Before addressing the topic proposed in the title, I want to talk for a minute about psychological motives for an increasingly apparent trend of interpreting every single interaction through the lens of race.
Priming, confirmation bias, and the availability heuristic are powerful psychological forces exerting subtle mind control outside of our conscious awareness:
- Priming is the notion that subtle cues can influence how you interpret subsequent information or even how you act. A classic (though somewhat contested) example of priming was demonstrated by a study in which some people were shown neutral words while other people were shown words associated with old age. After the experiment had apparently ended, the participants, unbeknownst to them, were timed as they walked down the hallway back to the elevator. Those who had seen the set of “old” words walked more slowly. The experimenters demonstrated that simply by making people think of old age, you could get them to walk in a manner that more closely reflected old age.
- Confirmation bias is the notion that once you begin consciously looking for something, you tend to find it more frequently in the environment around you. It’s why after buying a luxury car people tend to perceive that “everyone is driving that car.” After the purchase, they are on heightened alert and thus notice the car more often.
- The availability heuristic misleads you to believe that the ease with which you can think of something indicates its frequency of occurrence. Plane crashes are vanishingly rare but nonetheless horrible events that receive a tremendous amount of media attention. Images of the wreckage get burned into our minds. We can easily recall these images and thus think that plane crashes are common. The availability heuristic explains why many people worry about dying in a plane crash, despite frequency of crashes being so low that from the 2018 statistics researchers could only conclude there were “too few deaths in 2018 to calculate odds.”
In today’s climate, we are primed to think of race 24/7, we are incentivized to confirm instances of racism as a means of demonstrating a commitment to anti-racism, and due to the availability of examples broadcasted on social and traditional media we’re certain that racist events are occurring around us every second.
You can summarize the resultant mental state with an old saying: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The more focused we are on race, the more it will seem that every injustice in the world is due to racism.
I am well aware that racism and racial biases still exist in America. For example, studies over the past two decades have proven that resumes with black-sounding names are less likely to get a call back from prospective employers than resumes with white-sounding names. Every summer there is a litany of stories about black people being asked to leave the pool because a racist apartment manager assumes they don’t live there. These issues represent just the tip of the iceberg.
But the existence of these problems doesn’t prove that in every encounter with “Karen,” the now ubiquitous term for an obnoxious white woman, she was acting that way because 1) she is white or 2) she was motivated by the race of the other person in the interaction. To make everything about race is to ignore a much more fundamental truth: We are living in a world full of assholes. It’s eminently probable that the Karen du jour falls into this category.
I have been living in China for the past three and a half years. As a result, I’ve been slower to pick up on new trends and more deliberate in my consideration about whether or not to go along with them. I assume this is because while in China I was separated from my friends by thousands of miles, a 15–16 hour time difference, and a Great Firewall which made WhatsApp calls difficult. These circumstances force a person to arrive at conclusions independently, without the gravitational pull of thought patterns and world views shared with friends of fifteen years. I’ve come to the conclusion that using “Karen” as an insult and outing her online are unhelpful behaviors. I say unhelpful in the sense that these behaviors are counterproductive to achieving racial equality in America.
First, let’s address the use of “Karen” as an insult. Calling an obnoxious white woman “Karen” is materially the same as calling black or hispanic people by names that similarly evoke their ethnicity. You might say that black and hispanic people almost never embody Karen’s traits — a sense of entitlement, and contempt for people she deems below her. It may be true that this set of traits is more common in white people than people of color. But if you concede that white people exhibit certain characteristics frequently enough to justify a stereotype, you’ve excused white people to do the same with respect to people of color. This is not a threat, nor is it an opinion. It’s Newton’s 3rd law: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
In the past fifteen years, I can’t think of a single instance in which I’ve heard a friend use the name Shaniqua or Consuela to speak demeaningly of a person of color. I can’t say the same about my grandfather’s generation. The fact that this kind of racialized “humor” is not acceptable today is progress.
The more we use “Karen,” the more rapidly we’ll re-normalize that kind of language. I am dismayed at the prospect of taking such a large step backwards.
Second, I want to convince you that filming “Karens” and outing them online is also unhelpful. The example I’ll use comes from Jaime Juanillo in San Francisco.
Jaime is outside on a sunny afternoon stenciling “Black Lives Matter” onto the wall in front of his home. At the point he begins filming, a white couple has approached him and asks if he lives there. He defensively evades the question, evoking suspicion that he doesn’t in fact live there and is therefore vandalizing private property. At this point Karen (Lisa) makes a bluff that will end up ruining her life: she lies, telling Jaime she knows the owner of the property and therefore knows that he is committing vandalism. Jaime has now caught her in a lie.
If you watch the video, you might come to the conclusion that Karen is racist. It’s certainly a possibility.
But remember that as the audience, we are primed to believe it must be racism, we want to confirm it is indeed racism in order to remove another racist from the position of power she holds, and we’re awash in the readily available examples of racist behavior thrown at us daily across every conceivable media format.
If you’ve already seen the video of Tony Timpa having the life crushed out of him as a white police officer kneels on his back for fourteen minutes, you’ll have confronted the fact that racism didn’t cause his death. Tony and his killer are both white. We can speculate that the officer was poorly trained and utterly oblivious to the suffering he was causing. By the same token, we can speculate that Lisa is (or was being) an unpleasant person. If this is the correct explanation then her punishment far exceeds the crime: her brand was deplatformed from online retail outlets and her husband was fired.
Jaime, for his part, can be assumed to be under the same psychological forces discussed above. He immediately concludes that Lisa and her husband are racist. Unfortunately, there is an incentive for Jaime, or anyone in his position, to hold this belief: within days of the incident, he had dozens of articles written about him, he appeared on CNN, and went from several thousand Twitter followers to over 25,000. He’s a folk hero.
It’s certainly possible to think “If Jaime were a straight white man, he might not have been approached by Lisa at all. She treated him that way because he’s a person of color and she’s a racist.” We’ll never know, but let me suggest an alternative. I worked full time at a high-end restaurant for two years during college. I waited on people like Lisa five nights a week. I am all too familiar with tone, the hand gestures, the condescending facial expressions, the lies. The restaurant I worked at was frequently full and people would sometimes come in with no reservation, insisting they had one, and tell me they knew the manager and would get me fired if I didn’t seat them immediately. The first time this happened I panicked. I hauled in a table from out back and set it up for them in the patio area. The manager later told me he had no idea who they were. People like Lisa are motivated by the knowledge that by being unreasonable, often to an extent that escapes the imagination of decent people, they can often get what they want. Skin color isn’t necessarily a factor.
So why is outing Karens bad? There are two answers.
For starters, the social media success of Jaime’s video leads to copycats. Karlos Dillard, a Seattle man whose Twitter handle essentially means white people hate, posted a video of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Karlos says she called him the n-word, cut him off in traffic, and flipped him off. The video contains exactly zero evidence of this. Karlos is now selling “Karen” t-shirts on his website. If you’re OK with this, I don’t know what to tell you.
More importantly, every time a “Karen” video goes viral (especially videos like Karlos’), it sends a signal to any would be Karens: “If you see a person of color doing something that bothers you, don’t try to talk to them.” For some people, this will amount to walking away. For other people, this will amount to calling the police. If Lisa had known how the interaction with Jaime was going to unfold, she would not have approached him. She would have dialed 911 and left it up to the police to resolve. I am not excusing that reaction. I am telling you it’s inevitable. As Jaime pointed out in an interview after the incident, “You can presume that she knew by calling the police that I could possibly die.” The more “Karen” feels like resolving a situation face-to-face is impossible, the more we will see the police called, which ultimately puts people of color at risk.
I recently listened to a conversation with John McWhorter, a Brown University linguistics professor known for contrarian views on being black in America. His words have reverberated in my head over the past week as I’ve been writing this essay. To paraphrase: We are teaching people of color that defeatism is a means to identity formation. The way you become important is by crying victim. We are teaching white people that the way to be a good human being is to pretend that the lives of people of color in America have not improved since the year 1900. (Coates & Kanye, May 2018)
He spoke these words two years ago but they ring true for the Jaime/Lisa saga today. Jaime is offended by Lisa’s behavior and immediately determines the root cause is racism (maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but remember: priming, confirmation, availability). He goes on CNN and receives a deluge of praise on social media. Ill-intentioned copycats like Karlos Dillard arise. Lisa also plays her part, issuing a self-flagellating apology statement, presumably a condition of her her reentry into society.
I can understand why it feels good to expose someone like Lisa as the latest Karen. She does not come off as a pleasant person. But this temporary satisfaction will, as all things do, produce an equal and opposite reaction. The pendulum will eventually swing in the other direction.
The noblest deed is to encounter Karen and for no one but you and her to ever know about it.
