a grievance for white women and white people, but also an anger by people that even if they are white, can see the injustice of the situation.” So in this moment, where we’ve been trapped in our house for six weeks with nothing to do but feel, when you see these videos, you have nothing else to do but watch them and see people’s reactions to them. “For men, it’s a fight for women, it’s calling men to help on their behalf or demonstrating that they are so frail that they cannot handle the weight. André Brock, associate professor of Black digital culture at Georgia Tech whose research is leading the conversation on the impact of Black Twitter. “One of the things that has worked throughout American history is finding a way to project whiteness in need of defense or protection,” says Dr. A reckoning begins in Central Park and Minneapolis Visuals of Karens exploiting their privilege when things don’t go their way have become Internet shorthand of late for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries - following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood. In comments shared after the incident with CNN, Cooper said that she wanted to “publicly apologize to everyone” and claimed that she was “not a racist” and “did not mean to harm that man in any way.” In an interview with ABC7 News, Christian Cooper accepted her apology, but urged for viewers to focus on not just the viral clip, but the “underlying current of racism and racial perceptions.” Within days after the video of Cooper was shared to Twitter, Cooper was fired from her job and temporarily lost custody of her dog on July 6 the Manhattan DA said she would be charged for filing a false report. There’s the Karen who was recorded spewing multiple racist tirades against Asian Americans in a park in Torrance, Calif., upon which the Internet discovered that she had a history of discriminatory outbursts, earning her the title of “Ultra Karen.” There’s the Karen in Los Angeles who used two hammers to damage her neighbors’ car as she told them to “get the f –ck out of this neighborhood.” There’s the Karen who purposely coughed on someone who called her out for not wearing a mask while at a coffee shop in New York City.Īnd perhaps most notably, there’s Amy Cooper, the “Central Park Karen,” who elevated a national discourse about the dangers associated when Black people are falsely accused when she called the police on Christian Cooper (no relation,) a Black man who merely asked her to leash her dog in a part of Central Park that required it, invoking his race on the call. The archetype of the Karen has risen to outstanding levels of notoriety in recent weeks, thanks to a flood of footage that’s become increasingly more violent and disturbing. While Juanillo was fortunate to have been recognized and unharmed, calls like this could result in injury or worse, death. He later told ABC7 News that the couple called the police, who he says recognized him as the resident instantly. The video showed Juanillo, who identified himself in a social media caption as a person of color, telling Alexander and her partner that they should call the police if they felt he was breaking the law. The woman’s name is Lisa Alexander, but on the Internet, she’s most recognized as the “San Francisco Karen,” after a clip went viral of her last week, in which she demands to know if James Juanillo, who was stenciling “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on the front of his own home, was defacing private property. When you look up the hashtag #Karen on Instagram, a search that yields over 773,000 posts, the featured image on the page is a screenshot of a white woman staring intensely into the camera, pursing her lips into a smile as she touches a finger to her chin, a movement that’s at once condescending and cloying.
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