In 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released their joint album Some Time in New York City. And from that fateful album, came Lennon’s infamous flop of a song “Woman Is The N-gger of The World,” which the raging and misogynistic wife-beating “feminist” thought would send a real pro-feminist message.
To make a long story short, this egregious title of this equally trash song was “coined” by Ono via a 1969 interview with Nova Magazine. And by coined, I mean she swagger jacked it from a character in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The exact quote goes “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”
My point in this extended intro? Well, it’s quite simple:
Some white feminists don’t like to be left out of things. Especially, oppression.
That Lennon/Ono song (remember, you don’t have to be a white woman to subscribe to white feminist pedagogy and ideology) is the most extreme example, but now “Karen is a slur” has logged on to become the latest example of white women not knowing how to read the room and most certainly having so much extra time on their hands in this age of social distancing that they must fabricate a crumb of oppression—which is crucial to maintaining the illusion that is their collective fragility and maintaining the balancing out that is their perpetual victimhood.
It’s funny really. Like “Becky”, “Karen” has become a catch-all name for white women who have a ton of societal power by virtue of being white and despite being women. It would be easy for me to blame the bad boxes-hair-dye-jobs that these types have an affinity for, but the thing is…
What really makes a “Karen” a “Karen” is her recognition that she holds this societal power and that it is hers to wield at even the slightest SMIDGEN of an inconvenience.
This recognition of their societal power—even with the hierarchical downside of them being “women”—also comes with the recognition that they cannot wield physical violence as a supremacist weapon like their male counterparts. Mainly because, again, it would blow their “fragility” cover. So, they opt for other methods. You see, “Karens” are emotional, mental, and psychological terrorists. They are the human personifications of throwing a rock and hiding your ashy hand. And this means that a “Karen” will do things like scream about having talked to AppleCare. Or ask to speak to the manager if you so much as breathe at her wrong. Or call the police on you for standing outside while Black. Or bait you into a verbal tiff where they are clearly wrong and then cry blood in the middle of it to morph you into the aggressor. And you know what else a “Karen” will do?
She will boldly proclaim that this catch-all-name she was given is a “slur” with “classist” implications. And basically put it in conversation with a 350-year-old slur that she can’t even say or let alone spell out without threats or bodily harm.
But my dear readers, there is no slur to be found here. There’s no white woman equivalent to “n-gger” or any other [racial] slur for that matter. Because the truth of the matter is that “Karens” are part of the oppressor class and oppressors cannot be slurred. Indeed, “slurs” rely on power dynamics (and often violent history) to be slurred and are always deployed by those in power against those who aren’t and might never be. And seeing that the term “Karen” has mostly been employed by Black and Brown people to put the blistering privilege of young to middle-aged white women on display, you can see where this “slur” nonsense starts to sound ridiculous.
Now, if “Karens” are indeed in the mood to make this fetch and morph Karen into a slur, they would have to come back to me after a substantial number of “Karens” have been genocided, have had their land systematically stolen, have had their pumpkin spice culture erased via Karen-American schools, have been literally abducted from their homelands and plopped in a foreign land to work against their will, and have had legislature put in place to ensure that they’ll always at an economic disadvantage even after they are “set free”.
Oh and we can add lynchings for shiggles. You know. As a treat.
Until a “Karen” can do that? She can sit there with her Kate-Plus-Eight haircut and eat her food.