Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Spare A Tear For Oppressed Billionaire Conservatives
"Karen" and "Cis" are now racist, misogynist slurs!https://thebanter.substack.com/p/spare-a-tear-for-oppressed-billionaire
https://archive.fo/2eitP
There is precious little ideological consistency on the American right. Yesterday they loved law enforcement. Today they want to defund the FBI. Last week they were terrified of Czars and anything with the faintest hint of Russia. This week, they can’t stop praising Vladimir Putin and his nation of kleptocrats. This is what happens when your core organizing principle is “owning the libs.” The ground beneath your feet is sand that can shift at a moment’s notice. You believe in nothing. You stand for nothing.
But there is at least one fixed point in what passes for right-wing ideology: They are the eternal victims of oppression and persecution. This is their North Star. Even as they spend every waking moment hurting the people they hate, they obsess over the idea that they live in a country where white cisgender men and women are a powerless, oppressed minority. These are the same people who still control the bulk of the wealth, dictate the majority of the culture, and wield political power like a battering ram against vulnerable children. But, sure, they are the victims of relentless persecution.
One of the more recent, and definitely one of the more curious, subplots of the ongoing melodrama that is “My Oppressed Life” is the attempt to create new slurs in order to appropriate oppression. It hasn’t been going well, leading to much mockery of the painfully privileged people sobbing about their laughably performative anguish, but it has been highly instructive. Short of physically nailing themselves to a wooden cross, this is about as transparent (no pun intended) as it gets for self-martyrdom.
I want to speak to the manager!
Last month, Fox News talking head Will Cain was trying his darndest to fill in the pointed hood-shaped hole left in the propaganda channel’s primetime lineup by the truly unfortunate departure of Tucker Carlson. Cain blurted out that “Karen” is, and I swear he really said this, a “racial slur for white women.” Cue the white victimization and sad, sad music. I feel bad for women actually named Karen, I really do. It’s a little (a lot) unfair to them. But for “Karens?” The obnoxious middle-aged white women who abuse their privilege? They’re not the victims of anything but their own arrogance. If that arrogance drops a nuke into their life and disrupts their sheltered little world? They have no one to blame but themselves.
snip
22 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
because she's IS a she and therefore less likely to
respond with a punch or a bullet..Women make "easier targets". 
https://time.com/5857023/karen-meme-history-meaning/
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. 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. 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. He later told ABC7 News that the couple called the police, who he says recognized him as the resident instantly. While Juanillo was fortunate to have been recognized and unharmed, calls like this could result in injury or worse, death.
snip
Link to tweet
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. 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.
Link to tweet
snip
How the Karen meme relates to the violent history of white women
The historical narrative of white women’s victimhood goes back to myths that were constructed during the era of American slavery. Black slaves were posited as sexual threats to the white women, the wives of slave owners; in reality, slave masters were the ones raping their slaves. This ideology, however, perpetuated the idea that white women, who represented the good and the moral in American society, needed to be protected by white men at all costs, thus justifying racial violence towards Black men or anyone that posed a threat to their power. This narrative that was the overarching theme of Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that was the first movie to be shown at the White House, and is often cited as the inspiration for the rebirth of the KKK.
“If we’re thinking about this in a historical context where white women are given the power over Black men, that their word will be valued over a Black man, that makes it particularly dangerous and that’s the problem,” says Dr. Apryl Williams, an assistant professor in communications and media at the University of Michigan and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard who focuses on race, gender and community in digital spaces. “White women are positioned as the virtue of society because they hold that position as the mother, as the keepers of virtuosity, all these ideologies that we associate with white motherhood and white women in particular, their certain role in society gives them power and when you couple that with this racist history, where white women are afraid of black men and black men are hypersexualized and seen as dangerous, then that’s really a volatile combination.”
snip
related
The ‘Karen’ memes and jokes aren’t sexist or racist. Let a Karen explain
.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/28/karen-memes-jokes-arent-sexist-or-racist-let-karen-explain/
https://archive.fo/sSNJ9
snip
The most recent Karen fires came from across the Atlantic, fanned by white British women claiming that “Karen” is — wait for it — an oppressive slur. “Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman-hating and based on class prejudice?” tweeted Julie Bindel, a British feminist writer, whose credentials in oppression include being known for espousing anti-trans rhetoric. Nonetheless, the conversation around Bindel’s tweet included white women who did feel Karen memes were offensive. Hadley Freeman wrote in the Guardian that the Karen memes were sexist. Another viral tweet went so far as to call “Karen” the equivalent of the n-word. As a millennial black Karen, and a child of immigrants, I find the brouhaha hilarious and twisted. “Karen” is not and will never be an oppressive slur. Anyone who disagrees can take it up with my manag … — I mean, with history.
In her piece for the Guardian, Freeman’s basis for labeling the Karen meme sexist was that white men are using the word to make fun of white women. But Freeman seems to believe "Karen” originated with white men, when these notions about the name and white privilege have been circulating in the black community for a long time. As a kid in South Dallas in the ’90s, I remember one time when I introduced myself to other black kids at the mall. One of them raised an eyebrow and looked puzzled when I told him my name. “You don’t look like a Karen,” he said. “That’s a white lady’s name.” Karen was a popular name for baby girls in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, many Karens are, in fact, of the boomer generation. My mother, who grew up in Nigeria, named me Karen precisely because she wanted me to blend into white American society and face fewer problems in life than I would have with a foreign or a “black-sounding” name. Being a Karen has probably given me some advantages.
Freeman goes on to lament that there are “memes about Chad and Zach,” but those “have never had the popularity of ones about Becky, Susan or Tammy, let alone Karen.” It’s not as though men’s names haven’t been used to depict problematic behavior. There’s “Uncle Tom,” used to describe a black man who is seen to be excessively subservient to white people. A more recent example is “Stan,” which in recent years has come to mean a person who is an admirer of a public figure. But the origins come from Eminem’s song “Stan,” in which a male fan named Stan is so utterly obsessed with Eminem that he kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend. There isn’t a specific name that is used for problematic young white male behavior; the dismissive “OK, bro” is what we’ve got for now. Freeman largely ignores race in her piece, save for one throwaway line: “People of color should describe their experiences of racism in whatever language works for them.”
Well, many of us decided that Karen, or, say, Becky, works for us. Black American expression, including hip-hop, rap and remix culture, drives global social media culture and shapes language. Take Becky, for example: It was rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 song “Baby Got Back,” in which a white girl, disgusted by the shape of a black woman’s body, talks behind the black woman’s back to her friend Becky. Over the years, and partially thanks to Beyoncé, “Becky” was popularized in the black community to refer to a white girl, especially one with backstabbing tendencies. But this is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Cultures from around the world use common names to describe archetypal behaviors. Is “Karen” gendered? Yes, it’s a girl’s name. But sexist? Nah. In America, white women are often believed and protected at all costs, even at the expense of black lives. In 1955, it was a white woman who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of whistling at her in Mississippi, which led to him being brutally beaten and killed. Fast-forward to recent years and we still learn about black people being arrested or assaulted because a white woman called the police unnecessarily. Becky and Karen memes and jokes should be understood in this context, part of a long tradition to use humor to try to cope with the realities of white privilege and anti-blackness.
snip
for some much needed perspectiveve. 
violence against people of colour, violence many times instigated by racist white women (even if not actually physically perpetrated by them) feeding off of that system, but here I am.
