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It is not ok to label all middle aged white women as "a Karen"

sharon sanders

sharon sanders

Editor-in-Chief & President
This is not acceptable. I am in the middle aged / senior white woman category. How is it ok to ever refer to me "a Karen"?

We can not hope to be a more cohesive society if we are adding stereotypes to our culture.
 
I think so! In this day of social progress it is divisive to perpetuate another negative stereotype as acceptable. "Karen" name calling is all over social media in the last couple of weeks and it is becoming commonplace. For those of us who were at the forefront as women left the secretarial pools for the board rooms - it is quite insulting.
 
Actually we have seen this 'attitude' all along with this pandemic. It has been a technique used to degrade the severity of the COVID-19. We have seen it with the resistance of wearing masks, the "its only the flu", "it'll be over soon", " and hundreds of deliberate COVID-19 hacks that have been occurring in the United States.
I wonder "who" would be so devious to attack the health of people, and why.
Do we need to see a plastered cast to believe the bone is actually fractured? :)
 
The bullying and worse of women, especially older women, has been a gambit of opportunistic cowards for far longer than I have been alive. It also shuts down reasonable debates, but so does assuming that differences of opinions about mask wearing and disease impacts are coming from dark motives.
 
If all it takes to be a "Karen" is to be a middle aged, white, woman, then perhaps 25% of the US would be Karens. Maybe more. Anyone making that assumption is clearly misusing or misunderstanding the term, perhaps intentionally.

I've seen the term used in two main contexts:

1. When "Karen" is using her status as a "wealthy" consumer to bully a low-wage employee for her own benefit. The stereotypical example is Karen demanding a free meal in a McDonalds because her Big Mac had too many pickles on it, or something of that nature.
2. When "Karen" calls the police on a non-white individual for doing something routine, incorrectly reporting it as suspicious.

Karen #1 is a bully; Karen #2 is a bigot. The state of California is considering a bill that they called the CAREN Act that actually criminalizes action #2.

Until a couple weeks ago, I had only heard the term used in the first sense, but apparently both uses are fairly common. I am not aware of the widespread use of the term to describe ALL white women of a certain age.
 
"The 'CAREN Act' (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) was introduced on Tuesday at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting by Supervisor Shamann Walton. The ordinance's name is a twist on 'Karen,' the name social media gives people making racially biased 911 calls. And it's not just 'Karen.' There are also names like 'Becky,' which has also come to symbolize a stereotype of whiteness." link
 
alert said:
If all it takes to be a "Karen" is to be a middle aged, white, woman, then perhaps 25% of the US would be Karens. Maybe more. Anyone making that assumption is clearly misusing or misunderstanding the term, perhaps intentionally.

I've seen the term used in two main contexts:

1. When "Karen" is using her status as a "wealthy" consumer to bully a low-wage employee for her own benefit. The stereotypical example is Karen demanding a free meal in a McDonalds because her Big Mac had too many pickles on it, or something of that nature.
2. When "Karen" calls the police on a non-white individual for doing something routine, incorrectly reporting it as suspicious.

Karen #1 is a bully; Karen #2 is a bigot. The state of California is considering a bill that they called the CAREN Act that actually criminalizes action #2.

Until a couple weeks ago, I had only heard the term used in the first sense, but apparently both uses are fairly common. I am not aware of the widespread use of the term to describe ALL white women of a certain age.
Click to expand...

Karen is a name. What are the last names of Karen #1 and Karen #2, Alert? I think some people are misunderstanding, perhaps intentionally or perhaps because they are not middle-aged white women why this is wrong behavior. And making false reports is already a crime so why is it more of a crime if the reporter is white, middle-aged and heaven forbid, a WOMAN? Is it because as only 25% of the population THEY are a minority and thus perceived as easy targets? If you want to sacrifice yourself to the Karen insanity, Alert, go ahead and do it. I'm an individual and want the same rights as any other individual in this society.
 
Emily said:
Karen is a name. What are the last names of Karen #1 and Karen #2, Alert? I think some people are misunderstanding, perhaps intentionally or perhaps because they are not middle-aged white women why this is wrong behavior. And making false reports is already a crime so why is it more of a crime if the reporter is white, middle-aged and heaven forbid, a WOMAN? Is it because as only 25% of the population THEY are a minority and thus perceived as easy targets? If you want to sacrifice yourself to the Karen insanity, Alert, go ahead and do it. I'm an individual and want the same rights as any other individual in this society.
Click to expand...

Yeah, obviously it's a problem that a common name was used for these two issues, in much the same way as we object to certain types of disease naming. Could we come up with a better word for someone who does those actions than "Karen"? Probably. But in the same way that we're stuck with the name MERS for the disease caused by that coronavirus, I think we're stuck with the term Karen for those issues due to widespread use. Yeah, I've seen men act as a "Karen". (Various corners of the internet have adopted various male names that sound like "Karen" for such actions.)

As minorities go, 25% is a very large minority of a group, especially when you're considering THREE separate criteria to join it (age, race, gender). As women outnumber men overall, it's entirely possible that group might be the largest such minority one could construct. Anyone who is using those issues to bash all middle-aged white women seems to be pretty far in the fringes.

I think the purpose of the CAREN Act was to punish the racial motivation of the false call, not the age, race, or gender of the perpetrator.
 
Could we come up with a better word for someone who does those actions than "Karen"?
Click to expand...

Yes, the name of the person doing something wrong.

As minorities go, 25% is a very large minority of a group, especially when you're considering THREE separate criteria to join it (age, race, gender).
Click to expand...

No, that limits a group more. And I think that people who appear to show their first interest in human rights by supporting a demeaning sterotype like the Karen meme might ask themselves, "Could I be a touch misogynistic"? (Or ageist?)

As far as mature white women being stuck with the Karen because 'we' are stuck with MERS??? This 'we' is NOT a virus. You can be stuck with it, but I am not.
 
Alert - the name "Karen" is both racist and misogynist because it was a name popular in the 1950s for white female babies. It is like calling someone a "Mildred". That name conjures up a vision of an elderly white woman since that name has not been popular for white female babies since 1920s.

It is racist, ageist, misogynistic to use the name CAREN (specifically to mimic "Karen") for a law against racism.

We need less stereotyping - not more.

I was one of the first women professionals at a large aerospace company in the late 1970s. Women were not encouraged to speak up because the hold on progress was so tenuous that no woman wanted to call attention to herself. It felt like we were sneaking in to the party and it was important to try to be as invisible as possible while still excelling at the job. In large meetings women did not speak up on important issues. That was done privately after the meeting.

And when we did start to exert some opinions (in the 80s) we were privately labeled "pushy", "aggressive", "demanding" for doing the same thing male co-workers did.

Especially frowned on was any ambition to get promoted. Just lucky to be selected to wear a suit and be able to sit with the grown-ups at the decision makers' table once a month.

The Karen messaging is wrong.
 
There's something much deeper going on here.

Karen was one of many names that was used to describe a personality trait in memes. Kyle, Chad, Tyrone, Pepe, Becky, and many more had similar meanings. There really wasn't a racial or sexist component to any of them, and they were at most mildly insulting. But something has changed with respect to Karen, perhaps in the past few days or past few weeks, that I am still struggling to understand. If you asked me a week ago what the defining characteristic of a "Karen" was, I would have replied that a "Karen" calls the manager and then abuses the manager. The use in response to racist 911 calls was new to me. So I spent some time today wandering around the internet to find out what a "Karen" really was, and found everything imaginable being blamed on "Karens".

I saw memes that say Karens think vaccines cause autism. (That wouldn't be a Karen, that would be an anti-vaxxer.) I saw memes that say Karens think 5G causes COVID-19. (That's not a Karen; that's a science denier.) I saw memes that blame "Karens" for things that we clearly already have a better term for and that have nothing to do with the original use of the meme.

Memes can go bad. The meaning of a meme will change depending on who uses it. The Pepe The Frog meme is a good example. It went bad when fringe groups online began to use it as a symbol of white supremacy, and now it is widely considered racist and unusable. I don't think the Karen meme is coming from a political angle, however, as both parties realize this group is one of the key swing constituencies in the upcoming election. But the Karen meme seems to have gone bad nevertheless.

So who benefits by smearing a large group of people as Karens?
 
That's a good question, Alert. It could just be a Lord of the Flies kind of phenomenon due to the disintegrating social fabric of our times. Whatever it is, I think mature women in general are getting the short end. Look what happened to blues singer and business woman, Lady A, in Seattle:
https://www.seattletimes.com/entert...the-country-trio-lady-as-lawsuit-against-her/

Young white musicians basically co-opted the BLM movement and claimed they were taking Antebellum out of their band's name to be with the movement, but that shortens their name to Lady A, too. The real Lady A in Seattle is a 60 yr old black woman and she has used the name professionally all her career but they have the gall to sue her because they trademarked the Lady A name even though they were not using the name. It hopefully won't hold up in court, but this will be expensive and stressful for the real Lady A.
 
The Mayor of Chicago, who is a woman, should know better than to use a racist, ageist, misogynist term against another woman - even if that other woman has said something she doesn't like. The Mayor could have chosen many other words to describe the White House press secretary.


129
Mayor Lori Lightfoot

@chicagosmayor
?
19h
Hey, Karen. Watch your mouth.
 
The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, came nearly 50 years after the Fifteenth, which ruled that voting rights could not be restricted “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Click to expand...

That's insightful. I’m not sure the author's reference to To Kill a Mockingbird applies, though. Harper Lee, given her social position and upbringing under the influence of the American eugenics movement used anti-racism as a device to justify fear and loathing of the Southern underclass.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page...enics-movement
Thirty-two states passed eugenic-sterilization laws during the twentieth century, and between sixty and seventy thousand people were sterilized under them. The rhetoric of the movement toned down after the U.S. went to war with Germany; most American eugenicists abandoned their explicit praise of the Nazi project, and the field dwindled as an area of officially sanctioned research. (The disassociation did not go both ways: Buck v. Bell was cited by the defense at Nuremberg.) But the sterilization rate remained high even after the Second World War. So many poor Southerners underwent the procedure that it became known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” It was only in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, with evolving attitudes toward civil and human rights, that states began repealing their sterilization laws.
Click to expand...
 
Shamann Walton

@shamannwalton
?
Oct 20
Today the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Caution Against Racial and Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act, aka CAREN Act, on first reading (1 more reading next week), 911 calls, are not customer service for people’s racism. #CARENact

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The above person is, I believe, the person who authored and named the "Caren" act to mimic the racist, ageist, sexist, degrading name calling of "Karen".

It is not good governance to ridicule and degrade one group of citizens as a way to protect another group.

Shameful.

No wonder San Francisco is going into the toilet.
 
San Francisco ‘CAREN Act’ lets people sue over racist 911 calls

City set to enact the CAREN Act, through hate crime legislation, targeting needless 9/11 calls on people of colour.

20 Oct 2020

Fed up with white people calling 911 about people of colour selling water bottles, barbecuing or otherwise going about their lives, San Francisco leaders are set to approve hate crime legislation giving the targets of those calls the ability to sue the caller.

... It’s a nod to a popular meme using the name “Karen” to describe an entitled white woman whose actions stem from her privilege, such as using police to target people of colour.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020...ren-act-lets-people-sue-over-racist-911-calls

_________
Sounds like a future lawsuit: white women versus San Francisco.
 
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