Let’s Scare Karen to Death

Posted By Jim Goad On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]1,935 words / 13:53

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here [2]. To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

On May 25, 2020 — the same day that Saint George Floyd departed this vale of tears and ascended to Negro Heaven, where you can eat all the free fentanyl and bananas you want — a white woman in Central Park called the police on a black man.

It seemed like a minor incident, and it was until you consider the fact that any time a white person does anything other than slavishly bow down and kiss a black person’s feet these days, it becomes an international crisis.

https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/KAREN.mp3 [2]

Wikipedia refers to the event as the “Central Park birdwatching incident [3],” but the woman, Amy Cooper, became known as “Central Park Karen [4]” and had her life destroyed. The whole birdwatching angle was largely ignored as the story took on the terrifying veneer of yet another tale of entitled white women recklessly placing black men in harm’s way, because statistics show that every time police show up to arrest a birdwatching black man, they almost always kill him.

The black man, Christian Cooper (no relation to Amy Cooper, unless you buy into such idiocies as “the universal brotherhood of man”) claims he was birdwatching in the park that day, which fits the stereotype of black males being avid ornithologists. The section of Central Park where the notorious event occurred is known as the “Ramble.” The New York Times [5] describes the Ramble as both “a magnet for bird-watchers” and “a place where people prowl for anonymous sexual encounters,” but I am not trying to imply that either of the Coopers was there that day to do anything remotely so lecherous.

As the story goes, Amy Cooper was there walking her dog without a leash, which is apparently illegal. Christian Cooper reprimanded her for not following the law, which is ironic, seeing as how white “Karens” are usually the ones who walk up to people and scold them for not obeying the law. Amy refused to submit, which is also ironic, seeing as how black men are typically the ones who sho’nuff don’t them obey no laws.

By his own admission, Christian then told Amy, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” and then offered the dog a treat. Why he had dog treats handy while bird-watching will forever be a mystery, but Amy Cooper apparently took the black man’s comment as a threat, especially the “you’re not going to like it” part. Was it a poisoned dog treat? Was it merely a ruse so he could pull a Michael Vick on the animal and torture it? Did he intend to have an “anonymous sexual encounter” with the pooch and force Amy to watch?

After Amy allegedly yelled, “Don’t you touch my dog!”, Christian began recording her with his phone as she walked toward him. His video [6], which almost instantly became viral, shows her calling 911 and saying, “There is an African-American man — I am in Central Park — he is recording me and threatening myself and my dog. Please, send the cops immediately!”

Considering all of the words she could have used to describe him, it seems very polite that Amy referred to him as an “African-American man,” but to the Lügenpresse and the tweet-mobs, this automatically made her a “racist.” Pay no mind to the fact that all of the news reports referred to Amy Cooper as a white woman. On the same day as the incident, Christian Cooper’s sister Melody posted [7] her brother’s footage on Twitter and referred to Amy as a “Karen.” She wrote that her brother had “politely” asked Amy to put her dog on a leash, but she left out the part where he told her that he was going to do something that she wouldn’t like.

Neither of the Coopers waited around for the police to arrive, which, as far as I can tell, means they both fled the scene of an alleged crime, which I’m pretty sure means they both committed a crime, but neither of them was prosecuted for it.

The story instantly became another tiresomely predictable racial-media hysteria-fest. Amy Cooper surrendered her dog to a local animal shelter the day of the event. The next day, the investment firm that had employed Amy Cooper fired her, announcing [8] on Twitter that “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton.” Cooper was eventually charged with filing a false police report, but the charges were dismissed after she “completed an educational course.” Cooper says that she received several death threats and considered suicide before moving to another country.

The day of the ill-fated “birdwatching incident” was a seminal moment, a watershed, a fork in the road, and a changing of the guard for what formerly had been a relatively harmless meme about meddlesome white women known as “Karens.” It was a day when a benign stereotype metastasized into something far more ominous. My friends, it was the day — and again, the same day that George Floyd died — when “Karen” switched from someone who wanted to talk to the manager because she didn’t feel the black McDonald’s cashier was sufficiently obsequious to a sinister, entitled white woman who continued enabling a centuries-long tradition of white-on-black violence. It marked the day when “Karen” went from an annoying soccer mom to Eva Braun. Although George Floyd got most of the headlines in 2020, The Guardian declared it to be “The year of Karen [9],” because it supposedly “changed the way Americans talked about racism.”

May 25, 2020 was the day when Karen had to be forever put in her place because she was acting “entitled,” which used to be known as “actin’ uppity” when black people did it.

[10]

You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here [11].

Even going back to the slave days, black Americans always seemed to have some sort of designated generic name for uppity white women. In antebellum days, the favored pejorative was “Miss Ann.” In the 1990s, the term “Becky” was popular, although the average Becky appears to be a trifle younger than the typical Karen.

At some point in the early 2000s, white people also started using the term “Karen” to denote white female busybodies, but one thing is for sure: Whether the person defaming Karen is white or black, Karen is always a white woman, and she is always being defamed. But as I’ve already explained, defaming a white woman is never racist, and even her life is ruined as a result, while describing a black man who’s just threatened you as an “African-American man” is always racist, even if he suffers no harm and winds up being widely feted.

A few days after the notorious Central Park “birdwatching incident,” the New York State Assembly reintroduced a failed 2018 bill that made it a felony “hate crime,” with prison time and the whole nine yards, “if the motivation for reporting such crime is motivated by a perception or belief about their race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it into law in June 2020, about a year before he left office in the wake of multiple charges of sexual harassment and allegations of covering up COVID deaths in nursing homes.

A month after the New York law passed, San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Shamann Walton [12] introduced the CAREN Act — an acronym for Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies — which changed the city’s Police Code to prohibit “the fabrication of racially biased emergency reports.” According to Walton:

We don’t want what happened to Emmett Till in 1955, or the long history of false accusations of black men and boys in this country, due to weaponizing law enforcement, to threaten, terrorize, and sometimes even kill them, to ever happen again. . . . I really want to emphasize that 911 is not a customer service line for someone’s racist behavior.

According to The Guardian [13], the CAREN Act, which passed unanimously in October 2020, was “a nod to a popular meme using the name ‘Karen’ to describe an entitled white woman whose actions stem from her privilege, such as using police to target people of color.”

Two months later, The Guardian, in its “Year of Karen” article, again dragged Emmett Till’s perpetually-abused corpse into the fray when it wrote:

It was through that performance that Amy Cooper took on the mantle of an American archetype: the white woman who weaponizes her vulnerability to exact violence upon a Black [sic] man. In history, she is Carolyn Bryant, the adult white woman whose complaint about a 14-year-old Emmett Till led to his torture and murder at the hands of racist white adults.

In a July 2020 article titled “How the ‘Karen Meme’ Confronts the Violent History of White Womanhood [14],” TIME magazine called the Karen meme

Internet shorthand . . . for a particular kind of racial violence white women have instigated for centuries — following a long and troubling legacy of white women in the country weaponizing their victimhood. . . . Coupled with the rise of social media and the smartphone camera, the longtime narrative of white women as helpless victims in need of protection is now being challenged by video evidence of them as instigators of not only conflict, but violence.

Why, it’s almost as if the FBI Uniform Crime Reports — especially regarding interracial rape [15] — don’t even exist! I had no idea there were so many white women out there instigating violence against non-whites.

In 2021, Netflix released a movie simply called Karen, whose premise is summarized thusly by Amazon:

A racist Caucasian woman pulls out all the stops to rid her neighborhood of the peaceful African American couple who just moved in next door.

Ah, so it’s a fantasy film! The movie is set in a fictional upscale Atlanta neighborhood named after a Confederate general. Within moments after moving in next door to a white woman named Karen Drexler, Karen installs surveillance cameras which she points in their direction, tells them that she doesn’t keep a lot of cash in her house, scolds them for not following trash-collection protocol, cuts the power line to their abode, encourages her racist cop brother to plant marijuana in the black male’s car trunk, and breaks into their house carrying a gun and attempts to kill them before they finally lose their patience with Karen and kill her, whereupon they rename the neighborhood after civil-rights hero John Lewis.

In short, it’s an entirely realistic film that’s completely in line with modern interracial crime statistics.

Despite all the inverted-reality rigmarole about white women constantly exposing black men to violence, it’s easy to find videos online with titles such as AMAZON DELIVERY GIRL’S HAD ENOUGH OF THIS KAREN’S MOUTH [16] that show a dark-skinned girl throwing haymakers at a white woman who hadn’t physically threatened her in any way. The Daily Mail [17] recently covered the sordid saga of a white female college student who had her life ruined after falsely being accused of threatening another batch of those peaceful protestors — you know, the kind of people who surround a woman’s car, bang on it, and physically threaten her while calling her a “Karen.” In practice, the Karen meme doesn’t seem aimed at protecting black men from violence so much as it encourages violence toward white women.

I’m getting the queasy sense that all this anti-Karen hype, as well as all those new anti-Karen laws, aren’t what they purport to be. Instead, it seems as if they’re designed to demoralize and terrorize white women from even thinking about reporting any sort of crimes by non-whites. Merely to avoid the possibility that black criminals might live in fear of having Karen call the police on them, some people would rather scare Karen to death.

Jim Goad [18]

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[20]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.