Originally, the appellation ‘Karen’ meant “demanding older White woman” in the context of customer service.
After seeing the term used to describe certain older White female politicians, I started thinking that much of the time, ‘Karen’ has evolved to mean “White bitch” generally.
I think that using a derogatory term which specifically calls out race and gender is not OK. But it seems the consensus is that White people are fair game for jokey name-calling, and that most women who are called ‘Karens’ are bitchy anyway, so they deserve it.
The Karen stereotype denotes an old white mom, usually in 40-50s, with multiple kids, domineering soccer mom, henpecking wife, “I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR MANAGER” because she can’t get her coupon honored at a store, etc.
The OP is asking if this is racist and sexist because it specifically targets a subset of white women.
Couldn’t this argument be used to show that every single meme ever created is racist/sexist because the original picture is of a person with a race and gender? Bad news Brian? Overly obsessed girlfriend? Success kid? Ermahgerd? Good guy Greg? Willie Wonka?
I do think it’s demeaning to people with that name. Which isn’t to say one can never propagate things that single out people’s names for their humor but I think this thing’s had its 15 minutes.
I’ve never seen it used to demean someone explicitly for their race, only for their privileged and entitled attitude. But it’s a demeaning epithet, and it’s only ever applied to white women, I guess that’s the argument.
A similar kind of epithet used against a minority racial group would not be acceptable, but I think this is a case where it’s not symmetrical, and where the [prejudice+power] view of racism is applicable. To at least some extent, the stereotyped entitled attitude reflects the privileged position and attitude of white people. It makes little sense to say that you can’t call out white privilege because that’s racist against white people.
No, I don’t think it has. But I must say I find it very odd lately, this trend of having stereotypes of people personified with names. Karen, Chad, Stacy, and Becky are four that seem to have emerged just over the past few years. I can’t really think of any precedent for it (in American culture) other than maybe the name “Bubba” for a generic “hillbilly.” I find this name-character-stereotype thing rather annoying, to be honest.
It’s not a regional thing, it’s an internet meme thing. Something you’d encounter on social media or reddit. Originally it would typically when somebody films an entitled middle-aged white woman abusing retail staff, but I’d say the usage has widened to nasty entitled white women having public meltdowns for other reasons - ranting at cops when they have been pulled over, for example; perhaps even situations where it’s a white woman saying nasty racist things. But certainly always white women.
My FB friend are always posting Karen memes, and I asked where that came from and they had no idea. My wife’s name is Karen. She wasn’t familiar with that idea either.
