A Karenâs racism is inextricable from her white womanhood.
A white woman being called âKarenâ hardly seems like something to squeak up about in the midst of the pernicious, violent racism defining our current circumstances. But perpetrators donât like to be called perpetratorsâindeed, many people had only heard of Bindel previously because, in 2019, she deemed the term âTERFâ to also be a slur. Months before Bindel came for âKaren,â Aja Romano wrote a Vox explainer on âThe anti-vaxxer soccer mom with speak-to-the-manager hair,â explaining in its very first paragraph that Karen is for sure white: ââKarenâ in particular has emerged as the frontrunner for the average âbasic white person nameââa pejorative catchall label for a wide range of behaviors thought to have connections to white privilege.â But as Bindelâs Karen complaints ran rampant across the internet over the last week, others jumped into the fray, adding to the discourseâand, all too predictably, warping it.
Privileged people in general regularly balk at labels, saying theyâre âjust humanâ or that theyâre âpeople,â and therefore defy description. And white women specifically like to lean into the fact that they arenât men, so they canât weaponize their whiteness. They believe they occupy a unique place here, and just as white people online often apologize on behalf of whites to create distance between Good White People and Bad White People (an idea explored in Shannon Sullivanâs Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism), white women have attempted to separate themselves from power inherent in whiteness: In their world, it only really benefits men. But we know that isnât true. Last August, Anna North reviewed Stephanie Jones-Rogersâs recently published book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, writing, âJones-Rogers makes the case that white women were far from passive bystanders in the business of slavery, as previous historians argued. Rather, they were active participants, shoring up their own economic power through ownership of the enslaved.â And, in current contexts, white womenâs power is translated into that of a Karen; Black women know that Karens have always walked among us.
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