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| Last Crawled | 2026-04-06 20:29:40 (2 days ago) |
| First Indexed | 2020-06-25 20:55:38 (5 years ago) |
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| Meta Title | How the Karen Meme Confronts History of White Womanhood |
| Meta Description | The Karen meme follows in a long and troubling legacy of white women in the United States weaponizing their victimhood. |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | 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 thatâs at once condescending and cloying.
The womanâs name is Lisa Alexander, but on the Internet, sheâs most recognized as the
âSan Francisco Karen,â
after a clip went viral of her last week, in which she demands to know if James Juanillo, who was stenciling âBlack Lives Matterâ 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.
For Alexander, however, going viral as a Karen brought major consequences; she and her partner were both identified by their full names by online sleuths, which resulted in her skincare business being boycotted and her partner getting fired from his job. Both Alexander and her partner released
apology statements to
ABC7 News;
in Alexanderâs apology, she expresses regret for her behavior: âWhen I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did. It was disrespectful to Mr. Juanillo and I am deeply sorry for that.â
The video of Alexander is one of a myriad of other videos, images and memes that have emerged in the last few months of âKarens,â a slang term for middle-aged white women (which seems to have stemmed from the popular
âCan I speak to a manager?â
meme,) who have become infamous online for their shameless displays of entitlement, privilege, and racism â and their tendency to call the police when they donât get what they want.
And perhaps most notably, thereâs Amy Cooper, the âCentral Park Karen,â 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. 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
.
In comments shared after the incident with
CNN
,
Cooper said that she wanted to âpublicly apologize to everyoneâ and claimed that she was ânot a racistâ and âdid not mean to harm that man in any way.â 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 âunderlying current of racism and racial perceptions.â
Visuals of Karens exploiting their privilege when things donât go their way have become Internet shorthand of late for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries â following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood.
A reckoning begins in Central Park and Minneapolis
âOne of the things that has worked throughout American history is finding a way to project whiteness in need of defense or protection,â says Dr. AndrĂ© Brock, associate professor of Black digital culture at Georgia Tech whose research is leading the conversation on the impact of Black Twitter. âFor men, itâs a fight; for women, itâs calling men to help on their behalf or demonstrating that they are so frail that they cannot handle the weight. So in this moment
,
where weâve been trapped in our house for six weeks with nothing to do but feel, [so] when you see these videos, you have nothing else to do but watch them and see peopleâs reactions to them
.
..
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.â
Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking
here
.
Brock said that the viral widespread resonance of
â
Karenâ footage now is the result of an interest convergence where the coronavirus pandemic intersected with collective outrage over police brutality. The weekend that the video of Amy Cooper in Central Park went viral was the same weekend that
George Floyd was killed after now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin
knelt on his neck, suffocating him. The Central Park video only highlighted the extreme violence â and potentially fatal consequences â of a white woman selfishly calling the cops out of spite and professed fear.
Karens take
on a new meaning during a global health crisis
The Cooper incident and Floydâs death came in the wake of a couple monthsâ worth of Karen memes and videos that were already trending thanks to the new restrictions instituted because of the coronavirus pandemic. The clips documented the many encounters people had with
white women who openly flouted COVID-19 health and safety measures
like wearing a mask or
social distancing
.
The extreme pertinence of the Karen meme right now is significant, given that the meme had already been making the rounds online for quite some time. Although the Karen meme appears to have existed since at least 2017 on Reddit, according to Adam Downer, associate editor at Know Your Meme
,
the current iteration of the meme is taking on a new meaning that speaks to the sobering real-life consequences of what began as just a joke on the Internet
about bad haircuts and entitlement.
âWhen it got to the protests and the avalanche of incidents where white ladies were calling the cops, thatâs where it began to get a bit more menacing,â Downer says. âI think when people started pointing out who a Karen in real life was, like the âCan I speak to the manager?â figure and starting to zero in on the exact kind of person they were talking about, it became a lot easier to see those types of people in real life.â
How the Karen meme relates to the violent history of white women
The historical narrative of white womenâs 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
.
âIf weâre 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 thatâs the problem,â 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.
âWhite 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 thatâs really a volatile combination.â
Williams says the exposure is challenging this position. âThatâs part of what people arenât seeing is that white women do have this power and theyâre exercising that power when they call or threaten to call the police.â
As might be expected, the Internet has found a way to jest about this power dynamic, but the very nature of a humorous approach presents a risk by downplaying the threat
.
The violent history is why Williams cautions against letting the at-times humorous nature of Karen memes minimize the ways in which white womanhood has long posed danger to Black and brown lives.
âOn the one hand, the humor is a way of dealing with the pain of the violence, so in that way itâs helpful
,
but on the other hand, the cutesy-ness or the laughability sort of minimizes or masks the fact that these women are essentially engaging in violence,â she says. âThe fact that Amy Cooper is saying, âIâm going to call the police and tell them that a African-American man is threatening my lifeâ is a very racially violent statement and a racially violent act, especially if you look at it in a larger, broader historical context, and think about the way that Emmett Tillâs accuser [Carolyn Bryant] did the same exact thing and it resulted in his death.â
Thatâs not to say that memes arenât ultimately beneficial, however. According to Williams, Karen memes can serve different purposes for different audiences. For white people, it can help them recognize a pattern of behavior that they donât want to be a part of it, but might be complicit in and can be an easier way to have a conversation about white fragility, entitlement and privilege; it also holds them accountable for racism. For Black people, the memes can act as a news source, evidence, and an archive of the injustices, the attempts to control bodies and situations, or as Brock puts it, âmicroaggressions that often scale to macroagressions when the police are called in.â
How the Karen meme is pushing for change offline
âMemes have power above and beyond just humor,â says Brock. âWe often use metaphor, which is often at the heart of memes, and emotion or affect to make shorthand of things which deeply affect us. A lot of times, itâs funny; a lot of times, itâs cathartic; and other times, itâs racist. I try to push back on the idea that memes are frivolous way of articulating a particular phenomenon because in many ways, itâs much more potent shorthand than me trying to explain to you exactly the way people are reacting to a certain situation.
..
Social media is a platform for communicating feelings and the stronger the feeling, the more viral things go.â
Brockâs belief that memes have lasting power beyond the breakneck speed of going viral is echoed by Williams, who makes the case that along with the popular alliterative memes like
âBBQ Beckyâ
and
âPermit Pattyâ
that call out white people for calling 911 or the police on innocent Black civilians who just want to grill in the park in peace or 8-year-old Black girls selling water on the sidewalk, Karen memes can be seen as part of a genre that she calls âBlack activist memes.â
Williams said the accounts of the real people who have experienced the racism documented in these memes and the hashtag, #LivingWhileBlack, are helping to demand accountability and are actually helping to push forward legislation, like the
Oregon bill that was passed in 2019 that punishes racist 911 callers
. She likens them to a stand-in for Black-owned newspapers and Black presses, commenting on racial inequality in a way that might not be covered otherwise.
âThese memes are actually doing logical and political work of helping us get to legal changes or legislative changes, which is really something to be said,â says Williams. âWhile of course, they arenât a standalone movement on their own, they actively call out white supremacy and call for restitution. They really do that work of highlighting and sort of commenting on the racial inequality in a way that mainstream news doesnât capture.â
Please send any tips, leads, and stories to
virus@time.com
. |
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# How the 'Karen Meme' Confronts the Violent History of White Womanhood
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by
[Cady Lang](https://time.com/author/cady-lang/)
Updated:
Dec 12, 2023 5:59 PM CUT
Published:
Jun 25, 2020 4:53 PM CUT
Twitter
by
[Cady Lang](https://time.com/author/cady-lang/)
Updated:
Dec 12, 2023 5:59 PM CUT
Published:
Jun 25, 2020 4:53 PM CUT
When you look up the [hashtag \#Karen on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/karen/ "undefined"), 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 thatâs at once condescending and cloying.
The womanâs name is Lisa Alexander, but on the Internet, sheâs most recognized as the [âSan Francisco Karen,â](https://twitter.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240 "undefined") after a clip went viral of her last week, in which she demands to know if James Juanillo, who was stenciling âBlack Lives Matterâ 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](https://abc7news.com/lisa-alexander-san-francisco-james-juanillo-black-lives-matter/6249319/ "undefined") 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.
For Alexander, however, going viral as a Karen brought major consequences; she and her partner were both identified by their full names by online sleuths, which resulted in her skincare business being boycotted and her partner getting fired from his job. Both Alexander and her partner released [apology statements to](https://twitter.com/LuzPenaABC7/status/1272258758207397888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1272258758207397888&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fabc7news.com%2Flisa-alexander-san-francisco-james-juanillo-black-lives-matter%2F6247494%2F "undefined") *ABC7 News;* in Alexanderâs apology, she expresses regret for her behavior: âWhen I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did. It was disrespectful to Mr. Juanillo and I am deeply sorry for that.â
The video of Alexander is one of a myriad of other videos, images and memes that have emerged in the last few months of âKarens,â a slang term for middle-aged white women (which seems to have stemmed from the popular [âCan I speak to a manager?â](https://time.com/5683398/tropical-storm-karen-memes/ "undefined") meme,) who have become infamous online for their shameless displays of entitlement, privilege, and racism â and their tendency to call the police when they donât get what they want.
Advertisement
The archetype of the Karen has risen to outstanding levels of notoriety in recent weeks, thanks to a flood of footage thatâs become increasingly more violent and disturbing. Thereâs the [Karen who was recorded spewing multiple racist tirades against Asian Americans in a park in Torrance, Calif.](https://twitter.com/mynamegangg/status/1270835634224001024 "undefined"), upon which the Internet discovered that she had a history of discriminatory outbursts, earning her the title of âUltra Karen.â Thereâs the [Karen in Los Angeles who used two hammers to damage her neighborsâ car as she told them to âget the f**â**ck out of this neighborhood.](https://twitter.com/TMZ/status/1272171944448843776 "undefined")â Thereâs the Karen who [purposely coughed on someone who called her out for not wearing a mask](https://www.instagram.com/p/CBWKjH5gaoq/ "undefined") while at a coffee shop in New York City.
Advertisement
And perhaps most notably, thereâs Amy Cooper, the âCentral Park Karen,â 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. Within days after the video of Cooper was shared to Twitter, Cooper was [fired from her job](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/franklin-templeton-worker-placed-on-leave-after-viral-altercation-in-central-park-2020-05-26 "undefined") and [temporarily lost custody of her dog](https://www.facebook.com/AbandonedAngels/posts/10157503306378723 "undefined"); on July 6 the Manhattan DA said she would be charged for filing a false report**.** In comments shared after the incident with [*CNN*](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2020-05-26T09%3A10%3A04&utm_source=twCNN "undefined")*,* Cooper said that she wanted to âpublicly apologize to everyoneâ and claimed that she was ânot a racistâ and âdid not mean to harm that man in any way.â In an interview with [*ABC7 News*](https://abcnews.go.com/US/christian-cooper-accepts-apology-woman-center-central-park/story?id=70926679 "undefined"), Christian Cooper accepted her apology, but urged for viewers to focus on not just the viral clip, but the âunderlying current of racism and racial perceptions.â
Advertisement
Visuals of Karens exploiting their privilege when things donât go their way have become Internet shorthand of late for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries â following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood.
## A reckoning begins in Central Park and Minneapolis
âOne of the things that has worked throughout American history is finding a way to project whiteness in need of defense or protection,â says Dr. AndrĂ© Brock, associate professor of Black digital culture at Georgia Tech whose research is leading the conversation on the impact of Black Twitter. âFor men, itâs a fight; for women, itâs calling men to help on their behalf or demonstrating that they are so frail that they cannot handle the weight. So in this moment*,* where weâve been trapped in our house for six weeks with nothing to do but feel, \[so\] when you see these videos, you have nothing else to do but watch them and see peopleâs reactions to them**.***..*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.â
Advertisement
*Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking* [*here*](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/coronavirus?source=article "undefined")*.*
Brock said that the viral widespread resonance of **â**Karenâ footage now is the result of an interest convergence where the coronavirus pandemic intersected with collective outrage over police brutality. The weekend that the video of Amy Cooper in Central Park went viral was the same weekend that [George Floyd was killed after now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin](https://time.com/5847967/george-floyd-protests-trump/ "undefined") knelt on his neck, suffocating him. The Central Park video only highlighted the extreme violence â and potentially fatal consequences â of a white woman selfishly calling the cops out of spite and professed fear.
In a larger sense, the mainstreaming of calling out the danger that white women and their tears pose has been building up to this moment. Thereâs the oft-cited stat that [52% of white women voted for Donald Trump](https://time.com/5422644/trump-white-women-2016/ "undefined") in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, [the constant lies of white women like Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-heffernan-kellyanne-conway-sarah-huckabee-sanders-20190615-story.html "undefined") in service of the Trump Administration have made it abundantly clear that [white women can and are often complicit in oppressive systems](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/racism-white-women.html "undefined"). Coupled with the rise of social media and the smartphone camera, the longtime narrative of white women as helpless victims in need of protection is now being challenged by video evidence of them as instigators of not only conflict, but violence.
Advertisement
## Karens take **on a new meaning during a global health crisis**
The Cooper incident and Floydâs death came in the wake of a couple monthsâ worth of Karen memes and videos that were already trending thanks to the new restrictions instituted because of the coronavirus pandemic. The clips documented the many encounters people had with [white women who openly flouted COVID-19 health and safety measures](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-karen-memes-reddit-twitter-carolyn-goodman/611104/ "undefined") like wearing a mask or [social distancing](https://twitter.com/ziwe/status/1267118447902830592 "undefined").
The extreme pertinence of the Karen meme right now is significant, given that the meme had already been making the rounds online for quite some time. Although the Karen meme appears to have existed since at least 2017 on Reddit, according to Adam Downer, associate editor at Know Your Meme*,* the current iteration of the meme is taking on a new meaning that speaks to the sobering real-life consequences of what began as just a joke on the Internet [about bad haircuts and entitlement.](https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager "undefined")
Advertisement
âWhen it got to the protests and the avalanche of incidents where white ladies were calling the cops, thatâs where it began to get a bit more menacing,â Downer says. âI think when people started pointing out who a Karen in real life was, like the âCan I speak to the manager?â figure and starting to zero in on the exact kind of person they were talking about, it became a lot easier to see those types of people in real life.â
## How the Karen meme relates to the violent history of white women
The historical narrative of white womenâs 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*](https://time.com/3729807/d-w-griffiths-the-birth-of-a-nation-10/ "undefined"), 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](https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film "undefined").
Advertisement
âIf weâre 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 thatâs the problem,â 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.
âWhite 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 thatâs really a volatile combination.â
Advertisement
Williams says the exposure is challenging this position. âThatâs part of what people arenât seeing is that white women do have this power and theyâre exercising that power when they call or threaten to call the police.â
As might be expected, the Internet has found a way to jest about this power dynamic, but the very nature of a humorous approach presents a risk by downplaying the threat*.* The violent history is why Williams cautions against letting the at-times humorous nature of Karen memes minimize the ways in which white womanhood has long posed danger to Black and brown lives.
âOn the one hand, the humor is a way of dealing with the pain of the violence, so in that way itâs helpful*,* but on the other hand, the cutesy-ness or the laughability sort of minimizes or masks the fact that these women are essentially engaging in violence,â she says. âThe fact that Amy Cooper is saying, âIâm going to call the police and tell them that a African-American man is threatening my lifeâ is a very racially violent statement and a racially violent act, especially if you look at it in a larger, broader historical context, and think about the way that Emmett Tillâs accuser \[Carolyn Bryant\] did the same exact thing and it resulted in his death.â
Advertisement
Thatâs not to say that memes arenât ultimately beneficial, however. According to Williams, Karen memes can serve different purposes for different audiences. For white people, it can help them recognize a pattern of behavior that they donât want to be a part of it, but might be complicit in and can be an easier way to have a conversation about white fragility, entitlement and privilege; it also holds them accountable for racism. For Black people, the memes can act as a news source, evidence, and an archive of the injustices, the attempts to control bodies and situations, or as Brock puts it, âmicroaggressions that often scale to macroagressions when the police are called in.â
## How the Karen meme is pushing for change offline
âMemes have power above and beyond just humor,â says Brock. âWe often use metaphor, which is often at the heart of memes, and emotion or affect to make shorthand of things which deeply affect us. A lot of times, itâs funny; a lot of times, itâs cathartic; and other times, itâs racist. I try to push back on the idea that memes are frivolous way of articulating a particular phenomenon because in many ways, itâs much more potent shorthand than me trying to explain to you exactly the way people are reacting to a certain situation.*..*Social media is a platform for communicating feelings and the stronger the feeling, the more viral things go.â
Advertisement
Brockâs belief that memes have lasting power beyond the breakneck speed of going viral is echoed by Williams, who makes the case that along with the popular alliterative memes like [âBBQ Beckyâ](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Barbecuers-take-back-Oakland-s-communal-12929602.php "undefined") and [âPermit Pattyâ](https://time.com/5320939/permit-patty-alison-ettel-threats/ "undefined") that call out white people for calling 911 or the police on innocent Black civilians who just want to grill in the park in peace or 8-year-old Black girls selling water on the sidewalk, Karen memes can be seen as part of a genre that she calls âBlack activist memes.â
Williams said the accounts of the real people who have experienced the racism documented in these memes and the hashtag, \#LivingWhileBlack, are helping to demand accountability and are actually helping to push forward legislation, like the [Oregon bill that was passed in 2019 that punishes racist 911 callers](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/6/5/18654140/oregon-911-call-legislation-racism-living-while-black "undefined"). She likens them to a stand-in for Black-owned newspapers and Black presses, commenting on racial inequality in a way that might not be covered otherwise.
Advertisement
âThese memes are actually doing logical and political work of helping us get to legal changes or legislative changes, which is really something to be said,â says Williams. âWhile of course, they arenât a standalone movement on their own, they actively call out white supremacy and call for restitution. They really do that work of highlighting and sort of commenting on the racial inequality in a way that mainstream news doesnât capture.â
*Please send any tips, leads, and stories to* [*virus@time.com*](mailto:virus@time.com "undefined")*.*
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- [âSafe and soundâ: How a U.S. Airman Shot Down in Iran Was Rescued From a Mountain Crevice](https://time.com/article/2026/04/05/-safe-and-sound-how-a-u-s-airman-shot-down-in-iran-was-rescued-from-a-mountain-crevice/?utm_rs=IL_GNBazf4RR9GSs3N-N37Btw)
- [Iranian President Pens Open Letter to American People](https://time.com/article/2026/04/01/iran-war-president-open-letter-american-people/?utm_rs=IL_GNBazf4RR9GSs3N-N37Btw)
- [What to Know About the Army Chief Hegseth Oustedâand the General Whoâs Taking Over](https://time.com/article/2026/04/03/hegseth-army-firings-chief-of-staff/?utm_rs=IL_GNBazf4RR9GSs3N-N37Btw)
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| Readable Markdown | When you look up the [hashtag \#Karen on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/karen/ "undefined"), 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 thatâs at once condescending and cloying.
The womanâs name is Lisa Alexander, but on the Internet, sheâs most recognized as the [âSan Francisco Karen,â](https://twitter.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240 "undefined") after a clip went viral of her last week, in which she demands to know if James Juanillo, who was stenciling âBlack Lives Matterâ 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](https://abc7news.com/lisa-alexander-san-francisco-james-juanillo-black-lives-matter/6249319/ "undefined") 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.
For Alexander, however, going viral as a Karen brought major consequences; she and her partner were both identified by their full names by online sleuths, which resulted in her skincare business being boycotted and her partner getting fired from his job. Both Alexander and her partner released [apology statements to](https://twitter.com/LuzPenaABC7/status/1272258758207397888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1272258758207397888&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fabc7news.com%2Flisa-alexander-san-francisco-james-juanillo-black-lives-matter%2F6247494%2F "undefined") *ABC7 News;* in Alexanderâs apology, she expresses regret for her behavior: âWhen I watch the video I am shocked and sad that I behaved the way I did. It was disrespectful to Mr. Juanillo and I am deeply sorry for that.â
The video of Alexander is one of a myriad of other videos, images and memes that have emerged in the last few months of âKarens,â a slang term for middle-aged white women (which seems to have stemmed from the popular [âCan I speak to a manager?â](https://time.com/5683398/tropical-storm-karen-memes/ "undefined") meme,) who have become infamous online for their shameless displays of entitlement, privilege, and racism â and their tendency to call the police when they donât get what they want.
And perhaps most notably, thereâs Amy Cooper, the âCentral Park Karen,â 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. Within days after the video of Cooper was shared to Twitter, Cooper was [fired from her job](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/franklin-templeton-worker-placed-on-leave-after-viral-altercation-in-central-park-2020-05-26 "undefined") and [temporarily lost custody of her dog](https://www.facebook.com/AbandonedAngels/posts/10157503306378723 "undefined"); on July 6 the Manhattan DA said she would be charged for filing a false report**.** In comments shared after the incident with [*CNN*](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2020-05-26T09%3A10%3A04&utm_source=twCNN "undefined")*,* Cooper said that she wanted to âpublicly apologize to everyoneâ and claimed that she was ânot a racistâ and âdid not mean to harm that man in any way.â In an interview with [*ABC7 News*](https://abcnews.go.com/US/christian-cooper-accepts-apology-woman-center-central-park/story?id=70926679 "undefined"), Christian Cooper accepted her apology, but urged for viewers to focus on not just the viral clip, but the âunderlying current of racism and racial perceptions.â
Visuals of Karens exploiting their privilege when things donât go their way have become Internet shorthand of late for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries â following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood.
A reckoning begins in Central Park and Minneapolis
âOne of the things that has worked throughout American history is finding a way to project whiteness in need of defense or protection,â says Dr. AndrĂ© Brock, associate professor of Black digital culture at Georgia Tech whose research is leading the conversation on the impact of Black Twitter. âFor men, itâs a fight; for women, itâs calling men to help on their behalf or demonstrating that they are so frail that they cannot handle the weight. So in this moment*,* where weâve been trapped in our house for six weeks with nothing to do but feel, \[so\] when you see these videos, you have nothing else to do but watch them and see peopleâs reactions to them**.***..*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.â
*Keep up to date with our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking* [*here*](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/coronavirus?source=article "undefined")*.*
Brock said that the viral widespread resonance of **â**Karenâ footage now is the result of an interest convergence where the coronavirus pandemic intersected with collective outrage over police brutality. The weekend that the video of Amy Cooper in Central Park went viral was the same weekend that [George Floyd was killed after now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin](https://time.com/5847967/george-floyd-protests-trump/ "undefined") knelt on his neck, suffocating him. The Central Park video only highlighted the extreme violence â and potentially fatal consequences â of a white woman selfishly calling the cops out of spite and professed fear.
Karens take **on a new meaning during a global health crisis**
The Cooper incident and Floydâs death came in the wake of a couple monthsâ worth of Karen memes and videos that were already trending thanks to the new restrictions instituted because of the coronavirus pandemic. The clips documented the many encounters people had with [white women who openly flouted COVID-19 health and safety measures](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/coronavirus-karen-memes-reddit-twitter-carolyn-goodman/611104/ "undefined") like wearing a mask or [social distancing](https://twitter.com/ziwe/status/1267118447902830592 "undefined").
The extreme pertinence of the Karen meme right now is significant, given that the meme had already been making the rounds online for quite some time. Although the Karen meme appears to have existed since at least 2017 on Reddit, according to Adam Downer, associate editor at Know Your Meme*,* the current iteration of the meme is taking on a new meaning that speaks to the sobering real-life consequences of what began as just a joke on the Internet [about bad haircuts and entitlement.](https://www.vox.com/2020/2/5/21079162/karen-name-insult-meme-manager "undefined")
âWhen it got to the protests and the avalanche of incidents where white ladies were calling the cops, thatâs where it began to get a bit more menacing,â Downer says. âI think when people started pointing out who a Karen in real life was, like the âCan I speak to the manager?â figure and starting to zero in on the exact kind of person they were talking about, it became a lot easier to see those types of people in real life.â
How the Karen meme relates to the violent history of white women
The historical narrative of white womenâs 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*](https://time.com/3729807/d-w-griffiths-the-birth-of-a-nation-10/ "undefined"), 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](https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film "undefined").
âIf weâre 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 thatâs the problem,â 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.
âWhite 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 thatâs really a volatile combination.â
Williams says the exposure is challenging this position. âThatâs part of what people arenât seeing is that white women do have this power and theyâre exercising that power when they call or threaten to call the police.â
As might be expected, the Internet has found a way to jest about this power dynamic, but the very nature of a humorous approach presents a risk by downplaying the threat*.* The violent history is why Williams cautions against letting the at-times humorous nature of Karen memes minimize the ways in which white womanhood has long posed danger to Black and brown lives.
âOn the one hand, the humor is a way of dealing with the pain of the violence, so in that way itâs helpful*,* but on the other hand, the cutesy-ness or the laughability sort of minimizes or masks the fact that these women are essentially engaging in violence,â she says. âThe fact that Amy Cooper is saying, âIâm going to call the police and tell them that a African-American man is threatening my lifeâ is a very racially violent statement and a racially violent act, especially if you look at it in a larger, broader historical context, and think about the way that Emmett Tillâs accuser \[Carolyn Bryant\] did the same exact thing and it resulted in his death.â
Thatâs not to say that memes arenât ultimately beneficial, however. According to Williams, Karen memes can serve different purposes for different audiences. For white people, it can help them recognize a pattern of behavior that they donât want to be a part of it, but might be complicit in and can be an easier way to have a conversation about white fragility, entitlement and privilege; it also holds them accountable for racism. For Black people, the memes can act as a news source, evidence, and an archive of the injustices, the attempts to control bodies and situations, or as Brock puts it, âmicroaggressions that often scale to macroagressions when the police are called in.â
How the Karen meme is pushing for change offline
âMemes have power above and beyond just humor,â says Brock. âWe often use metaphor, which is often at the heart of memes, and emotion or affect to make shorthand of things which deeply affect us. A lot of times, itâs funny; a lot of times, itâs cathartic; and other times, itâs racist. I try to push back on the idea that memes are frivolous way of articulating a particular phenomenon because in many ways, itâs much more potent shorthand than me trying to explain to you exactly the way people are reacting to a certain situation.*..*Social media is a platform for communicating feelings and the stronger the feeling, the more viral things go.â
Brockâs belief that memes have lasting power beyond the breakneck speed of going viral is echoed by Williams, who makes the case that along with the popular alliterative memes like [âBBQ Beckyâ](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Barbecuers-take-back-Oakland-s-communal-12929602.php "undefined") and [âPermit Pattyâ](https://time.com/5320939/permit-patty-alison-ettel-threats/ "undefined") that call out white people for calling 911 or the police on innocent Black civilians who just want to grill in the park in peace or 8-year-old Black girls selling water on the sidewalk, Karen memes can be seen as part of a genre that she calls âBlack activist memes.â
Williams said the accounts of the real people who have experienced the racism documented in these memes and the hashtag, \#LivingWhileBlack, are helping to demand accountability and are actually helping to push forward legislation, like the [Oregon bill that was passed in 2019 that punishes racist 911 callers](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/6/5/18654140/oregon-911-call-legislation-racism-living-while-black "undefined"). She likens them to a stand-in for Black-owned newspapers and Black presses, commenting on racial inequality in a way that might not be covered otherwise.
âThese memes are actually doing logical and political work of helping us get to legal changes or legislative changes, which is really something to be said,â says Williams. âWhile of course, they arenât a standalone movement on their own, they actively call out white supremacy and call for restitution. They really do that work of highlighting and sort of commenting on the racial inequality in a way that mainstream news doesnât capture.â
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| Shard | 39 (laksa) |
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