Meditations on the Karen
In the last few years, we’ve witnessed the white woman’s reckoning in American society. In the wake of Trump’s election, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) were at pains to remind everyone that 52 percent of white women voted for him. Throughout his presidency, Trump trotted out white women who defended him, lied for him, and generally did his bidding. I think it landed hard for many white women when they saw that they, too, could be complicit in creating and maintaining systems of white supremacy.
Not uncoincidentally, we have also seen the rise of a new American villain -- the Karen. Who or what is a Karen? As one journalist put it, “it’s a slang term for middle-aged white women…who have become infamous online for their shameless displays of entitlement, privilege, and racism — and their tendency to call the police when they don’t get what they want.” In other words, she is the white woman who weaponizes her femininity to police Black and Brown people, often with the help of actual police.
Karens have been busy these last two years. There was BBQ Becky who called the cops on two Black men barbecuing in the designated grilling area in Northern CA. There was Poolside Patty who drunkenly called the cops to report Black people at the pool after a Black woman said she didn’t want to speak with her. And lest we forget, there was Amy Cooper who phoned the police on Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, in Central Park. These are just a few examples. The last two years have furnished many more.
The Karen phenomenon is not only about white women who call the cops on Black people. It’s how they leverage their specific form of (white) femininity and assumptions about their (white) fragility in the process. Time and time again, we’ve borne witness to how Karens put on a particular kind of hysterical emotional display to suggest that they are in grave physical danger. Tears, histrionics, voices high-pitched and breathless – they engage in a performance of fear of the dangerous Black or Brown other.
We know all this to be true because 911 calls were recorded, bystanders taped them. We’ve seen with our very own eyes Karen’s instantaneous transformation from bully to victim. And all of it has gone viral on social media, a distressing reminder that more often than not white folks will only be held responsible for their racist behavior if and only if they are caught on tape. It’s a sad state in America when Black and Brown people in this country have to resort to live streaming their assaults online as a form of life insurance.
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Nearly twenty years ago, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva wrote a book about how colorblind racism came to operate in the US in the post-Civil Rights era. He more or less argues that a particular racial frame – that of supposed colorblindness – perpetuates racial inequality in the US. But, happily, towards the end, he draws attention to one group who are likely to serve as allies to BIPOC in the struggle for racial equality: white working-class women. According to his thinking, white working-class women experience the “double handicap” of gender and class. They are thus capable of being more empathetic towards those who face similar structural and interpersonal hurdles. He applauds these potential “white traitors” and thinks of them as the most likely allies that BIPOC are likely to find in the struggle for racial justice.
I admit that in the wake of the last four years, this assertion has not exactly aged well. White working-class women, like middle-class suburban white women, have shown themselves to be avid supporters of Trump and his fascist agenda. As many of them like to point out, they’re perhaps not as fanatical in their support of Trump as white men, but I scarcely think that’s something to brag about…
As you know, I often refract what I see happening in the wider world through my own lens as a DEI administrator and consultant. In that particular world, I have largely found Bonilla Silva’s assertion to be true – at least, for myself. White working-class women are often my partners, collaborators, and co-conspirators in the pursuit of educational equity in elite educational institutions where I have led DEI work. Importantly, however, wealthy and middle-class white women are decidedly not. I think of the wealthy white mother of a former student who publicly and vocally humiliated me whenever she got the chance. Or the middle-aged white woman (and senior leader, to boot) who, following a Black alumni gathering during the George Floyd protests, snapped, “They should just be glad they got to go to this school.”
To be fair, I don’t always see eye to eye with working-class white women, either. There have been plenty of times I’ve felt compelled to push back when a white girlfriend tries to make the argument that as a poor white person she experienced just as much bias and discrimination as BIPOC in her lifetime. This is typically a preface to a bootstrapping argument. And I’ve opted to bow out of more than one white woman’s “anti-racist book club” because the organizers and attendees overwhelmed me with their white guilt and sorrow, moving our attention away from the matter at hand – racism.
In the last six months, I have interviewed countless DEI practitioners for my new book project. They are largely Black women, many of whom began this work decades ago. There are several similarities in their stories. Nearly all point to the persistence of conflict with white women. For most, white women posed an obstacle to equity work and they do still. Why? Namely because white women view themselves as an oppressed category of people in the US but fail to recognize that their white racial privilege nevertheless accords them certain advantages. Today’s DEI practitioners continue to face off with white women colleagues. Indeed, one senior leader entreated me to write about this very topic.
One thing these women of color often had to put up with is what Robin DiAngelo has dubbed “white women’s tears.” The term has gone mainstream – at least in my circles – but for clarity’s sake: it refers to the ways that some white women weaponize emotion in the form of, yes, tears, in order to express their guilt, sadness, and discomfort with conversations about race and racism. Though it may not be their intention, the phenomenon of white women’s tears serves to direct attention away from the topic at hand and refocus it instead on their feelings of victimization and persecution. This can in turn activate white male protectiveness and bring the entire conversation to a stop. In the eyes of BIPOC, white women’s tears, whether employed intentionally or not, can often feel like a deflection tool.
At this point you may be thinking this has been a hit piece on white women. But my mind turns to questions of my own relationship to white womanhood and white femininity. As I’ve recently written, as a South-Asian American woman, I experience a sort of proximity to whiteness, compounded also by my socialization into white culture as a result of having grown up in a wealthy white suburban neighborhood and attended predominantly white schools and universities my whole life. And as both research and lived experience show, today Asian American woman like me have a lot in common with white women. Most significantly for this conversation, Asian-American femininity bears a remarkable resemblance to white femininity. Like white women, we are often coded as delicate and dainty, more likely to be docile and obedient. We are, above all, helpless, vulnerable, and in need of white male protection. This is worlds apart from the stereotypes applied to Black and Latina women who are typically seen as loud, aggressive, and out of control.
Why does this matter? I’ve already thought through how race and gender stereotypes pose different challenges to folks in the workplace, especially for DEI practitioners. But I also wonder if this might in some small way contribute to the fast friendships that I am able to develop with white women, and especially working-class white women. In addition to the fact that Asian American women have different, more positive stereotypes about them (the “model minority myth”) is it not also possible that we are better able to identify with one another because of the similar forms of femininity that we inhabit? Is it possible, then, that I can walk into an institution with the knowledge that I will have institutional partners who will rapidly support me because, in some small way, they recognize me as a kindred spirit?
All of which brings me back to the subject of this post – the Karen. If white women and I inhabit similar femininities, does it not stand to reason that I, too, have a Karen lurking inside me? I’ve recently turned a critical eye on my past, searching for ways that my inner Karen might have reared her ugly head. I am, in part, aided by Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy handbook. And I have not liked what I’ve found. I will not share it all here because I am too ashamed. But I do share my thinking here because maybe it’ll inspire some of you to question your own racialized femininity.
As a final note: Even as I type these last sentences, I realize that I have assumed a white and perhaps Asian-American female audience. I have, in other words, spoken to you because I identify with you, not “them.” And this is precisely the problem…