that exist along the lines of race. As this nation moves towards a new normal in a seemingly post-pandemic environment, it is important to reimagine our collective approach to public safety to create an American society that supports our well-being and protects us all.

[i] Methodological Endnote:                                             

This data comes from the 2019-2020 American Middle Class Hopes and Anxieties Study (AMCHAS) conducted by the Brookings Institution Future of the Middle Class Initiative (FMCI). This work was done in partnership with sociologist and ethnographer Dr. Jennifer Silver and the Econometrica, Inc. research firm.

AMCHAS is a national qualitative data collection project intended to strengthen what is known about middle-class well-being in the U.S. and to inform policy to support it. We launched AMCHAS in fall 2019 to facilitate our qualitative exploration of happiness, hope, and anxiety related to how middle-class Americans spend their time, their financial security and health, how they think about relationships and respect, and how these concepts might differ by race/ethnicity and/or gender. Because of the timing of this work, AMCHAS gathered people’s experiences with time, money, health, respect, and relationships prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and in the early months of it in the U.S. (May 2020).

AMCHAS included 12 race-gender stratified focus groups and 15 in-depth interviews with middle-class Americans living in Houston, TX; Las Vegas, NV; Wichita, KS; Lebanon, PA; and Prince George’s County, MD. We held two focus groups for each of the six race-genders included in our study (Black women, Black men, Latina women, Latino men, white women, and white men). This approach allowed different middle-class race-gender groups to talk openly about their experiences in their workplaces, with their families, communities, and in their everyday lives. Our definition of the middle class included individuals living in households with incomes ranging from $22,900-$130,900, in line with the FMCI definition which considers households in the middle 60% of the income distribution as “middle class.”