Coping While Black: Comparing Coping Strategies Across COVID-19 and the Killing of Black People

Abstract

In the same year the world was thrown into turmoil with COVID-19, the USA also experienced a surge in attention given to the plight of Black people in the policing system, following the killing of George Floyd. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing “pandemic” of police and White violence against Black people in the USA cause significant amounts of stress, disproportionately affecting Black people. Utilizing qualitative analysis of responses from 128 Black-identifying participants to an online survey, this investigation seeks to understand how the coping strategies of Black people in the USA compare between the racism-related stressor of police killings of Black people and the generalized stressor of the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings demonstrate that while Black people use overlapping strategies to deal with stress, clear patterns exist with regard to differences across racism-related and non-racism-related stressors. We report important implications for understanding the impact of COVID-19 on Black people, cultural understandings of research on coping, and Black mental health more broadly.