– 5 May 2020 –

Janus:

Non-whites and Leftists once again proclaim that there is nothing racist or sexist about the Karen meme that has floated around the Twitter sphere for some months now. For those who don’t know, the term “Karen” has become a one-word dismissal of any seemingly privileged white woman who demands to “talk to the manager” at a service counter, or show her supposed privilege in some other way. It’s an effective meme because everyone can visualize this type of woman; and because the meme is so effective, non-whites savor the opportunity to throw it into any white woman’s face who dares to oppose them.

If you should find this Karen meme offensive, these people will triumphantly assert that you obviously can’t stand people calling out your own privilege and you can’t take a little joke at your own expense.

Beautiful rhetoric, ain’t it?

Via The DePaulia, the Student News Site of DePaul University; a private, Catholic university in Chicago:

“The Karen meme is used to reference a middle-class white woman who feels entitled to special treatment,” said Jacqueline Arcy, assistant professor of new media at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. “She is depicted as the type of person that asks to ‘speak to a manager’ when she is dissatisfied with her service, often provided by working-class people of color. A defining feature of a ‘Karen’ is that she is oblivious to her white privilege.”

According to the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, a “young Karen likely would have been the class snitch, tattling on her classmates to the teacher to get them in trouble.”

[. . .]

“The term ‘Karen’ is not equivalent to a racial slur because it is not propped up by a system of racism against white people,” Arcy said. “Categorizing the ‘Karen’ meme as a slur is misleading because it obscures the racial discrimination the meme was designed to call out.”

[. . .]

A theme that the meme puts into focus is the difference between those with power and those without and how it is wielded, particularly in the service industry. The coronavirus has deemed service and retail workers essential and they are the ones having to deal with disgruntled customers including “Karens.”

“I have worked in several customer service jobs, one being Starbucks which is Karen Central, Darcy said. “It’s definitely a stereotype for a reason. There’s definitely a problem in our society about respecting customer service workers. I feel like it is more evident than ever due to what we see going on with the coronavirus.”

At the end of the day, what this comes down to is people taking something that was supposed to be funny and making a mountain of a molehill. We’ve all dealt with our fair share of Karens and the meme is a way to make light of it and meet other people who may have gone through something similar.

“I don’t think it’s demeaning, I’ve never thought so deep about it,” said Marianna Vazquez, a student at Governor’s State University. “I just thought it was funny. I only consider Karens as the rude ladies we get at work. I don’t think it was ever meant to be taken that serious.”

As far it being a racial slur, that’s ludicrous. People feel uncomfortable when forced to look at their own privilege or when they aren’t catered to. “Ok Boomer” was born out of the countless articles blaming millennials for every wrong thing happening in this country. That generation got tired of it so they made up that phrase which the older generation immediately took offense upon.

Comedian John Mulaney said it best: “If you’re comparing the badness of two words and you won’t even say one of them… that’s the worse word!”

If you can say Karen but can’t say the racial slur you’re trying to compare it to, in many ways, you’ve rendered your argument moot.

It’s really a clever meme in that on the surface it attacks a particular type of white woman, yet it subtly denigrates all whites who are foolish enough to still expect professional standards of service from increasingly unprofessional and incompetent (and frankly “diverse”) service workers. Yet, if any whites call out those who use this meme, then they expose themselves as one of the pampered, over-privileged oppressors who take themselves too serious, bro. One more complaint, and maybe they’re bigots or racists.

Yet, what if the roles were reversed? In my time in the service industry, I frankly experienced more nasty encounters with over-entitled black women than snobby white bitches. If whites were throwing around the equivalent “Keisha” meme, we’d get banned from Twitter.

In fact, the first comment for the DePaulia article says basically the same thing:

I’ve encountered plenty of rude women but the majority of them have been black and Hispanic.. Are they Karens too?

On one level, I get it. I’ve had to deal with this particular type of woman many times, and they are always a pain in the ass. Nobody likes them.

Fred Reed, an American ex-pat living in Mexico, described a version of this type of woman quite well in an article last July:

Anyway, this ruin bore down on us and began lecturing us about our garbage can that, like those of three others in sight at the moment, was waiting for the garbage truck. It was, she said, unsightly. As unsightly went, I thought, she could have frightened the tires off a garbage truck, but never mind.

Violeta is the soul of patience, until she isn’t, when it is better to be on another continent. The old bat didn’t bring her to the point of nuclear ignition, and eventually went away, presumably to hang by her toes in some dank cave.

Why didn’t her husband control her, I wondered? After all, we keep dogs on leashes.

We might have regarded her as a mere psychiatric curiosity, except that she was par for a certain type of gringas who have nothing to do and so spend their time being disagreeable. At Puerta Arroyo we seem to be regarded as fresh meat as we have attracted at least four of these horrors.

For example, we have three well behaved dogs that Vi walks in the mornings. They cause no trouble and we pick up after them. The feral biddies bitch about them to Violeta. One actually suggested that we have the pooches killed. They do this when I am not around which is why I am not in a Mexican death row.

[. . .]

In fairness, most American women do not behave this way, or even close. But, at least in Mexico, most women who behave this way are American.

When I first arrived in Ajijic long ago I lived in Italo’s, a residential hotel just off the plaza. Mexicans like fiestas. Often they bring in carnival paraphernalia–merry go rounds, Ferris wheels, that sort of thing–to assist in fiesting. There is nowhere to put all of them. Nor is there space for the many stalls selling the tequila and tortillas and toys proper to a fiesta. These towns are often very old, laid out centuries before Henry Ford’s grandmother had her first date. So the locals block off streets and put things wherever they fit. It’s fun. The children love it.

But not the gringas.

During one such fiesta, hearing much blowing of a car horn, I walked up a side street to investigate and found a car containing an enraged gringa, maybe seventy. She was almost hissing. She had started down the street without looking and found herself trapped between stalls with another in front. She couldn’t drive well enough to reverse out and was yelling about people so stupid they put stalls in the street, didn’t they know this and that.

To which the correct response is “It’s how they do things. It’s their country. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.”

Fred is complaining about entitled ex-pat American women in Mexico, people who have no right to tell the people of the surrounding nation how to behave in their own country.

And that is just my point of contention.

While I’m sure many of the people who are throwing the “Karen” meme around are doing so innocently, the people who are taking such condescending delight in their use of this meme are non-whites, or at least people who oppose “whiteness.” They take especial pleasure in knocking down not merely some particular bitchy type of white woman but “whiteness” as a whole.

What do I mean by “whiteness?”

Better to let the Lefties explain. From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History & Culture:

Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.

Before the 1970’s, in the United States, whites were the real people and non-whites something else. This attitude wasn’t even hostile. We just didn’t think about, or care all that much about, people who weren’t us.

To today’s programmed, sensitized ears, that sounds appalling, but for just about every nation around the world (and I mean “nation” in the original heritage sense), this attitude is normal and has always been the case. In fact, it’s just about impossible for anyone to truly understand what it’s like to be someone who isn’t part of his own nation, let alone someone outside his race. In relation to other peoples, to some extent or another he will always think like an outsider, and be an outsider, no matter how hard he tries.

Why did TV shows like the Jetsons or the Flintstones only show white people? Because they didn’t even think to show anyone else. It didn’t even occur to them.

For most of American history, overall society existed to serve the national interests of American whites first, though we increasingly tried to share the wealth, so to speak, with others (to our ultimate demise). But to those who came of age since the 1970’s, all of the benefits of society in the United States (and just about every other white country) is explicitly for everyone and anyone, for whomever happens to live here. For many in these younger generations, this more recent attitude is the “new air,” the new standard to be unconsciously taken as unquestionable default.

Therein lies the conflict.

In the case of those remaining whites who never grew up around non-whites or other forms of diversity, they can’t help but be what they are: Americans (as in, White Americans, or Americans with Whiteness.) Many of them apply the standards of whiteness to other races and sub-groups, increasingly to their folly. Others recognize that these outsiders can’t achieve whiteness, so they work to condescendingly protect and nurture these “others,” also to their folly. All of these “Whiteness-Americans,” I’ll awkwardly call them, can’t help but subconsciously look at everything through the lens of their own identity, even while some of them are trying to work against their own privilege. This is how some non-whites can truthfully say that it is racist to be anti-racist.

In the case of those rapidly increasing non-whites and alternative-Americans who grew up since the 70’s, they absorbed the lesson that the benefits of society exist for all regardless of who they are, that they should be unconsciously accepted as part of the air, too. Part of normalcy. Yet they look around and see this isn’t the case. To too many, they are still “the Other.” And they resent it. Many of these groups still subconsciously (or consciously) see themselves as part of their original nation or sub-group first, and they can’t help but look at everything through that lens.

Whiteness-Americans think: “Why shouldn’t we have privilege in our own country? Who are these outsiders to demand we give up everything our ancestors built? Don’t Mexicans have Mexican privilege in Mexico? Or Somalians have Somali privilege in Somalia?”

Where are all the non-Koreans at? Koreans make shows for Koreans and I doubt they think about anyone else. It’s not racist. It’s just a natural preference for one’s people.

When these whites see some snide outsider call one of their people “Karen,” it not only serves as an infuriating reminder that whites are losing the country they grew up in, but that the New Americans have no appreciation for it; they seem to despise what’s left of old America and want to destroy it.

To these Whiteness-Americans, the “Karen” meme is in fact racist, contrary to what the DePaulia articles says, because it is in fact “propped up by a system of racism against white people.” From their eyes, all of the power in the country is used to elevate the interests of non-whites and alternative-Americans while it actively destroys, suppresses, or displaces their own heritage and punishes those who try to defend it. The argument, “If you’re comparing the badness of two words and you won’t even say one of them… that’s the worse word!” doesn’t necessarily point to the worse word: it identifies who has the power in society to make a word “bad.”

For the New Americans, they must ask themselves, “Who are these entitled, spoiled white holdovers to lord it over us? Who are they to look down their noses and judge us for who they are?” Nobody likes to feel inferior, and the Whiteness-Americans make them feel that way.

That is why they take such particular joy in calling out white privilege with the unassailable “Karen” meme.

Why are today’s TV shows and commercials so diverse? Because the cast directors consciously and deliberately hand-picked them that way.

With very few exceptions, non-whites actually can’t even see that they are currently a privileged class in American society: below the ruling elites, yes; yet in many important ways above average whites. And why would they see themselves as privileged? After all, non-whites (except Asians) make up the poorest people across most of the land. To the extent that affirmative action works at all, non-whites don’t think it goes far enough to balance the scales. They see unequal treatment under the law. They see poorer health and environments. They see that racists still exist. We try to block them from entering the country. In other words, non-whites look at society through the lens of their own people-hood, and they unfailingly take their own side as second nature. And they lack any interest in looking at events that are outside their interests, so they don’t see any kind of slant in society that favors them against whites. We could call it a form of confirmation bias.

Of course, that attitude works on all sides. White Americans, especially older ones, if they happen to notice inequality under the law, they write it off entirely as, “those people commit more crimes,” and that’s true. But why? And if they see inequality of results, they say that non-whites lack a good work ethic, when in fact there is at least some institutional bias against non-whites. What about discrimination against large groups of black people in public? They’re too loud and unruly. Would blacks have gotten away with the recent Lansing, Michigan lockdown protests, where armed protesters broke into the capital building? Well, the protesters aren’t all white. And we whites only make these observations to the extent that we care at all to think about it, and most of us don’t care so long as we don’t have to deal with the issue. Despite all of the programming, we will still view things through the lens of our own people-hood, however distorted that lens can get.

What is happening in reality is that we have multiple heritage-nations approaching society in different, incompatible ways according to their own different natures. East Asians pursue society in an East Asian way. Whites, Blacks, Arabs etc. all do the same thing in their own various ways. To the extent that these groups clash, it is because of their unnatural proximity with one another.

We are experiencing a verbal race war, or identity war, though one side or the other can’t see the other’s point of view. As conditions decline in our country, the situation isn’t likely to get any better.

People are different. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. And this fact should be obvious.

And there is no use trying to make one side understand the other. It won’t work. People can’t effectively see outside their identities.

I only wish to point out to my own people, to the extent that I can, that this egalitarian system to which most of us subscribe is a suicidal charade, and that it’s right and natural to take our own side.

After all, everyone else does.