It’s been a week of Karens, with videos of white women refusing to wear masks, berating frontline workers and threatening to sue police, flooding social media.
The Today Show faced backlash on Tuesday after giving air-time to Lizzy Rose, an anti-masker and career psychic. In the segment, Rose claimed that wearing a mask was against her human rights, that COVID-19 statistics had been falsified and the virus was biochemically engineered.
But while these women were initially labelled ‘Karens’ and , it now seems the tide has turned. As #NotAllKarens began trending on social media, The Today Show, The Project and Sunrise aired segments on ‘Karens fighting back’, pitting supposed ‘good Karens’ against ‘bad Bunnings Karens’.
This morning, published a piece that cited a linguistic expert who found “the term has evolved to become derogatory and offensive” and said: “anyone called Karen has a right to feel badly done by”.
But Gomeroi journalist Madeline Hayman-Reber says the Australian media has entirely “missed the mark” on Karen, glossing over its racial elements.
“The term ‘Karen’ isn’t about a name. It’s a concept,” Hayman-Reber told The Feed.
“The fact they have found a way to make white women the victim in a larger debate about white privilege is ignorant and racist,” she added.
So, what does ‘Karen’ mean?
Dr Benjamin Nickl, a cultural studies researcher from the University of Sydney, told The Feed that ‘Karen’ is a stereotype of a white person who uses their privilege and entitlement to intimidate and threaten people of colour.
A classic ‘Karen’ moment could be seen to be the example of Amy Cooper, a white woman who called the police on a bird watcher in New York’s Central Park after he asked her to put a leash on her dog. Cooper was with filing a false police report that accused an African American man of threatening her life.
But as its popularity has risen, the meaning of Karen has become more complex.
As Professor of Linguistics at University of Michigan, points out in “a lot of media analysis about what Karen ‘really’ means [shows] its use has been quite fluid. For example, we’ve seen people who deny the existence of racism, panic buy toilet paper or call for an end to social distancing all called ‘Karens’.”
Is the term Karen discriminatory?
Journalists such as Julia Baird have claimed the use of Karen has , pointing out that there is no real male equivalent of the meme.
“Women are told to resign, not to rage. To be compliant; defiance is not the norm. So to parody women who complain only adds to the sense they’d be foolish to speak up,” Baird wrote in the in February.
But after the piece drew a barrage of criticism on Twitter, Baird later tweeted “I can now see it’s not possible to – or important not to - divorce one definition (racist, abuse of privilege, punching down) from another (bad hair, middle aged, annoying)... Am taking all this on board.”
In the same way that #BlackLivesMatter has been weaponised with the ‘All Lives Matter’ retort, #NotAllKarens has come to prominence, according to Dr Nickl.
“If you think Karen is really offensive put it next to the ‘n’ word and see which one you think is a really problematic term,” he said.
While Dr Nickl agrees that ‘Karen’ can be used as a sexist and ageist term, he says those claims have also been used to escape white discomfort and avoid examining white privilege.
“We’ve already made up a way out of responsibility and having to confront this and say ‘is there something to this?’. Is this reasoning of ‘ageism and sexism’ letting us off the hook so we don’t have to get into this complex and muddy history of slavery and racism?,” he said.
For Hayman-Reber, the discussion of Karen has detracted from important issues like Australia’s Black Lives Matter movement and systematic racism.
The Project asks women named Karen to send them videos. Source: Twitter/ The Project
“It seems that no matter what happens, commercial media will find a way to make white people the victim,” she told The Feed.
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