Enough with calling women ‘Karen’
May has shaped up to be a real Karen-a-palooza.
First, there was “Hospital Karen,” the white pregnant physician assistant at Bellevue wrongfully accused of stealing a black teen’s Citi Bike. Then, an Upper West Side lawyer, the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant, was branded a Karen after she tweeted a picture of unlicensed food vendors in Riverside Park.
Finally, this week, the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at Uber was put on leave after organizing a “Don’t Call Me Karen” panel discussion.
Its potency forged through internet memes, the pejorative label of Karen is shorthand for an entitled and demanding white lady — sporting Kate Gosselin’s haircut of yore — who hassles people of color.
Like most things that start online, it’s been tossed around so much that it becomes distorted, diluted and hackneyed.
Even my friend’s teenage sons now call her a Karen when they don’t get their way. If everyone is a Karen, no one is a Karen. As a term, yes, it’s reductive, but ultimately it means nothing.
But, weaponized by an online mob looking to manufacture a racist narrative, it’s much more than a derisive label. It’s a flamethrower meant to incinerate the woman, her reputation and her livelihood in the name of so-called racial justice.
Guilt and ruin by an edited social media clip.
Pregnant Sarah Jane Comrie (“Hospital Karen”) saw her home address posted online and was even put on leave by her employer, simply on the basis of the social media outrage. But after a fuller picture emerged, it was proved she did indeed pay for the bike.
While it was once universally frowned upon to harass a pregnant lady, Comrie was still slammed for “performative” crying.
There was no more famous case than Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen,” who called the cops on a black birder named Christian Cooper back in 2020 while walking her dog off-leash. Every media report, except Kmele Foster’s for Bari Weiss’ Substack, omitted the fact that Christian Cooper had threatened her before the ugly altercation. (“If you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it,” he told her.)
Foster also reported that additional dog owners had been threatened by the birder. But that information was left out of 99 percent of the accounts because it would have chipped away at the desired narrative.
It also hindered a more sober conclusion: that they both probably could have behaved better.
But even talking about the Karen persona is a transgression, as Bo Young Lee, the DEI boss at Uber, learned. She was put on leave after organizing a panel that dove “into the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience from some of our female colleagues, particularly how they navigate around the ‘Karen’ persona.”
Nonwhite employees complained. Insanity ensued.
That’s to be expected when you turn a place where people go to earn a living into a struggle session ruled by intersectionality — not by reason.
One less-discussed side effect is that the trope tells once-empowered women that they should suck it up and take whatever is given them.
It has also made many women I know disarm that instinctive alarm that kicks in when they sense danger, lest they be branded a Karen.
There’s a difference between being an annoying, racist, self-appointed hall monitor and an advocate for your personal safety or the safety of those around you.
But in this era of online virality, it’s far easier to indulge the cynical storyline. To divide and reduce people, not only to a few short seconds of their lives — but also their immutable characteristics.
