The K-Word

About Karens

Dear readers,

I don’t normally weigh in on matters of race, because, to borrow from John McWhorter, I can only tolerate so many groups hating me. But the CitiBike Karen incident of last week prompted me to express some verboten thoughts about who has a right to express what emotions or behaviors based on social category—and who doesn’t.

—LD

Photo by Dylan Dehnert on Unsplash

When I first heard that my child’s elementary school was forming a diversity committee around 2015, I was both excited and relieved. My daughter was different than every other girl in her school in a fundamental way—she exhibited many “boy-typical” qualities and proclivities—and I wanted to educate the community about gender nonconformity.

In order to do that, I basically had to communicate one thing: Boys and girls can look and act all kinds of ways.

What a salve that message turned out to be. Once delivered by the kindergarten teacher, the message assuaged the confusion, the unnerved feeling of those put off by a girl with short hair and sweatpants and mostly male friends. They understood. Rarely did it come up again (except in the bathroom, when kids who didn’t know her thought she was in the wrong one).

The diversity committee, though, was not what I expected it to be.

At the first meeting I attended, the main topic was removing books on the Negro Leagues—a network of black baseball teams begun in 1920—from the school library. “But wasn’t the league actually called that?” I asked. “Wasn’t that acceptable terminology at the time?” Why, I wondered, would we erase history like that, imposing our present ideas of acceptability onto the past, because a word was now out of favor? It seemed a poor lesson for children.

This was before I knew that asking the wrong questions could get you labeled as a bigot and rushed to the bottom run of the social ladder. The ladies (all ladies!) of diversity committee didn’t immediately scold me. They explained, with waning patience, that the books were written by white, Jewish writers. The content wasn’t the problem; the creator was.

I put my phone in my lap and stealthily texted my husband, “I feel like I’m at some version of book burning.” It seemed especially strange to me that the problematic author was Jewish; after all, many Jews were drawn to participate in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, feeling kinship as people once enslaved and oft discriminated against themselves. Some had died for their Civil Rights activism.

But Jews weren’t minorities anymore, despite making up less than 3 percent of the population, because the bulk of them could pass as white. Or, rather, they had become accepted as white in the American racial hierarchy, over the last century—at least by some segments of the population.

I continued to participate in the committee, certain we shared the same values: to respect diversity, to increase tolerance of differences, to make sure the kids in our overwhelmingly white school were aware of and able to talk about race.

Then the Diversity Committee assigned White Fragility as the book-of-the-month.

In all honesty, I didn’t finish it. I read the intro, and I watched some of author Robin D’Angelo’s talks, and I had that same feeling I experienced when I first started to report about gender issues: Something seems fundamentally wrong with these arguments, but I don’t have the language or the information to formulate a decent rebuttal.

Over the years, I’ve been in many book clubs, and thus I assumed we’d be discussing, parsing, debating the content of the book, its assertions.

Instead, book club was a struggle session, in which I was supposed to comb over the racial missteps in my life and atone for them.

It’s not that I don’t see some value in this exercise—or that I have nothing to atone for. After all, we all judge people based on their categories and group affiliations. We all have some innate tribalism that causes us to cling to our identity groups, whether they be related to religion or artistic preferences or whether or not we want to spend hours listening to YouTube videos of people chewing; there are all kids of ways to align and commune with people based on shared beliefs or innate characteristics, and all kinds of ways to distance ourselves. To understand how this human instinct works, to ask yourself how it might be affecting the way you treat people: that’s good. It’s not gonna end structural racism or institutionalized sexism or create lasting and fair societal change, but it’s still useful self-knowledge.

Problem was, we weren’t supposed to see it that way at book club. We were supposed to repent for sins like: One time in sixth grade a white woman hadn’t invited a black girl to her birthday party. A woman of South Asian descent maybe shouldn’t have taken the promotion, reserving it for a black woman instead.

Unsurprisingly, I resisted the instructions. When it was my turn to talk, I asked, “Does it seem strange that white women are supposed to face their racism, the worst parts of themselves, but not cry about it? Doesn’t that seem…dehumanizing?” I was truly horrified by this idea, that white women were “weaponizing tears”—manipulating people, as opposed to feeling and expressing emotions. I assumed the other book clubbers would be skeptical, too.

Not so. At my questions, their heads cocked, their eyes crinkled. Wasn’t this the same lady who wanted to keep the Negro League books in the library, they seemed to be wondering. Was this lady a racist? Was she a…Karen?

(Oh god, I thought. I am so unprepared for the most basic part of being human. I am so bad at being in a tribe—unless someone forces me into one.)

The book club ended without serious incident, but it was clear to all of us that I wasn’t aligned with them. And later, when I first heard the term Karen, I had the same reaction that I did to White Fragility when I first learned its tenets. It seemed like the term was a way to shame white women, but those of us who live in liberal-land are often told that it’s not possible to be racist against white people, so if white woman felt pain or shame over misbehaving, that wasn’t a problem. That was accountability.

For someone like me, who has struggled with emotion regulation for my entire life, Karen can be a useful term, a reminder that I’m not behaving in the way that I want to. Sometimes my kids call me Karen when I’m losing my temper at a customer service rep (my biggest weakness). Then I’m catapulted back into my body, into the reality that my children are watching and learning from me. I have Karened a million times in ways I’m deeply ashamed of: yelling at the tow truck guy for blocking me from a spot during the high-stakes stress of alternative side parking, for example. Anytime I feel panicked or disrespected—anytime I perceive that someone is disrespecting me, whether they are or not—I may slip into the angry, entitled behavior associated with Karens.

I am white, by current definition, so if I behave this way, it must be because I’m white, and thus I must be held accountable—and by that I mean: punished.

Thing is, I’ve seen women of many races behave this way. I’ve seen women of many races being demanding, dressing someone down, dismissing them for the social categories to which they belong. I’ve seen these women act entitled. Yet under the currently ideology, as long as they are not white (or not “cisgender”) they are entitled—not meaning “acting as if you deserve more than you do,” but rather meaning “deserving more than you’ve gotten.” They have the right to unkindness and prejudice.

The idea is that this division is about equity.

I remember seeing this poster at my kids’ school, of an adult and two kids standing at a fence, trying to see a baseball game. One image showed “equality”—one tall, one short, and one medium-sized person each received a box to stand on, to see over the fence. The other showed “equity”—the tall one got zilch, the short one got two, the medium-sized one got one.

That makes complete sense to me, except that height is measurable, and so is the ability to see, or not, over a fence. But power and privilege and entitlement—these are fuzzier ideas, more difficult to measure. Equity is harder to mete out when it comes to who is allowed to access and express certain feelings or certain ideas, based on their immutable characteristics or subjective realities or self-determined identities.

Someone texted me on Friday about the CitiBike Karen incident. The first video I watched looked kind of bad: a white woman on a bike, a black teen next to her as she calls for help.

Then I read more: she was six months pregnant. She worked as a physician’s assistant at Bellevue Hospital, a public hospital that disproportionately serves the poor and people of color. She was surrounded by several teens. One report suggested she’d taken the bike out and a kid had grabbed onto it and pushed her back to the dock. It sounded terrifying.

Yet, even after these details were released, tweets remained up, calling her CitiBike Karen and impugning her character, dismissing her as a hateful bigot. No context, no additional information, could shift the judgers from their positions. The hospital placed her on leave, because it appeared, according to a viral video, that she had misbehaved.

Under the constraints of white fragility, there lies no path toward retribution other than to join the church of social justice and dedicate yourself to a very particular mindset known as “anti-racism,” requiring public apology and proselytizing. Thus, anything that doesn’t jive with it is pro-racism. What a nifty trick of semantics. The more this woman defends herself, the more “accountability” will be required by her critics.

For many decades, much of white society assumed the guilt of people of color, especially black people, without ever having the bear the burden of proof. Punishment came in the form of lynchings—a sort of vigilante “justice”—or, later, Jim Crow laws: institutionalized injustice.

These are scars on our nation, on families. I don’t for a minute suggest that being placed on leave and publicly shamed—because you are white and called for help when black teens surrounded you—are the same as being murdered or systematically oppressed. But I do suggest that it’s not progress, that it’s not healing, that it’s not fair, that it’s not healthy. And I suggest that it is indeed racist: if someone’s race causes us to assume their guilt, their moral pollution, we are being racist.

We often talk about minority stress in this country—the emotional, financial and physical burdens of being discriminated against because of your social categories. But I’d offer that anyone can feel that stress, whether their category is associated with privilege or not.

Any word that allows you to dehumanize someone, to see them only as avatars of social categories and not as individuals who may deserve respect…is a bad word. When we label a woman a Karen, we give ourselves permission to behave badly toward her. Perhaps only Karens like me should be able to call themselves Karen. For everyone else, it should be the K-word, and a reminder that hating someone for her sex and skin color is wrong.