{"id":20989,"date":"2020-06-13T19:41:11","date_gmt":"2020-06-13T19:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=20989"},"modified":"2020-06-15T04:35:03","modified_gmt":"2020-06-15T04:35:03","slug":"how-karen-went-from-a-popular-baby-name-to-a-stand-in-for-white-entitlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-karen-went-from-a-popular-baby-name-to-a-stand-in-for-white-entitlement\/","title":{"rendered":"How ‘Karen’ went from a popular baby name to a stand-in for white entitlement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robin Queen<\/a>, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

When I read about Amy Cooper<\/a>, the woman in Central Park who called the police on a black birder because he\u2019d asked her to leash her out-of-control dog, I was horrified.<\/p>\n

But, as a sociolinguist who studies and writes about language and discrimination<\/a>, I was also struck by the name given to Cooper in several headlines: \u201cCentral Park Karen<\/a>.\u201d On Twitter, the birder\u2019s sister also referred to her<\/a> as a \u201cKaren.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was no confusion about what this meant: It was a label for a white woman who had used her privilege to threaten and try to intimidate a black man by calling the police.<\/p>\n

But this was just one way \u201cKaren\u201d has been deployed in recent months. There was the woman dubbed a Karen<\/a> who, after being told that a waiter would bring ketchup to her table, ended up helping herself at the server\u2019s station. And then there was the mom who was called a Karen<\/a> for telling a woman wearing a bikini to cover up. Countless other variations have emerged.<\/p>\n

At first glance, a generic name becoming infused with so much meaning seems patently absurd. Imagine if your friend groused that his boss was being \u201ca real David,\u201d or a sibling pointed out that mom was acting like \u201csuch a Christina.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how, exactly, does a name like Karen become such a powerful form of social commentary? And how does it come to mean so many different things at the same time?<\/p>\n

The many shapes of meaning<\/h2>\n

First names tend to contain a range of social cues<\/a>. An obvious one is gender. But they can convey other kinds of information too, including age, ethnicity, religion, social class and geography. The first name Karen<\/a> peaked in popularity in 1965, which means that in 2020, most people named Karen are middle aged. Because roughly 80% of the U.S. population was white<\/a> in the 1960s, it\u2019s safe to assume that the proportion of people named Karen in 2020 is predominantly white.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s kind of a rough foundation for what the first name Karen might signal to people. But what about the way it evolved to mean much more than simply a first name relatively common among middle-aged white women?<\/p>\n

On the one hand, meaning can directly reference something in the world. A kitchen is, well, a kitchen. For this reason, we often assume that meanings are fixed and stable.<\/p>\n

But meaning can also be more indirect, indicating characteristics like where a person is from, their age or their ethnicity. Whether you say \u201csoda,\u201d \u201cpop\u201d or \u201cCoke\u201d for a carbonated beverage can indicate where in the United States you likely grew up<\/a>. In many African American communities, kitchen, in addition to being the place you cook, means \u201cnape of the neck<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These different definitions are often referred to as \u201cindexical<\/a>\u201d because different contexts indicate, or index, different meanings. Meaning, it turns out isn\u2019t nearly as stable or fixed as we like to think<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is how the use and understandings of words change and shift over time. It\u2019s also how they can become vehicles for social commentary.<\/p>\n

Karen\u2019s origin story<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s largely a coincidence that Karen \u2013 rather than, say, other popular baby names from the 1960s like Linda or Cynthia \u2013 is the name that became the label. Instead, it\u2019s the repeated use of the name on social media and on the street that reinforced its status.<\/p>\n

By tracing the origins of Karen up until the Central Park incident, you can see how two separate threads of meaning converged to make Karen the label for an officious, entitled, white woman.<\/p>\n

The first comes from African American communities, where certain generic first names have long been a shorthand<\/a> for \u201ca white woman to be wary of because she won\u2019t hesitate to wield privilege at the expense of others.\u201d Around 2018, people started posting pictures of white women calling the police on the mundane activities of black people. These individuals got labeled with hashtags like #bbqbecky, #permitpatti, #golfcartgail and #cornerstonecaroline.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The goal was to call out the inherent racism and white privilege of these women using a particular kind of alliterative flair<\/a>. This was the same sort of behavior that Amy Cooper engaged in when she called the police claiming to be threatened.<\/p>\n

The second thread emerges from stand-up comedy and Reddit. In 2005, Dane Cook performed a sketch comedy piece in which Karen is \u201cthat friend nobody likes<\/a>.\u201d In the sketch, she\u2019s described as \u201calways a douche.\u201d This portrayal of a \u201cKaren\u201d is less about her racism and contains more gender-based critiques, which might be why some continue to call the Karen meme sexist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then, in late 2017, Karen appeared on Reddit<\/a> as a parody of a Reddit user who had ranted about his ex-wife named Karen who received custody of their children and possession of the family home. That\u2019s likely the point at which Karen became linked to pushy behaviors like \u201cwanting to speak to the manager.\u201d A link that may have occurred first through parody went on to serve as an actual label for self-important, bossy people.<\/p>\n

A Karen by many other names<\/h2>\n

The Central Park incident created the perfect moment for these two strands to come together. There\u2019s the intersection of entitled behavior, racism and demographics.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, despite a lot of media analysis about what Karen \u201creally\u201d means, its use has been quite fluid. For example, we\u2019ve seen people who deny the existence of racism<\/a>, panic buy toilet paper<\/a> or call for an end to social distancing<\/a> all called \u201cKarens.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the meaning and use of Karen continues to shift. We can find male Karens<\/a> and black Karens<\/a>. Donald Trump has even been called a Karen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the way it\u2019s being used to push for justice, with protesters of police violence holding signs<\/a> like \u201cKarens against police brutality\u201d and \u201cI\u2019d like to speak to the manager of systemic racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

So is Karen fundamentally about white women using their racial privilege as a weapon? Is it about being an obnoxious rule follower? Or is it about being a no-fun, hysterical mom?<\/p>\n

Karen can be and is all of those. That doesn\u2019t weaken the critique; it simply gives it more facets and nuance.<\/p>\n

[Deep knowledge, daily.<\/em> Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s newsletter<\/a>.]\"The<\/p>\n

Robin Queen<\/a>, Professor of Linguistics, English Language and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robin Queen, University of Michigan When I read about Amy Cooper, the woman in Central Park who called the police on a black birder because he\u2019d asked her to leash her out-of-control dog, I was horrified. But, as a sociolinguist who studies and writes about language and discrimination, I was also struck by the name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":20990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8025],"tags":[365,2755,6654,2074,8190,498,7110,185],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20989"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21002,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20989\/revisions\/21002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}