Sometimes they approach with a smile. Other times, it’s with the rage of angels.
About four months ago, Terence Fitzgerald, and his two sons, who are 5 and 3 years old, were on a weekend bike ride in his neighborhood, a quiet suburb in Southern California with picturesque houses situated amid generous lawns.
“My oldest loves nature and stopped all of a sudden,” Fitzgerald said. “It forced us all to hit the brakes because he was leading us on our little adventure. He saw a cardinal and wanted to show me. The bird sat on a branch on the edge of someone’s property.”
It was one of those occasions a parent remembers: an ordinary moment when he and his family got to escape the rat race, pause and take a breath to enjoy the simple gifts of nature and fleeting childhood. Blink and that 5-year-old will be 15. Blink again, he’ll be 25.
Alas, Fitzgerald remembers that day for another reason. “All of a sudden, a truck stopped. A white woman rolled down her window and said, ‘What’s going on here? What are you looking at?’ I felt this surge of anger rise within me,” he recalled.
Fitzgerald, a clinical associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California and the author of “Black Males and Racism: Improving the Schooling and Life Chances of African Americans,” said he was ready to use a tone of voice his children had never heard before. “But I looked at my boys and realized that I am their role model and knew I had to control myself,” he says.
“I simply said in the smartest-ass way possible, ‘A bird,’” he said. “I gave them the death stare and the husband said, ‘Well, all right then,’ as if he was giving me permission to continue on my day. He rolled up their window and drove on. This neighborhood is my neighborhood.”
For a moment, he wondered if he had made the wrong decision in moving there. “There are maybe two other families of color here,” Fitzgerald said. “I told my wife we should have never moved into a development with ‘Plantation’ in the name.”
This is an all-too-familiar story of a white person “policing” Black neighbors. “Karens” and “Kens” have been filmed on smartphones challenging people of color with increasing regularity: “Why are you in this building? Do you live here?” Or even, “You’re not allowed to sell lemonade on this street!”
Many say these videos, whether featuring Karens or Kens, shed light on racism and ongoing harassment of people of color by white people, sometimes even their neighbors. Meanwhile, some white feminists argue that the Karen video meme has gone too far, smacks of misogyny and aggressively shames women who are merely having a bad day.
Research suggests Black people are mistreated based on their race more than white people. Some 65% of Black adults say they’ve been in situations where people acted suspicious of them, compared to just 25% of white adults, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Karen phenomenon can be roughly split into two groups: white people who confront and question people of color, and white people who show antipathy or rage toward authority — retail and restaurant workers who ask them to abide by social-distancing rules and wear face masks, for example — or ask to see the manager.
A recent prominent example of the first category is Amy Cooper, who called the cops on May 25 — the same day George Floyd died in police custody, sparking Black Lives Matter protests — after Christian Cooper (no relation) asked her to put her dog on a leash in New York’s Central Park.
They are the neighborhood busybody who has a problem with their Black neighbors: Earlier this summer, Fareed Nassor Hayat and Norrinda Brown Hayat’s neighbor in Montclair, N.J., called the police demanding to see a permit because Hayat and her husband were building a patio in their backyard.
“This isn’t just an argument between neighbors when she’s using the power of the state. She’s calling on the power of the state to say, ‘Hey, I can have a knee on your neck if you don’t submit to me,’” Fareed Hayat said after the incident. Several white neighbors came to the couple’s defense, and the next day there was a protest in the neighborhood in support of the Hayats.
Some harassment runs the gamut from legal residency and ethnicity to sexuality. Earlier this month, this woman harassed a Latino gardener in California and, when he asked her to step back because she is not wearing a mask, she repeatedly said, “Can you show me your papers?” She called him “Mariposa,” Spanish slang for homosexual. He told her, “I’m Mexican! I’m Filipino! I’m Chinese! You’re funny. You made my day.”
The other group of Karens and Kens featured in these viral memes and videos gets upset in public places when the rules don’t bend to their will. However, such cases may also raise larger issues about mental health, substance abuse and/or stress as a result of the pandemic.
Some people in these videos charge store staff at the entrance, cough on patrons, or throw their baskets on the floor or groceries out of their cart. In one particularly bizarre case that could be attributed to stubbornness or something more serious, “Costco Karen” COST, -0.69% sat on the floor of a Costco in Hillsboro, Ore., after declining to wear a mask. “I’m an American. I have constitutional rights,” she said. After requesting to speak to the manager, she sat on the floor. A staff member politely asked her if she would like a chair.
White women also call other white women “Karen.” Take this recent trip to a hairdressers on Madison Avenue, as recounted by Gail, who asked to have her last name withheld. As she was paying her bill, Gail stood at the cash register next to a woman and her dog, who had been running around the salon without a leash. (The salon had a “No Dogs” sign outside.)
When asked to use her credit card, the woman refused to put it into the machine herself. “I couldn’t possibly do that! I have four assistants,” she said, according to Gail’s account. “My assistants do that for me.” The woman also complained about having to social distance and wear a mask. But Gail seemed excited tell the story. “Is she a Karen? I think I met a Karen!”
Racial animosity and economic disenfranchisement
While white women have been filmed for vehemently refusing to wear masks during the pandemic, Black men have even been targeted in stores for wearing them. In May, Kam Buckner, a member of the Illinois state legislature, was stopped by police after leaving a store while wearing a mask.
Buckner told a local news station: When it was clear he had bought the items in his possession, the uniformed officer in question told him, “People are using the coronavirus to do bad things. I couldn’t see your face, man. You looked like you were up to something.”
It was ironic, given the resistance among some white people to wearing face coverings. “I have been programmed to show as much of my face as possible and use certain cues to disarm anyone who might have a learned inclination to be suspicious of my very presence,” Buckner said.
“It is an indictment on the whole of society for creating a climate where this is normal and this is OK,” he added. “I can’t help but think of the dangers that are inherent for a number of Black men who are just adhering to the mask rule and, by doing so, look like they are ‘up to something.’”
In a paper published in the Michigan Journal of Race & Law last year, Chan Tov McNamarah documented a “legion” of white people calling the police on Black people “engaged in mundane activities” during the summer of 2018.
The article, “White Caller Crime: Racialized Police Communication and Existing While Black,” chronicles a litany of such instances ranging from sitting in Starbucks SBUX, +0.17% and playing golf to eating in university classrooms.
But explaining why a Karen or Ken questions Black people who are simply trying to go about their day is an attempt to rationalize the irrational, said Linda Clemons, the CEO of Sisterpreneur, an organization aimed at empowering female entrepreneurs.
“Children are not born that way,” she said. “It doesn’t come from their core being. It comes from someone who is racist or biased.” These divisions go back generations, she adds: “They are coming out of the woodwork. They were already there.”
Clemons says she tells white-women friends to use their voices to speak up against Karens, Kens and white supremacy: “Use your white privilege to form a human barrier.”
That has worked in the past, albeit fleetingly, and with mixed results. Black and white farmworkers fought side-by-side for better working conditions and pay in the 1930s, with the help of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, a federation of tenant farmers, to push for reform of the rights, and the working conditions and pay of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
“Women played a critical role in its organization and administration,” according to the Central Arkansas Library System Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
But politics and government policies got in the way. Laws and practices in the former Confederate states — such as poll taxes, literacy tests and “grandfather clauses” — were introduced to prevent Black people from voting, creating a two-tiered system among the Black and white workers.
Clemons sees the current social climate in the broader historical context of Black workers being scapegoated for white Americans’ economic ills and personal misfortunes, after being exploited as free labor for generations. “The White House was built off [the labor of] slavery and [on] Native Americans’ stolen land,” she said.
White allies have always been there too — perhaps not in the numbers seen so publicly since the civil-rights protests of 1968, Clemons said. But the most recent Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other unarmed Black people at the hands of police have galvanized a new generation of white allies, she added.
‘White people feel safer acting antisocially in public’
In the 21st-century U.S., a different set of economic and social fissures have emerged. President Donald Trump has long identified his white, blue-collar base as “the forgotten people,” those who feel they’ve been left behind. Globalization and technological advancement have hit manufacturing jobs in many of the pivotal states won by Trump in 2016.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” Trump said in his election-night victory speech. The president-elect may have been paying uncredited homage to a 1932 speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that vowed help for “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Given the resentments aired in Karen and Ken videos, they appear to be divided along political lines. FDR’s New Deal in 1933 provided federal support to African-Americans and, by the mid-1930s, most had cut historical ties with Republican Party.
Facing discriminatory labor laws and practices, they threw their support behind Roosevelt and joined with labor unions, farmers and progressives. FDR’s 1936 reelection in a landslide shifted the balance of power in the Democratic Party from its Southern bloc of white conservatives to a more diverse field.
The most recent spate of videos featuring white people confronting Black people for the most innocuous reasons — and seeing red when they’re asked to socially distance by a store employee — comes at another polarizing time in American life, as Black Lives Matter protests sweep the country.
Lillian Glass, a Los Angeles-based communications and body-language expert and author of “Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing With People Who Make Your Life Miserable,” says the rage displayed in these videos is displaced, and likely originates with a combination of multiple other personal and financial problems.
Furloughs, layoffs, the stress of lockdowns and the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has left many Karens and Kens feeling insecure and threatened, Glass observes. “It’s like the perfect storm,” she said.
Fitzgerald, the USC social-work professor, contends fear fuels their fire: “People who have historically lived in a place of privilege and safety are being told a couple of jarring things that have shaken them to their core,” he said. “They are not safe. There is a new social-justice power pushing them to look in the mirror.”
“They are being told that the supposed fake media and the misguided liberals are to blame for the current state of social and economic turmoil,” he adds. “These in fact are the same people, along with people of color, who are challenging their long-held beliefs of white superiority.”
To Aram Sinnreich, an associate professor of communication at American University in Washington, D.C., “the more interesting dimension of this is the question of who is getting angry about masks.” Or put another way: Why are these people refusing to abide by store rules nearly always white?
“Let’s assume that almost everyone is feeling an unusual level of anxiety with a pandemic, record unemployment, political and social instability, and climate change,” Sinnreich said. “Why do some people feel empowered and entitled to act on this anxiety by publicly defying mask-wearing regulations?”
“White people in this country are less accustomed than people of color to having their public behavior subject to regulation, scrutiny and critique,” Sinnreich added. “That’s the purpose of whiteness, after all. So the enforcement of rules like this may come as more of a shock.”
It’s easier for some Americans than others to let loose, and break mandatory mask rules, he said. “White people feel safer acting antisocially in public because there is less of a pervasive threat of injury or death as a result, he said, whereas “a Black person can get killed for jogging or for opening their front door.”
A LONG READ - but for those interested in the rest of the article:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-are-karens-so-angry-2020-07-29
