But whether she owned actual Black bodies or hoed her own land, Miss Ann was always going to consider herself better than the best Black person anywhere near her, because she was white.Īnd white womanhood - rich or poor - was firmly placed on a pedestal, the living icon of white supremacy. Miss Ann goes back to the land of cotton, to Dixie before the " War of Northern Aggression." She may have been the mistress of a sprawling plantation or the inhabitant of a much more humble home. If that sounds kind of antebellum, that's because it is. You know, the kind that "fits in."Īnd way before there was Becky, there was her predecessor - Miss Ann. Not because they're Black, of course - Becky doesn't "see color." No, Becky won't be voting for Black candidates because they're not the right kind of Black. (Karen, on the other hand, can't be racist because she has a Black work friend or neighbor.)īecky is the sorority sister who will sing along to Beyoncé at the top of her voice, but unless the actual Beyoncé shows up to join her sorority (as if!), Becky won't vote to admit any Black pledge candidates. She can't be racist because she's gone out with a couple of Black guys. Becky wants the Black girls in homecoming court to straighten their hair for the official photos "so we'll all look nice." (She also wants to know how you got your natural hair to behave that way in the first place, or touches it with or without asking.) She might know a couple of Black folks and makes assumptions about the entire culture based on her narrow experience. You know these Beckys - young white women who are as entitled as Karen but significantly more cheerful. In the recent past, before Karen, there was Becky, immortalized by Sir Mix-a-Lot in the '90s. Instead, they are the latest link in an evolutionary chain of white women that goes back at least a couple of centuries. These Karens did not spring full-grown from the ether. ![]() And what they want, to a frequent degree, is the ability to determine where Black and brown bodies may or may not be present. They are women, almost always white, who are entitled, often racist and determined to get what they want. For these women, Karen is not the name on their birth certificates but what they have become. Harassing her neighbors - on their own property. Calling police on little children on the sidewalk. You can't log on to your computer or glance at your phone without an example of some "Karen" somewhere behaving badly: in the park. Well, as the '60s folk song says, times, they are a-changin'. And although the name is Nordic descended, there were plenty of Black Karens in my New England hometown. We were not the ones in risqué prom dresses. We were class officers and community volunteers. Later, we were the babysitters who showed up on time, no prompting needed. ![]() We collected the class milk money in elementary school (Google it, young'uns) and took teachers' notes to the principal's office. Back then, you could yell "Karen!" on the schoolyard playground and watch the heads pop up. I knew a whole bunch of them: Karen Trader, Karen Huff, Karen Ramos, Karen Davis, Karen Petersen, Karen Johnson, Karen Robinson. Thanks to the baby boom, it felt as if every fifth person was named Karen. When I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Karen was a name that was everywhere - but in a different way than it is now. The evolution of a nickname for a certain type of white woman.
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