this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Likewise, incel communities were originally gender inclusive and focused more on physical and mental issues/disabilities than toxic mindsets. Until the misogynists moved in and pushed everyone else out.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

it's the new b word

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's become a way to say the c-word or call women female dogs without saying the actual slurs. I've never liked it because I noticed right away that's how it gets used.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Seriously hate how chuds co-opted the term to mean the opposite of what it originally did

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

"Karen" started out as calling out racism

I feel like I hear this claim pretty often here, but did it really? Pretty much all the early Karen stuff I can find are the she took the kids/can I speak to a manager/vaccines cause autism angles.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

I remember it originally meaning any expression of upper class privilege in the feminine. Picking on retail staff, the “don’t you know who I am” kind of attitude.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Various names have been used as ‘white women calling cops on black people nicknames’.

  • 2018 BBQ Becky - YouTuber posted a video entitled “White Woman Called Out for Racially Targeting Black Men Having BBQ in Oakland”.
  • 2018 Permit Patty - Oakland, California woman called the police on an eight-year-old black girl and her mother for selling water outside her apartment. Her profession as the CEO of a medicinal marijuana company for animals was pointed at as illustrative of the difference between being white and black in America.
  • 2018 Pool Patrol Paula - Arrested for accosting a group of black teenagers while trying to forcibly remove them from a public swimming pool in South Carolina.
  • 2018 Baggage Claim - A female baggage claim attendant who was filmed refusing a black woman the name and contact of a manager, after the attempted to report a customer service issue at Logan International Airport in Boston.
  • 2018 Cornerstore Caroline - A female resident of Brooklyn, New York, who became the subject of a online scutiny, after accusing a nine-year old black child of sexual assault and calling the police on him. The allegations were later refuted by surveillance footage of the incident.
  • 2018 Golf Cart Gail - A white woman who was the subject of controversy, after calling the police on a black father watching his son's soccer game.

6 major incidents in 2018 alone. But a 2020 viral incident that got ‘Karen’ to stick.

  • 2020 Central Park Karen - The incident that led to the internet coming to a consensus, much to the chagrin of nice women named Karen everywhere. "Central Park Karen" is the white cop-caller nickname of Amy Cooper, who was recorded calling the police on an African American birder in Central Park in New York City after being asked by him to leash her dog in the park.
  • later in 2020 San Francisco Karen - A white man and woman confronted a person of color who was stenciling Black Lives Matter in chalk on their own property. In the video, the woman, Lisa Alexander, assumed James Juanillo was not the property owner and called the police.

A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. “Karen” lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here.
https://twiiit.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240

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”.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of the early examples I remember involved calling the cops on black people basically for existing.

For example, this article from 2021 which says, "It has gone on to become one of the most widely publicized so-called "Karen" incidents, where a white person, typically a woman, calls police to report a Black or brown person engaged in mundane activities."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's not early, though. It was already pretty popular in like 2018 with the "she took the kids"

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

it absolutely did not

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

The superstructure of white supremacy leading to the appropriation and complete gutting and twisting of any and all terms originating in New Afrikan lects, in a manner that ends up only serving various systems of oppression, strrrrikes again

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It fucking sucks. It's indoctrinating a whole new generation of sexism

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't run into too many kids these day, but when I do, I usually have to play the "That's a really fucked up thing to say" card

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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