Moments
Now people are making death threats to Amy Cooper, and Christian Cooper is saying please stop that immediately.
Christian Cooper told CNN that he recently learned that Amy Cooper, who is unrelated, has been receiving death threats following her call — and he wants them to stop.
“I am told there has been death threats and that is wholly inappropriate and abhorrent and should stop immediately,” he said. “I find it strange that people who were upset that … that she tried to bring death by cop down on my head, would then turn around and try to put death threats on her head. Where is the logic in that? Where does that make any kind of sense?”
No death threats, people! Just none! Is that so difficult?
Amy — who was fired from her job in the aftermath — has since apologized multiple times for the incident, calling it “unacceptable” to WNBC.
“I’m not a racist,” she told CNN. “I did not mean to harm that man in any way. [My] entire life is being destroyed right now.”
Christian told CNN Tuesday night that it’s not up to him to determine whether Amy is a racist, but that her actions were “definitely” racist.
“I think her apology is sincere. I’m not sure that in that apology she recognizes that while she may not be or consider herself a racist, that particular act was definitely racist,” he said. “And the fact that that was her recourse at that moment — granted, it was a stressful situation, a sudden situation — you know, maybe a moment of spectacularly poor judgment. But she went there and had this racist act that she did.”
That’s how I see it. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t think she’s necessarily a horrible person – but she had a horrible moment. It was probably a horrible moment added to a whole complicated sense of entitlement that she wasn’t entirely aware of – like the sense of entitlement that allowed her to let her dog run around off leash in front of a lot of signs saying dogs have to be on leash in the Ramble. I suspect that the confidence that comes from being a big noise at Franklin Templeton and having a lot of money played a part, along with the confidence that comes from having white skin – offset by the unconfidence that comes from being a woman. It’s complicated, but the moment she had was definitely a horrible one.
It turns out the ban from Central Park was a fiction.
Michael Fischer, president of the Central Park Civic Association, told the New York Post that Amy’s behavior was “a disgusting display of intolerance” that should “never, ever be accepted in the City’s public domain like Central Park.”
“The Central Park Civic Association condemns this behavior and is calling on Mayor de Blasio to impose a lifetime ban on this lady for her deliberate, racial misleading of law enforcement and violating behavioral guidelines set so that all can enjoy our city’s most famous park,” Fischer said, adding that she should only be allowed back after getting “rehabilitation.”
But City Hall says no can do.
“While this woman’s behavior was despicable and goes against everything this administration stands for, there is unfortunately no legal way to ban her from Central Park,” mayoral spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie tells PEOPLE.
Terrible moments can expand out of all recognition.
I suspect this is part & parcel with the “Karen” meme, since the first link I saw to the story/video referred to her as an “entitled Karen”. “Karen” reduces a (white female) person to a caricature, a thing to be ridiculed. It also serves to exclude the person from any moral calculus (and thus, of course, from any sort of “intersectional” consideration).
Taken as a feature of a deviant logic, the death threats make a certain sort of (paraconsistent) sense.
Yes, the first source I saw was Christian Cooper’s sister calling her a Karen. I wish the Karen meme would just die, but clearly it never will. (And apparently there will never be a male equivalent, either.)
I bet the death threats weren’t coming from the anti-racism people; they were coming from the pro-dog people. They can be rabid, and that video with the poor, choking, ignored pup was damning.
I’ll eliminate the possibility it was the pro-bird people. They would have been tweeting about it.
Christian Cooper is handling this situation perfectly; he is an admirable person. It continues to baffle me that we as a culture can’t seem to get a grip on the distinction between ‘this person is X’ and ‘this person’s act/behaviour is X’–how is this so difficult? This cognition difficulty seems to be at the root of a lot of social and political problems–‘this person is a good person, therefore it’s impossible for him to have done a bad thing, or be wrong about anything’. And if he did do a bad thing, or happens to be mistaken, then he must by definition be a bad person.
I got an email from a friend mentioning the Ramble thing and casually referring to a ‘Karen’–I’m going to have to patiently and politely explain to him that it’s not nice to label people, and not very intelligent (in fact, pretty much the definition of bigoted) to ascribe one person’s bad behaviour to a whole group of people.
Ha! That made me laugh, Sastra.
guest, I don’t think that’s a culture thing. Sadly, I think it’s a human thing.
I’ll bet that the death threats came in significant part from anti-woman people.
Well, men as a class aren’t otherwise “oppressed” or “marginalized”, so there’s no need for a term that excludes them from care. Women, on the other hand, are the oppressed side of an intersectional binary, so “Karen” lets people ignore that and feel righteous about mistreating women. Kinda does work similar to TERF, now that I think about it. Hm. Yeah, that seems right.
@Lady Mondegreen: I don’t actually think it’s a human thing, though it’s certainly an easy thought trap to fall into. I say this for two reasons. First, in our own culture we seem to be fine with statements like ‘not every woman has a uterus’ or whatever–we seem to be able to separate appearance/behaviour from ‘what someone is’ when it suits us. (A couple of interesting books about how these ideas arose and developed historically are Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man and Lyn Lofland’s A World of Strangers.) Second, other cultures approach individual bad behaviour in different ways–some use the ‘devil made me do it’ excuse, in which a spirit or something causes the person to do the ‘bad’ thing and can be removed by the person her/himself or some designated authority–the person didn’t do a bad thing because they were a bad person, they did it under some ‘outside’ influence that can be removed. Or the culture group has some designated penance process, either perfunctory or seriously challenging; the person who did the ‘bad’ thing can be restored to being ‘not bad’ once they have completed this series of actions.
I keep being told my reaction is due to not being American and failing to take into account the historical context of white ladies complaining to the police about black men.
BUT I HAVEN’T DEFENDED THE WHITE LADY. I haven’t even downplayed the vileness and potential deadlines of her actions.
I don’t feel badly that she lost her job. This will follow her for the rest of her life and I think that’s reasonable. Her actions have been universally condemned. She should face consequences for wasting the police’s time and, yeah, she should be unwelcome in Central Park from now on. Her actions warrant punishment.
But I don’t support the effort to drive this woman to suicide.
And that makes me racist, apparently.
So then I guess Christian Cooper is racist too.
People; honestly.