[ The image of a white woman calling police on Black people put
the lie to the myth of racial innocence] [[link removed]]

THE YEAR OF KAREN: HOW A MEME CHANGED THE WAY AMERICANS TALKED ABOUT
RACISM  
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Julia Carrie Wong
December 27, 2020
The Guardian
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_ The image of a white woman calling police on Black people put the
lie to the myth of racial innocence _

'Becky and Karen memes provide a vital social function,’ writes
Apryl Williams, Illustration: Michelle Thompson/The Guardian

 

There was no direct connection between the “Central Park Karen”
incident in New York City and the police killing of 46-year-old George
Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, beyond the coincidence of timing.
Time in the pandemic has been elastic and confusing, and reports of
the separate incidents did not emerge immediately, but the two events
occurred on Monday 25 May, Memorial Day.

The video footage of the two incidents loomed over the strange,
violent summer of coronavirus and civil unrest as a kind of digital
diptych representing the state of racism – and whiteness – in
America in 2020.

On one side we had Floyd being slowly and mercilessly suffocated to
death beneath the knee of the white male police officer Derek Chauvin,
a brutal portrait of the implacable indifference to Black life that
defines American policing. On the other side was the 40-year-old white
investment manager and scofflaw dog-owner Amy Cooper, an avatar for
the respectable white civilian who demands that violence_ _be
brought to bear on her behalf because a Black man has dared to expect
her to abide by the rules governing public space.

The specter of Karen persisted as Black Lives Matter protests and
civil unrest spread around the country following Floyd’s murder and
reckonings with racism began to roil institutions, toppling careers as
well as statues. More than just an amusing meme, Karen allowed for a
new kind of discourse about racism to gain credence in the US.   
 

The Karen meme says they are conscious actors. They are complicit.
 Apryl Williams

 

“We as a culture have adopted this stance that white women are more
virtuous and not complicit in upholding racism in particular,” said
Apryl Williams, a professor of communication and media at the
University of Michigan. “They just sort of go along with it, but
they’re not conscious actors. The Karen meme says, no, they are
conscious actors. These are deliberate actions. They are complicit.
And I think that’s why it strikes a nerve with people.”

Amy Cooper’s Karen status was cemented when she called the police
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Christian Cooper, a 57-year-old Black birdwatcher, after he had asked
her to leash her dog in New York City’s Central Park. Not content
with falsely alleging, twice, that “an African American man” was
“threatening me and my dog”, Cooper put on a play for the 911
operator, changing the register of her voice to one of distress and
panic as she cried: “I am being _threatened_ by a man in the
Ramble. Please send the cops immediately.”

It was through that performance that Amy Cooper took on the mantle of
an American archetype: the white woman who weaponizes her
vulnerability to exact violence upon a Black man. In history, she is
Carolyn Bryant, the adult white woman whose complaint about a
14-year-old Emmett Till led to his torture and murder at the hands of
racist white adults. In literature, she is Scarlett O’Hara sending
her husband out to join a KKK lynching party or Mayella Ewell
testifying under oath that a Black man who had helped her had raped
her. In 2020, she is simply Karen.

Williams defines a Karen as a “white woman surveilling and
patrolling Black people in public spaces and then calling the police
on them for random, non-illegal infractions”. She has been studying
memes about Karen and her predecessors (BBQ Becky
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Patty
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Patrol Paula
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etc) for several years, and in in the journal Social Media and
Society [[link removed]],
she traces Karen’s historical lineage and makes the case for her
societal importance.

“In the past, Black bodies were controlled in public spaces by
threats of violence, lynching, and routine, targeted racialized terror
that dictated who Black people could speak to, where they were allowed
to live, and in which spaces they were able to exist,” she writes.
“Presently, the routine act of calling the police on Black people in
public spaces extends this historical practice of regulating Black
bodies to maintain White supremacist order.”

 

A man recites poetry at a memorial honoring George Floyd, at the spot
where he was taken into custody, in Minneapolis.
Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters  //  The Guardian
According to Williams, “Becky”, or “BBQ Becky” – the name
given to a white woman who called the police on a group of Black
people for using a charcoal grill
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Oakland, California – was the more common moniker for that kind of
white woman before the coronavirus pandemic, when Karen took off. But
the name is not as important as what it signifies. “It’s a
cultural shorthand and it’s interchangeable with any number of
names,” Williams said. “If my friend were to call me and say, ‘I
had an incident with a woman today at the bank and it was a Susan,’
she wouldn’t have to say anything else. I would say, ‘What did
Susan do?’ and I already know what’s coming.

“This is a continuation of a historical legacy,” she added. “We
can trace it back to the Reconstruction period when vigilante groups
were assembled to patrol freed slaves … These Karens and Beckys are
still serving as that sort of extra-legal patrolling. They aren’t
actually part of the law, but they act as enforcers of it. They extend
the legal power, even though they have no legal power.”

To live in the United States is to experience the passage of time
through the litany of names of Black people murdered or beaten by the
state. In my own lifetime, I can chart a course from Rodney King to
Amadou Diallo to Oscar Grant, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray,
and George Floyd.

Much of the civic response to the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and
Baltimore focused on broad systemic racism and reform. Police body
cameras were sold as a panacea. Implicit bias offered both an
explanation and a justification for actions that, to those affected by
them, still felt like plain old racism. It’s not _intentional_, the
story went; every white person must still be granted the benefit of
the doubt, the assumption of perpetual racial innocence.

But as the summer of Karen kicked off, it became clear that people of
color in America, and especially Black people, were no longer prepared
to accept the alibi offered by unconscious bias. Among the first to
rip off the Band-Aid was the Glee actor Samantha Ware
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who responded to her former co-worker Lea Michele’s platitudes about
Floyd’s murder with a reminder of how the star had treated her:
“Remember when you made my first television gig a living hell?!?!
Cause I’ll never forget.”

Soon, social media feeds began to fill again with testimonials
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from people of color, not so much #MeToo as #YouToo. You, too, have
been racist, the moment of reckoning warned, and your co-workers and
underlings are not going to keep your secrets
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you any more.

It would be silly to chalk up the entire racial reckoning of 2020 to
the power of Karen memes, but it would also be silly to dismiss their
influence. Williams compares it to that of the Black press. Events
that would otherwise be ignored – a white woman in San
Francisco calling the cops
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a man chalking “Black Lives Matter” on his building, say –
became fodder national news once they fit within the memetic frame of
Karen.

“Becky and Karen memes provide a vital social function,” Williams
writes. “They restore agency to Black communities by allowing them
to exert a form of justice on perpetrators. In a subversion and
reversal of power dynamics, Black meme creators police White supremacy
and explicitly call for consequences.”

Of course, any attempt by Black people to assert power against white
supremacy is instantly met by a backlash, and the backlash against
Karen memes was practically foreordained. Complaints
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Karen being sexist
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noteworthy mostly for how neatly they re-enacted the Karen dynamic.
Confronted with evidence of their own agency and complicity, some
white women responded by reasserting their victimhood.

What I’ve found especially useful about Karen memes is the way
they’ve given willing white women a tool with which to assess their
own behavior and, if they want, improve it. My own mother, who is
white, has on rare occasions demonstrated behavior that verged on the
Karen-esque. This summer, for the first time, she acknowledged some of
those Karen tendencies to me and stated her intention not to act like
that any more – a conversation I’m not sure we would have had
absent the meme.

Williams recalled similar conversations with white friends, and
offered three simple rules to avoid being a Karen. One: recognize the
privilege and history of being a white woman in this society. Two:
avoid calling the police on people of color unless someone is in
imminent danger of harm. And three: “Understand that it’s just not
always about you, period. People are not out to get you for the most
part, people are not trying to hurt you or harm your property or make
you uncomfortable,” she said. “You’re not that special, Karen.
You’re not that special.”

_[Julia Carrie Wong is a technology reporter for Guardian US, based in
San Francisco. Click here
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Julia's public key. Twitter @julliacarriew
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