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.
Various names have been used as ‘white women calling cops on black people nicknames’.
6 major incidents in 2018 alone. But a 2020 viral incident that got ‘Karen’ to stick.
Since then it’s been almost entirely “Karen” and like “woke” and so many other appropriations of Black culture, has been taken from original anti-racist meaning to just be another misogynistic term for “disliked woman” or “man acting like an entitled woman”.
People were absolutely using “Karen” amongst a few other names for the entitled white woman stereotype, but the catalyst for standardising “Karen” was specifically about the racist Central Park Karen video viral. Around that time and George Floyd and BLM summer riots. The peak “Karen” was about BLM against racist white women. And it has since been watered down like a lot of the energy of the summer of 2020.
As this graph shows, “Karen haircut” peaked during the 2020 summer of BLM.
I remember the “good karen” video where a girl just flipped off a bunch of police officers.
It was truly a time where everyone in america was anti-pig. Imagine if the bernards actually did something with it.
I could have sworn it was being thrown around earlier than that. Like, around 2014 or 15
Yeah, it came from a meme about the Nintendo Switch reveal ad which came out in 2016.
EDIT: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nintendo-switch-karen
You have an impressive knowledge of the history of this topic.
I’m not really disputing any of this except “original anti-racist meaning” because it doesn’t seem like that’s how it started even if that’s what it morphed into around 2020
Original is imprecise.
Certainly for the blips on the graph, “Karen” predates the anti-racist meaning and can be argued to be the “origin”.
For most people, including many in the thread, the owl that posts about this occasionally, myself, we hadn’t heard of it until the spike in the graph, so that is the “origin” even if not chronologically first.
The spike is the popular origin people are referring to saying it has lost the “original” meaning since. Saying that the “original” was earlier isn’t so much a ‘dispute’ as a reframing of context. Neither is necessarily more valid until the priority of time vs spread is declared.
The origin is both anti-racist and predates the anti-racist meaning depending on context. Many point to the spike, but pointing to the clock blips is also correct.
Idk I feel like that’s less of an origin than it is a popularization. Like, if someone asked for the origin of pepe I wouldn’t say it started with 4chan edgelords even if that’s how most people were exposed to it. I’d say it started in that webcomic but was popularized and turned into something else.
Ultimately a semantic issue but 乁[ ◕ ᴥ ◕ ]ㄏ