I Don’t Call Raggedy White Women ‘Karens’—and You Shouldn’t Either
Malice deserves more than mockery, and racialized harm is a punchline I never found funny.
If you’re a properly seasoned individual who’s spent even a day of your life reluctantly navigating the Great American Shitshow, there’s a 99% chance you’ve survived a close encounter with a particular breed of insufferable white woman.
World-renowned for their uncanny ability to weaponize their entitlement, deplete entire canisters of hairspray, and attempt to police every park and Trader Joe’s on behalf of their glaring privilege, they exist only to ruin your fucking day—and defile potlucks one raisin at a time.
Yet somehow, despite their propensity to befriend imaginary threats and conjure police sirens out of thin air, “Karens,” as y’all love to call them, are still very much coddled—even at their absolute worst.
While generations of Black folks before me spent centuries being dismissed as “thugs,” feral animals, or worse for simply existing, these yoga pants-wearing despots are rewarded with a moniker that conveniently sanitizes the severity of their transgressions.
Harass an 8-year-old Black girl for “illegally selling water without a permit” in front of her own apartment building? You’re a “Karen.”
Physically attack a 14-year-old in front of his father after wrongly accusing him of stealing your phone? You’re a “Karen.”
Call the cops and falsely accuse a Black man of threatening your life because he asked you to put your dog on a leash in a designated birdwatching area that requires dogs to be on a leash?
Still a “Karen.”
Why confront the long lineage of white womanhood being weaponized to enact racialized harm when we can just…slap a cute nickname on these aggressors and giggle at all the trauma they inflict instead? Have you ever heard of a Black or Brown person being extended the same grace after deliberately terrorizing white folks?
I haven’t.
There’s a loooooong list of things they’d be called, and not a single one would be as silly or innocuous as “BBQ Becky” or “Karen”—a gendered epithet that has evolved into a societal pressure valve, reducing individual accountability to a cultural archetype.
And since I’m not in the business of trivializing racial violence, especially against marginalized communities I belong to, I refuse to call them “Karens.”
You’re cordially invited to do the same.