Over some KAREN in EUROPE
About that “Karen” thing…
Was Anne Frank a “Karen”?
In since-vanished but much-screenshotted (and still search-appearing) tweets, Gazi Kodzo, someone evidently of YouTube activist fame/notoriety, pointed an emoji middle finger at… Anne Frank?
As one does.
A BECKY as well as a KAREN.
To be sure, there is plenty of room to point out that we’re better at shock-horror at genocides Over There than at genocides Right Here. That probably applies to humans in general as well as USians in particular. But it’s surprisingly easy to talk about that without calling Anne Frank either a Becky or a Karen, and by the same token it’s easy to talk about it without calling anyone a Becky or a Karen.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy goes on:
Is “Karen” — or the similar “Becky” — an anti-racist protest against white ladies who call the cops at the drop of a hat? Or is it sexism posing as progressivism?
Mostly the second, in my view, especially when it’s white men doing it, as it so very often is.
It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Denzel” or “Stokely.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Truman” or a “Barney.” It seems to me you don’t see a whole lot of progressives jeering at a “Juan” or a “José.” It seems to me it’s not a thing progressives do, because it looks…wrong. Bad, racist or racist-like, homophobic or homophobic-like, xenophobic or xenophobic-like. But somehow when it’s women the squick factor isn’t there. Why is that? Why does it feel ok and even progressive to use dismissive contemptuous personal names for a kind of woman you dislike when it doesn’t feel ok to do that for a kind of man you dislike?
Updating to add another example, this time from Pharyngula:
The Idaho playground rebellion was grotesque, and the different rules for white people are grotesque, but it’s entirely possible to say that without saying “a flock of Karens” just as it’s possible to say that without saying “a bunch of cunts.”
H/t latsot
I loathe the Karen thing for all those reasons and because the justification is always that “we all know women like that.”
That we all know a lot more men like that doesn’t seem to matter. Nor does the vast difference in the standards of behaviour deemed Kareny between women and men.
PZ used the term in a recentish post and someone in the comments asked what it meant. I answered that it was a misogynistic term, best avoided and was called a troll. Another comment quipped (incorrectly) that I’d obviously never worked in retail.
PZ has lost the fucking plot.
Well, I have worked in retail. And in fast food, which is a whole other form of retail that brings out the worst in customers. And yes, I have encountered women “like that”. Even more, I have encountered teenagers “like that”, in much larger numbers (male and female alike). But the most common “like that” I ever encountered was among white men.
In women, there seems to be a class differential. The more middle class the woman, the more likely she was to be sort of okay. As she moved up in class, I saw more of “like that”. Those in the working classes were mostly a mixed bag of attitudes, but rarely “like that”. What I did see was more condescension, entitlement, and ill treatment of the female employees by men of every class (and to some extent every race, but the town I grew up in was intensely white, so not much).
And no woman, “Karen”, “Becky”, or otherwise, ever removed her pants and came through the drive-thru in such a position that one could not avoid seeing their sexual equipment. I never saw a woman flash her tits, and none of the young men working there did, either, though they did make crude jokes about the women workers and customers they wished would flash their tits.
And it is perfectly possible to cry over an Anne Frank and also all the many African Americans, Mexican Americans, Palestinians, and others who suffer. I for one do not have a limited pool of compassion that is used up by the time I finish reading the Diary of Anne Frank. I can continue to feel compassion as I turn to Twelve Years a Slave or any other incident of injustice that I encounter.
It’s not lost on me how the horde over at PZ’s are simultaneously urgently demanding of such stupid crap as “preferred pronouns” while also sneeringly using “Karen” to denigrate women.
Anna Frank doesn’t “count” because she was just some Jewish girl? The Holocaust doesn’t “count” because it was just a few million Jews?
That’s quite the take.
Yes. If this was some white militia member, everyone would be quick to call it what it is: Anti-Semitism.
Indeed, it’s telling that it’s not-particularly-“ethnic”–sounding names that get used. It means that it’s a “being anti-white women is neither racist nor misogynist” thing. The race component occludes the misogyny. It means that white people are so bad, so deserving of hatred that any other sin is irrelevant as long as Whiteness is the target.
That’s rather perverse.
Well, that white women are. I don’t think there’s a male equivalent of Karen and Becky is there?
Well, the MRAs have Chad, but Chad is a counterpart of Stacy. Becky is, if I understand correctly, Stacy’s friend.
Oh, and one other thing that occurred to me. It seems odd that he never heard of all the indigenous genocides, or the ways in which black girls were kept in slavery, abused, and killed. I did. In middle school. In junior high. In high school. in Oklahoma. In the 1970s. And the teachers were not attempting to explain it away, to cover it up, to present it as good. They were as horrified by this as by the Holocaust, and did their best to bring it to the attention of the lily-white, upper middle-class students that populated the schools I attended. We talked more about those things than the Holocaust.
And it is still covered. I have not had a single student that was unaware of the problems of the genocide of indigenous people, the problems of slavery, and so forth. Few if any of them are unaware of the Palestinians, though I will admit they get most of that information through their churches, which tend to be slanted towards Israel. I do, strangely, get students who are unaware of the Holocaust, but that might just be forgetting. After all, as I said, we got it for one unit out of history, and the others were a much bigger part of my history courses, so unless they elected to remember, they might not.
They have all heard of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and other major civil rights leaders. They haven’t heard of Albert Einstein, but they do know Rosa Parks. They know of slavery (many of them seem to think it ended with WWII, but I suppose getting all these conflicts straight can be challenging when it all seems so hopelessly long ago).
So I suspect the majority of this tweet is hyperbole designed to make his case. The sad thing is, there is a strong case to be made for the oppression and outright murder and genocide of these groups; you don’t need hyperbole to sell it.
#10 Yes. Its amazing how the poster’s ignorance MUST be because of a conspiracy. And, as always, one cannot do a Wokey McWokeface complaint without citing the Elders of Zion.
As far as I can tell, it’s a straight up falsehood, and a rather common one, which pretends that nothing was ever taught about the slave trade or the destruction of native American nations. The Truth is/was intentionally hidden from non-whites in order to support white supremacy. Those who are aware of the Truth are special; the Truth has been revealed to them in revelation as part of the the New Great Awakening. They are Woke.
The insidious thing is that, just like with religious belief, the believer retrospectively alters his or her own experience to conform to the faith. Like how cults can convince people that their families are evil and whatnot. Only the Woke know about the Truth, so the believer couldn’t have learned about it before Awokening, and the believer denies his or her own experience.
It’s part of saying the correct words in the correct order.
There is a shred of truth in the “never taught” claim: the way Reconstruction was taught was a genuine disgrace. The slaveowner/KKK narrative of “carpet baggers” and corruption and blah blah blah was the official version until the 1970s.
Maybe. I can’t speak to that, because I went to high school in the 1970s. We got it more as a “both sides now” sort of thing, with “some people say it was bad, but a lot of scholars are now saying that…” This guy, from his picture, appears to be much younger than me. So I still doubt his story.
I will say, it wasn’t until college that I learned how badly we treated Panama. But the other stuff? Yeah.
There’s no “maybe” about it, it’s just a historical fact. The teaching of post-Civil War history was fucked up for way too long.