Don’t Kid Yourself: We Are All Karen
all these Karen exposés help white people distance ourselves from the stereotype without engaging with our own inner Karen
On May 25, 2020, Amy Cooper “said the quiet part out loud” in the Ramble at Central Park. She accidentally tipped her hand that we white women know the actual job of the police is to enforce the subjugation of Black people when she threatened to “tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life” even though he was doing no such thing. The way she locked her icy blue eyes on Christian Cooper, the man in question, as she said it, tilting her head first one way on the word “African,” and then the other on “American”, made her intentions clear. She was planning to punish him for challenging her by deliberately increasing the chances he would be arrested, harassed, or even killed. On the phone to the 911dispatcher, she pretended to cry out of fear so they would believe she was in danger and come do her dirty work for her.
A couple of weeks later, a New York Times article came out suggesting that Amy Cooper has a history of lying to get people in trouble for calling her out on bad behavior. People have also mocked her for spending a massive amount of money on another woman’s abortion to clear the way for her married boyfriend to dump his other mistress and be with her. It sounds like something out of a soap opera — certainly not something most of us can relate to! What a relief! She’s a special brand of mess that I certainly don’t relate to, which means I don’t have to worry about the implications of what she did.
More recently, personal injury lawyers Patricia and Mark McCloskey found infamy when they stood outside their mansion with guns, brandishing them at protesters in their street. At first, they claimed that they got their guns out after someone tapped two pistol magazines together and said “you’re next,” but video evidence shows they were outside with their weapons drawn before any protesters had even passed through the gate.
Dubbed “Ken and Karen,” the couple were mocked for their terrible trigger and muzzle discipline, their awful taste in interior decorating, and their apparent litigiousness. Back in 1988 or ‘89, Patricia McCloskey had apparently brandished her weapon and screamed at someone passing by her house (whether the land they were stepping on belongs to the McCloskeys or the city is under dispute). Yes, they looked bizarre standing on the porch. Yes, their home looks like it belongs to a villain in a Disney Channel Original Movie from 1998. No, that doesn’t mean we get to just dunk on them and move on.
When we gleefully dig up bizarre examples of past behavior by a “Karen,” we’re making excuses to think of what they did as exceptional when really, it isn’t. As Michael Harriot says in his Washington Post article, and Adrienne Green in hers on The Cut, Black people feel the menacing presence of white women all the time, constantly worried that anything they do will be misconstrued and used against them to justify violence. Until we recognize that our presence in many spaces represents mortal danger, without getting defensive, we’re going to stay stuck in the same loop we’re in.
Why is white people’s fear so dangerous?
Given that they appeared relatively safe before their performance of fear, one might wonder why Amy Cooper felt like pretending to be scared of Christian Cooper, or why Mark McCloskey, speaking for himself and his wife, said, “I was terrified that we’d be murdered within seconds. Our house would be burned down, our pets would be killed.”
Why is it that when we feel an uncomfortable feeling in the presence of racialized people who do not meet our expectations that they stay quiet and out of the way, our outward expression looks like fear? Why do we take that fear, real or not, and use it as a justification for calling a police force we know to be racially discriminatory, or threatening the subject of our fear with deadly weapons? Well, claiming that you feared for your life turns out to work great as a defense.
The fact is, many laws that allow us to use deadly force on other people have as their essential requirement that the killer was afraid.
The “Stand Your Ground” law was not explicitly used in George Zimmerman’s defense when he murdered Trayvon Martin in the street, but the jury was given instructions to consider it while deliberating. These instructions, combined with the self-defense claim they actually used, worked because Florida had extended the definition of “your ground” to any public place. If you could claim you were afraid, and the police can’t prove you weren’t, you were protected.
What was the result of introducing Stand Your Ground? According to McClellan & Tekin (2016), Homicides went up.
While the actions (and outfits) of the McCloskeys seem laughable on their face, they fit very snugly in this legal landscape where the person who has the deadly weapon manages to assume the role of potential victim instead of the person they're aiming at. Take a look at this screenshot from Missouri law, the state where the McCloskeys’ personal Versailles happens to be.
The part about “duty to retreat” is taken from a very old idea: Castle Doctrine. As Caroline Light describes in the Harvard Gazette, this is the belief that you have the right to stay and fight when someone tries to enter your property. Self-defense is usually limited so that if someone comes at you, you have a duty to try and avoid confrontation as much as possible, and only attack if you think that’s the only way to get yourself or others out of the situation safely. If you’re on private property, castle doctrine says you don’t have to try and get away. You can guard the property with a deadly weapon if you’re scared people will trespass.
People tend to conflate law and morality all the time, but it’s not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that the laws we create and use on a regular basis in court might reflect our ideas about how the world should work. If we look at laws about self-defense, it’s clear that we really do think that if a person is afraid, that fear licenses them to commit violence against the person we’re afraid of. And that fear is disproportionately directed at racialized people to a terrifying degree.
How did we get here?
We colonizers have established a strong track record of using white women’s fragility to justify enacting unspeakable horrors on nonwhite people. Black men’s bodies have been “hypersexualized and criminalized” in America: for more detail on that practice, I recommend reading Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 by Sandra Gunning. In the context of things like the lynching of Emmett Till or the way white politicians described innocent Black teens as “superpredators” in the 1990s, the fact that Amy Cooper acted so scared on the phone to the police dispatcher doesn’t seem all that disconnected.
White victimhood, especially white women’s constructed fragility, purity, and need for protection, has been used throughout American history as a justification for excluding Black people from “civilized” spaces, and indeed for committing unspeakable acts of violence against Black people. Among many others, Valerie Smith has done some really amazing research about how white culture has given itself permission to control and kill Black men by positioning them as dangerous. By imagining Black men (and other men of color) as unintelligent, immature, and sexually voracious, we can also justify summoning all the force we can muster to control them (Young, 1996).
Importantly, whenever we talk about our cultural fears around becoming a victim of crime, the prototypical victim is a middle-class white woman. Or as De Welde (2003) puts it, “middle-class white women emerge metonymically in the discourse on fear of crime.” We imagine white women as constantly in danger of victimization, and that makes us feel okay about subjugating the people we imagine are most dangerous to the safety of those white women.
This sense that white women are especially vulnerable reaches into our legal system: judges are more likely to sentence someone to death if they killed a white person than if they killed a Black person (Baldus et al., 1994), and even more so if the victim was a white woman (Girgenti, 2015).
Does it seem like any coincidence, then, that the inciting incident for the lynching of Gus in Birth of a Nation was the death of a white woman who would rather leap from a cliff than give in to his lust? Or that this film reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan as we know it?
Think about the insidious implication of that trope: in order to keep the race order intact, white people would have to consistently perform fear of Black people without admitting to racism themselves.
Saying “I’m not a racist” after doing a racist thing
Amy Cooper herself insists she’s not racist, even though she has done an inarguably racist thing. The lawyer for the McCloskeys made sure to point out that they “are long-time civil rights advocates and support the message of the Black Lives Matter movement.”
When the lawyer said the McCloskeys are long-time civil rights activists, the AP quoted him and put a hyperlink on that quote. That link takes you to a story about the fact that in the year of our lord twenty nineteen, Mark McCloskey represented a man who was injured while surrendering to police last year. I didn’t go to a fancy news-people school but that feels like some spurious hyperlink practice. Long-time… 2019. Okay, yes, I suppose 2019 does feel like a very long time ago.
White people have great success absolving ourselves of racism by drawing a line between ourselves and “real” racists like the klan, or by saying we made one mistake but our hearts are pure (Hill, 2008). This is the difference between being “a racist” and committing racist acts. You can do racism on Monday and then on Tuesday you can go on CNN with a straight face and tell the world you’re not a racist because you represented a Black guy in court once.
So why can’t I dunk on Amy Cooper?
Look, I read that New Yorker exposé. It was wild. I enjoyed it a lot. I made seventy million jokes with my friends about it. That’s just good old-fashioned fun.
The problem is, we can’t let Amy Cooper or the McCloskeys, or any of these other people, be framed as total outliers. What they did is just not that uncommon. When white people are afraid, we tend to resort to violence, whether direct or indirect. We draw weapons or we call the police, despite being aware of the prevalence of police brutality against racialized people.
When a white person is caught on tape endangering someone’s life because of their own racism, what we should not waste our energy on is the hunt for bizarre stories about things those specific people have done in the past. All that does is make us think, “well that person is an anomaly, not like me,” so we can move on and not feel responsible for the ways we enact the same violence. When we call the police on suspicious characters, when we complain to our bosses because our Black coworker frightened us by speaking up in a meeting, when we exclude our peers because they just don’t seem like a cultural fit, we think we’re doing so for a good reason. We’re not.
The more we draw a line between ourselves and the Amy Coopers or the McCloskeys, the more we let ourselves off the hook for our part in supporting white supremacy. It doesn’t serve us, and it certainly doesn’t help create a world where Black lives matter more than white comfort.
Academic Works Cited
Baldus, D., Woodworth, G., & Pulaski, C. (1994). Reflections on the “inevitability: of racial discrimination in capital sentencing and the “impossibility” of its prevention, detection, and correction. Washington and Lee Law Review, 51, 359–419.
De Welde, K. (2003). White Women Beware!: Whiteness, Fear of Crime, and Self-Defense. Race, Gender & Class, 10(4), 75–91. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/41675102.
Girgenti, A. A. (2015). The intersection of victim race and gender: The “Black Male Victim Effect” and the death penalty. Race and Justice, 5(4), 307–329.
Griffith, D. W., Dixon, T., & Triangle Film Corporation. (1915). Birth of a nation. Los Angeles, CA: Triangle Film Corp.
Hill, J. H. (2008). The everyday language of white racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
McClellan, C. & Tekin, C. (2016). Stand your ground laws, homicides, and injuries. Journal of Human Resources, 52, 621–653.
Smith, V. (1990). Split affinities: The case of interracial rape. In M. Hirsch and E. F. Keller (eds.), Conflicts in feminism, pp. 271–287. Routledge: New York, NY.
Young, Lola. (1996). Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. Routledge: London, UK
