Wikipedia  defines Karen as “a pejorative term for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal.”  The stereotypical “Karen” refers to a blonde in her mid 30’s or 40’s.  She has multiple young kids, usually an anti-vaxxer, mask-wearer, and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with their asymmetrical bob haircut.  While the memes can be funny, and while there are definitely real women in the world that live up to the stereotype, there is a much deeper history behind white women using their white privilege to victimize anyone that they deem “lesser than.”  This can include the help at a restaurant, the lemonade stand on the corner that doesn’t abide by “Association Rules,” or many other examples.  Karen is willing to risk or demean others to achieve her ends.  In other words, she is a mean girl who is willing to step on whoever she needs to in order to get her way and live her life the way she feels she deserves.  Her entitlement comes from her middle class status and her desperation to prove that she is better than all of those that she stepped on to get there.  She holds onto her white privilege with everything she has, and she weaponizes it when it suits her.

There is actually a long and dark history specifically of white women weaponizing their position.   They call the cops on Black people or accuse Black people of heinous crimes.  They do all of this while insisting that they are not racist, merely scared for their lives.  Again, I bring up Acho’s quote that “Proximity breeds care.  Distance breeds fear.”  The only reason these Karens fear for their lives is because they don’t know any Black people personally.  They see them as nameless and faceless stereotypes that they merely see on tv and movies.  The same tvs and movies that have lied to them and deepened the wrong stereotypes from the beginning.

This lying to white women began back in 1915 with the release of the movie The Birth of a Nation.  D. W. Griffith set this film in a South Carolina town during the Civil War era.  It depicts Blacks as “good for nothing more than subservient labor and asserting abusive dominion over Southern Whites.”*  It goes so far as to depict the KKK as heroes in white hoods who came in to save the day for a white woman who was being “harassed” by a mulatto.

In 1955, Emmett Till spoke to a 21-year old white woman who was married to the owner of a small grocery store.  He was then falsely accused of flirting with, or being inappropriate toward Carolyn Bryant only because Till talking with Bryant violated the unwritten code that Blacks did not speak with Whites.  As a result of this innocent interaction, Bryant’s husband took matters into his own hands.  A few days later, Roy and his half brother abducted Emmett, beat and mutilated him, then shot him in the head before dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River.  His body was recovered, and the two White men stood trial for murder.  Both were found not guilty by an all white jury.

The next blatant display of propaganda and outright lying to Whites about the “danger of the violent Black Man” was the War on Drugs.  At the time that it started, less than 2% of Americans thought that the drug problem was the primary concern of the nation.  Most felt that it was the economic collapse and the complete disappearance of the blue-collar factory job.  Yet President Reagan began his War on Drugs campaign by “sensationalizing the emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods-communities devastated by de-industrialization and skyrocketing unemployment” (Tatum 118).  For those of you who might not be familiar with the chemical makeup of certain drugs, crack is almost identical in makeup to powder cocaine.  The only difference is that crack has been converted into a form that “can be vaporized and inhaled for a faster, more intense (though shorter) high using less of the drug-making it possible to sell small doses at more affordable prices” (119).

I am not here to downplay the effect of drugs or the violence that surrounds it in some of the inner cities.  However, instead of responding with pushes toward therapy and addiction counseling, help in reducing unemployment or investing in the underfunded schools of the inner city, the United States slashed education funding in order to fund more police raids.  Even though at the time, cocaine and crack were being used in similar numbers of people, the media focused on the “crack crisis,” creating harsh stereotypes of violent gangbangers and crack babies born to crack whores.  They were very careful to only ever mention crack and the prevalent racial stereotypes of a Black inner city.  This push to racialize the War on Drugs worked so well that in 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.  This Act established harsh mandatory minimums for many offenses, including minor first-time offenses.  The biggest part of this Act, however, was the extremely aggressive 100:1 sentencing ratio between cocaine and crack.  This meant that 1 gram of crack would be penalized the same as 100 grams of cocaine.  This meant that Blacks were sentenced to much longer prison sentences for even minor first offenses compared to Whites and their cocaine.  The White media’s push to racialize and weaponize this War caused most Whites to fear Blacks and the inner cities, in case they didn’t already.

One of the most famous yet heinous stories of this “weaponization of Whiteness” happened in Central Park in 1989.  Trisha Meili was found badly beaten, raped, and left for dead in the North Woods of Central Park.  Although the woman herself never accused anyone specifically, the system itself did the work for her.  The police officers used eye witness accounts of a group of 30-40 Black and Latino boys who were causing mischief in Central Park to tie a group of 5 boys to Trisha’s rape and murder.  There is not enough time or space to go into all of the ways that these 5 men were denied their rights and coerced into confessing.  Bottom line is that these 5 kids were guilty from the moment that the police decided they were.  Each boy was found guilty and served anywhere from 6-12 years before another person confessed to the crime.  All 5 were eventually exonerated and their sentences vacated, but it was far too late.  The damage had already been done.  The exoneration did not receive near as much press as the original accusals and subsequent trials, and it was used to further this lie of Black violence against White women. (Small note: The 2012 film The Central Park Five and the When They See Us miniseries on Netflix are amazing places to start if you want to explore this further.)

A more recent example of a “Karen” weaponizing her whiteness came in May of 2020.  Amy Cooper was walking her dog in Central Park without a leash when a Black man, who was out bird-watching, simply asked her to put a leash on her dog.  The area that they were walking in, named the Ramble, has a rule that all dogs must be on leashes.  Amy refused to leash her dog.  She walked toward Christian threatening to call the cops on him.  He began recording her at that moment.  The video goes on to capture Amy calling the police and reporting that a “Black man is recording me and harrassing me and my dog.”  This is the epitome of a White woman weaponizing her Whiteness to get an innocent Black man in trouble even though she was the one breaking the law at the time.  Is it any wonder why we Karens are looked at in a negative context?  This is why it is more important than ever for us White women to become actively anti-racist.  Beverly Daniel Tatum gives the best definition of racism in her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?:

“I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport.  Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt.  The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White Supremacy and is moving with it.  Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway.  No overt effort is made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking.  Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go to the same destination as the White Supremacists.  But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt-unless they are actively antiracist-they will find themselves carried along with the others.”*

We as white women must begin running against the conveyor belt of systemic racism. We have allowed ourselves to be lied to for far too long, and we have let our distance breed fear of a group of people we know nothing about. It’s time that we get out of our comfort zone, be intentional about getting to know people who look different than us, and allow that proximity to breed care.

2013.  Brody, Richard.  “The Worst Thing about Birth of a Nation” is How Good it is.”  The New Yorker.  Accessed online 11/19/2022.

2017. Tatum, Beverly Daniel.  Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race.  Basic Books: New York.