Good women are young, quiet, have pretty long hair (never dyed a unnatural colour though!) and never speak up about being mistreated, ever. You want to complain about a genuine problem? Sorry, you’re a Karen. Ask people to social distance? Karen. Nicely tell people to please be quiet during a movie? Karen. Ripped off by corporate greed and want a refund? Karen.

Be silent, be feminine and behave, woman.

It sucks because it actually used to describe real harrassment that black service workers experience. Now it’s just “Mouthy mom aged women with short dyed hair”

I’ve even seen a male black service worker be called a “male Karen” I shit you not.

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    63·
    6 days ago

    I mean, Woke used to mean “being aware of systemic oppression” and now it’s shorthand for “anything not white, straight and male”

    Slang always gets coopted by those in power

    • OldSoulHippie [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      39·
      6 days ago

      To the same end, “Fake News” was a term used heavily by liberals in response to the enshitification of right wing news around 2015. When Trump first started gaining momentum, there were a bunch of news stories that got amplified that were completely made up or used dodgy means to exploit statistics and stuff. The right started shouting it back to everything they didn’t like and now it’s theirs.

      • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        71·
        6 days ago

        Pretty sure the term was popularized by Trump himself, who called a journalist “you are fake news”.

        The liberals then used it to basically replace previously common used words like disinformation, propaganda or simply hoax, to describe right wing slop of questionable veracity. While the right wing itself kept using it to claim liberals were the ones lying.

        • OldSoulHippie [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          6 days ago

          I can believe that. The chain of custody is weird with stuff like that. I was mostly aware of it because we listened to not at work and I used to hear the host pretend to call people out with that term

    • Sinisterium [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      21·
      6 days ago

      Wasnt woke first used by black americans to refer to being aware of the race construct? Similar thing happened to Karen, its origin comes from primarily black american women working in customer service jobs and using it to refer to entitled white customers who use the “white woman’s tears/distress/discomfort” as a tool to exort her power?

      • tocopherol [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        Yes, it was used in that way as early as the 20s I think, or earlier. On the wiki page about “Karen” they mention that:

        In African-American culture, there is a history of calling difficult white women or those who “weaponize” their position by a generic pejorative name.[6] In the antebellum era (1815–1861), “Miss Ann” was used.[7] In the early 1990s, “Becky” was used.[8] As late as 2018, before the use of “Karen” caught on, alliterative names matching particular incidents were used, such as “Barbecue Becky”, “Cornerstore Caroline”, and “Permit Patty”.