I meant the power of law enforcement, or security guards, or whoever is charged with enforcing the rules.
If someone is overconfident in their own power, I don’t see it as a problem. If they indeed have the power, good for them. If they don’t, they’ll pay the price for their overconfidence.
Karen is different because she knows she has the power of 911 behind her. Or the store manager, or whoever. She doesn’t have to engage in conflict resolution with you. She knows she can make a phone call and solve her problem. She might know this will ruin someone’s day or possibly their life. But she doesn’t have to know or care, so she probably doesn’t.
I’m not discounting your story BTW. It serves to show that lots of people are potential Karens, and they only lack access to the right kind of power.
AFAICT, most of the time, Karen is not calling police on a black person. Most of the time Karen just wants to speak to the manager, regardless of the ethnicity of the person she’s assuming is an employee who failed to do as she wished.
My mother is upper middle-class. She doesn’t wield the power that an upper middle class white Karen has. But she does have power that a poor person doesn’t have. If she wanted to shed some “white tears” on a 911 call, she definitely could. She has mastered the quintessential white lady phone voice.
Thing is, my mother isn’t Karen enough to sic the police on someone. She will definitely talk to someone’s manager and get someone fired, though.
I would agree with DrDeth. The term IS racist, sexist, misogynistic and classist. There are no “Black Karens” because, by definition, the term “Karen” refers to an obnoxiously entitled white, upper-middle class woman (hence the generically white, upper-middle class name).
Sort of offensive to all perfectly normal women named Karen, which happens to be a very common first name. I genuinely wonder how people whose names are (mis)used in this manner cope with it. John is another example - wonder how it came to be associated with toilets? Insulting. Imagine the plight of Karen J Weiner, if such a one exists…
Interesting discussion. I would add a sense of entitlement, a serious disregard for minding one’s own business, and complaining about being filmed. Like what many of you have said. Of course, a lot of Karenism is tied to social privilege which means White folks are more likely to engage in said behavior.
However I do have one example of Karen behavior by a Black woman, and I cringe every time I see it. There’s a scintilla of a point here, that might be worth discussing, but from what I can tell she berates a White kid for his hair and puts hands on him.
I should note there’s a robust debate about what happened before the video starts, some said the White student called her out of her name. I know what cultural appropriation is, but as dreadlocks are the natural state of uncombed curly hair, I think she’s on thin ice…
Certainly more white “Entitled complainers” than other races, but by no means is there a strict racial divide. And of course males can act like that also.
Sure the “poster child” is a Middle aged White Woman, but it is by no means exclusive.
There is a long history in America of black people having a name for an aggressively demanding white woman. Miss Anne is one of the first such names and it dates back to the days of slavery. A Miss Anne was the wife or daughter of the plantation owner who would get blacks in trouble with authorities. The name Karen applied to these women is recent and seems to stem from a merging of the Miss Anne trope with a Karen meme that developed on Reddit. Here is a link to a fascinating podcast on the subject:
Oh absolutely. The whole “Karen” meme isn’t really a race-based thing, except insofar as most women in the US are white, so the stereotypical “Karen” is white.
But “Karens” come in all races, and really even genders. Back in my sporting goods retail days, I had a white male Karen show up- he got all pissed that I couldn’t guarantee that he’d receive the sale price on a queen-sized air mattress of a particular brand that we had for another specific brand of full sized air mattress that had already sold out. In essence, we had a sale on Chevy Novas, and he got pissed that since we had sold out of Chevy Novas, that we wouldn’t give him a full-sized Cadillac for the same price. I tried telling him that it wasn’t how it worked- that he could have a rain check, and we’d call him when it was back in stock, but merely being out of stock didn’t entitle him to any other air mattress of his choice at the same price.
He ranted at me about how we needed to honor our sale, blah blah, demanded to see the manager, and last I saw him, he was ranting at the manager about the same thing, despite having the manager say the exact same thing to him. I suspect he either took it to the store’s general manager, or the corporate office. I hope they all told him to pound sand.
Wow! She’s insane. Why the hell does she think she can go up to that guy and touch him like that? His hair is none of her damm business. Yup, that’s a “Karen”-type personality, fer sure.
I will never get the “dreadlocks are cultural appropriation” thing. Locks and other hairstyles that are popular among black folks can certainly be used to side-eye worthy, attention-seeking purposes. But they can also just be hairstyles that people wear because they like them.
yooooooooooo @monstro!!! Been too long sis. Raising these kids and academic administration kept me away but I’m wading back into the Doper pool.
I’m with you. It’s like a while ago when Americans went in on Adele for getting Bantu knots at the Notting Hill Carnival. That was completely appropriate and loved by West Indians in Notting Hill. If you did that in the U.S. it would probably not go over well.
That lady… again, with the knowledge that there might have been some stuff happening BEFORE the camera was rolling… I’m just wondering why she expended the energy and life force to deal with this young fellow.
I mean, if you and me kick it, and I think you could use a course correction, I might lean in and have a word if it bothered me… I do see a small fragment of her point. But if this is just some dude you crossed paths with, why not just keep it moving and save it for things that matter?
It’s not like our life expectancy goes that long. Preserve your energy, sis!
