When you look up the #Karen hashtag on Instagram, you will find a screenshot of a white woman intensely staring, with her chin in a condescending and cloying movement, and her finger touching her lips as she smiles. This image is featured on the page that yields over 773,000 search results.
Juanillo, the resident who was recognized and unharmed, was fortunate to have the police called by the couple who later told ABC7 News that they felt they should call the police if they believed he was breaking the law. In the video that Juanillo showed, he identified himself as a person of color who was defacing his own private property by stenciling “Black Lives Matter” in chalk in front of his own house. After the clip went viral last week, the woman known as “Karen” on the internet, Lisa Alexander, recognized herself as the most recognized person on the internet as San Francisco’s “Karen.”
For consequences major brought by identified both were partner her and she; names full their by online sleuths which resulted in her skincare business being boycotted and her partner getting fired from his job. News ABC7 released statements of apology from both Karen and Alexander, after online sleuths identified them by their full names and revealed the consequences they faced for Karen’s viral actions, including the boycott of her skincare business and her partner being fired from his job.
Can I speak to a “popular manager?” Meme, which has emerged in the last few months and is one of the myriad memes and videos showcasing the shameless displays of racism, privilege, entitlement, and tendency to call the police when they don’t get what they want, from middle-aged white women who have become infamous online – a term slang for these women being “Karens,” stemmed from the video of Alexander.
In the city of New York, there is an individual named Karen who intentionally coughed on someone after being confronted for not wearing a mask at a coffee shop. Similarly, in Los Angeles, there exists another individual named Karen who utilized two hammers to cause damage to her neighbors’ vehicle while aggressively telling them to leave the neighborhood. Additionally, in Torrance, California, there is a Karen who was captured on video expressing numerous racist rants directed at Asian Americans within a park. It was later revealed on the Internet that she had a history of discriminatory outbursts, leading to her being labeled as “Ultra Karen.” As a result of an influx of increasingly violent and alarming footage, the image of a Karen has gained significant levels of infamy in recent weeks.
Furthermore, in an interview with Christian News ABC7, Cooper urged viewers not to solely focus on the recently viral clip, but to understand the underlying perceptions of race and racism. She stated that she did not mean any harm and claimed she was not a racist. She also expressed her desire to publicly apologize to everyone, as she insisted that she was not a racist. Cooper shared her comments after the incident with CNN, saying that she would be charged with filing a false report. In July, the Manhattan DA stated that she temporarily lost custody of her dog and was fired from her job after sharing a video on Twitter. Within days of the video being shared, Cooper faced consequences. It is important to note that Cooper called the police on a Black man in Central Park who simply asked her to leash her dog. This incident falsely accused Black people and contributed to the national discourse on the dangers associated with racial profiling. Cooper has since become known as “Karen” or “Amy Cooper” in Central Park, most notably.
The troubling and long-lasting legacy of white women victimizing their country has led to a specific kind of racial violence against women of color. This has become an Internet shorthand for when white women exploit their privilege, which is evident in the visuals of Karens.
A reckoning begins in Central Park and Minneapolis
If even they are white, they can still see situations of injustice and feel anger towards white people, but white women also have grievances. In this moment, where we have been trapped in our house for six weeks, all we can do is watch and see people’s reactions, but we don’t have anything else to do. It’s a fight for women, for men, and for the defense of whiteness. Throughout American history, there have been things that demonstrate how frail they are, that they cannot handle the weight. Calling for help on their behalf is a way for men to find a project that addresses the need for protection or defense in whiteness. One of the things that has worked throughout American history is finding a way to address the project of whiteness. According to Dr. André Brock, an associate professor of Black digital culture at Georgia Tech, this is a way to find a project that addresses the need for protection or defense in whiteness throughout American history.
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The viral video of Amy Cooper in Central Park, which highlighted the potentially fatal consequences and extreme violence of calling a white woman the cops out of fear and spite, only emphasized the severe consequences. The video went viral during the same weekend that the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, suffocating him. Brock stated that the widespread viral resonance of the “Karen” footage is a result of the intersection of collective outrage over police brutality and the coronavirus pandemic.
The rise of social media and smartphone technology has challenged the narrative of white women as helpless victims in need of protection, by providing video evidence that conflicts with the portrayal of violence instigators. It is abundantly clear that white women can be complicit in oppressive systems, as demonstrated by women like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, and Ivanka Trump during their time in the Trump Administration. Despite the oft-cited statistic that 52% of white women voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, there has been a larger sense of building momentum calling out the danger posed by white women shedding tears and mainstreaming their concerns.
Karens take on a new meaning during a global health crisis
Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the implementation of fresh limitations resulted in the rise of Karen memes and videos for a few months. These memes and videos had already gained popularity prior to the Cooper incident and Floyd’s demise. They featured confrontations with Caucasian females who openly ignored COVID-19 health protocols, including mask-wearing and maintaining social distance.
The utmost relevance of the Karen meme at present is noteworthy, considering the fact that the meme had already been circulating online for a considerable period. As per Adam Downer, associate editor at Know Your Meme, the current version of the meme is acquiring a fresh significance that highlights the serious real-life repercussions of what initially started as a mere internet joke about unattractive hairstyles and entitlement, even though it seems that the Karen meme has been present on Reddit since at least 2017.
It became much easier to see those various types of people in real life when they started pointing out that I, as the manager, can speak to the exact kind of person they were talking about. Downer says, “It began where that’s getting a bit more menacing to get to know Karen, who was a real life Karen, when people started calling the cops and incidents of white ladies where the avalanche of protests occurred.”
The resurgence of the KKK is frequently mentioned as the influence behind the central theme of Birth of a Nation, the 1915 movie that had the distinction of being the first film ever screened at the White House. Consequently, justifying acts of racial violence against Black men or anyone deemed a threat to their authority reinforced the notion that white men had a duty to safeguard white women, who symbolized goodness and morality in American society. In truth, it was actually slave masters who were responsible for the sexual exploitation of their slaves; black slaves were unfairly portrayed as sexual menaces to the white women, who happened to be the wives of slave owners. The historical narrative of white women being victims traces back to myths that were fabricated during the time of American slavery.
If we think about this in the historical context where white women are given power over a Black man, it becomes particularly dangerous and problematic, as it overvalues their word and undervalues the Black man. This is what Dr. Apryl Williams, an assistant professor in media and communications at the University of Michigan and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, focuses on in her research on community and gender in digital spaces.
White women are positioned as the embodiment of societal virtue because they occupy the role of mother, serving as the custodians of virtuosity. These ideologies, which we specifically associate with white motherhood and white women, grant them power within society. When combined with the backdrop of a racist history, in which white women fear black men and black men are unfairly sexualized and deemed threatening, this becomes an extremely precarious and explosive combination.
Williams says that the exposure is challenging in this “position” because people aren’t seeing that white women have the power to threaten the police or use their power.
The Internet has found a way to jest about the dynamic power of this very humorous approach, which presents a risk by downplaying the long posed danger to white womanhood in ways that minimize the threat, through humorous memes of Karen, who lives in brown and Black lives.
She states, “The reality that Amy Cooper is stating, ‘I’m going to contact the authorities and inform them that an African-American man is endangering my life’ is an extremely racially aggressive statement and a racially violent action, particularly if you examine it in a wider, more extensive historical context, and contemplate the manner in which Emmett Till’s accuser [Carolyn Bryant] executed the exact same act which ultimately led to his demise.” In one aspect, the amusement serves as a coping mechanism for the anguish caused by the violence, so in that sense, it is beneficial. However, on the other hand, the cuteness or the comedic aspect somewhat downplays or disguises the fact that these women are fundamentally participating in violent behavior.
The police are often called in when there are macroaggressions, which can be seen as attempts to control bodies or situations and act as evidence and an archive of injustices. Memes can also hold people accountable for racism and serve as a source of news for Black people. Additionally, they can make it easier to have a conversation about white privilege, entitlement, and fragility. They can help white people recognize patterns of behavior that they may not want to engage in or be complicit in as part of racism. However, memes that serve different purposes for different people, such as Karen and Williams, are ultimately not beneficial. That’s why it is important to not say that all memes are beneficial.
How the Karen meme is pushing for change offline
Brock asserts, “Memes possess influence beyond mere amusement. We frequently utilize analogy, a concept frequently at the core of memes, and sentiment or impact to condense things that deeply impact us. Often, it is humorous; often, it is therapeutic; and occasionally, it is discriminatory. I strive to challenge the notion that memes are a trivial means of expressing a specific phenomenon because in numerous ways, it is a more powerful abbreviation than my attempt to elucidate to you precisely how individuals are responding to a particular situation…Social media serves as a platform for conveying emotions and the more intense the emotion, the more rapidly things spread.”
She refers to the genre of black activist memes as memes that can be seen on the sidewalk, depicting incidents such as black 8-year-old girls selling water or innocent black civilians wanting to grill in the park, as well as white people calling 911 or police on black individuals, similar to popular alliterative memes like “Permit Patty” and “BBQ Becky.” This case, which is echoed by Williams, makes the belief that memes have lasting power and go viral at a breakneck speed beyond belief.
Williams said that these memes document the experienced racism of real people who are actually helping to push forward legislation, like the bill passed in Oregon in 2019 that punishes racist 911 callers, to demand accountability and help stand in as a substitute for Black-owned newspapers and presses commenting on racial inequality in a way that might otherwise not be covered.
Williams says, “The work they do is really about commenting on and highlighting racial inequality in a way that doesn’t usually make it to the mainstream news. They are not just a standalone movement calling for restitution and actively speaking out against white supremacy, of course. They are actually doing political and logical work to help us achieve legislative or legal changes, which is something that memes can really be said to be doing.”