I admit it--I tweeted a link to yesterday's full-length blog post after writing it. And even clicked on a "trending" tag and read until I came to a blue tick, just to check whether the "notifications" page collects any evidence that Twitter's even trying to save itself. So far, none.\
The "trending" topic was the word "Karen." Some people think it's cute to take the name some other person's parents gave that person and use it as slang for something else. I don't think that's cute. Using names from history is merely obfuscatory; there was only one Benedict Arnold, but there was a real Benedict Arnold, and if any of his relatives resent the way we remember his name, well he deserved it. Using names from literature, ditto, and at least there never was a real Uriah Heep or Caspar Milquetoast; people recognize those stereotypes but the names given to them are unlikely to be heard as unintended insults to any real person.. But just randomly picking a given name that means any of several hundred thousand living people? ??? Hello, if you're not using the name to refer to a specific person ("then she started singing like Karen Carpenter," e.g.) or homonym ("Many of the people who named their daughters 'Karen' didn't even know it was also the name of an ethnic group"), then using it as a slang word is just plain obnoxious. And tacky.
I looked this up. As a term of hate for (a) a White woman and/or (b) a woman who insists on getting what she's paying for, "Karen" does not refer to any actual example in history or literature. Somebody just picked on that name and an admittedly silly-looking hair style to create the stereotype that, when a White woman demands her due, she's doing it to persecute some poor Black youth who has some sort of natural right to come to work stoned and fail to do per job, right?
I would really prefer to leave the chastisement of people who use "Karen" to mean anything but "someone who inherited that as either a given name or an ethnic group name" to competent, responsible Black adults. When I worked in the D.C. school system I knew several. To the best of my knowledge none of them ever used a computer other than at work, though, so I've waited in vain to read where any of them has come online to say, "If you mean 'someone who has made it a goal to get you fired from your job,' you should say that."
Anyway, the tweet: Women who demand their due are doing a GOOD, GOOD, GOOD thing. If you mean a racist, you should say "a racist."
And you should also be able to prove that you do mean "a racist," as completely different from "a person insisting on the product or service person is paying for." The suggestion that those two disparate things are normally linked--now THAT is racist.
There is no natural correlation between being Black and being dishonest, lazy, or incompetent.
Women, even in African Muslim countries, have generally been trusted with a positive duty "to reward good and punish evil" by shopping responsibly. That is one of the main ways the virtuous wife in the Book of Proverbs "will do [her husband] good and not evil all the days of her life." A good homemaker is, like a good middle manager or small business entrepreneur, prudent and frugal. She demands her due when she pays for anything. That cultural expectation is global.
When did "race" come into the picture? When the French Romanticists, concerned about the effect of recognizing women's civil rights during the French Revolution, concocted the idea of disabling women by marketing an ideal of femi-ninny-ty in which the virtuous woman stayed home, didn't bother her pretty little head about money, didn't have any money or go out shopping anyway, and focussed her energy on mystical communion with the dead. Men who worshipped science and technology, in Auguste Comte's demented vision, would feel tired, corrupted, and guilty, so they'd need to come home and unburden themselves to "the angel in the home," that artificially "sweet" (though probably insipid), preferably illiterate, friendless, vocationless, surely at least a little bit "crazy," baby-doll wife who was to be trained to direct whatever stunted intelligence she had toward communion with the dead because, by following Comte's prescription for life, she was pretty sure to join them by age twenty-five.
In real life very few parents seriously considered bringing up little girls this way, but a modified version of "the angel in the home" was sentimentalized about by men and even women who thought women shouldn't be "corrupted" by going to university or having a vote. The modern version is the Nice Girl who doesn't think about moral or ethical questions any "heavier" than some sort of ideal of making everyone feel good. The families that bought into the Nice Girl ideal, producing John Gray's "women from Venus" and Deborah Tannen's "relational women," were (in the United States) almost exclusively of European or Japanese origin. Very few human cultures ever took that ideal seriously.
So when these typically pale-complexioned women have their own money and are responsible for using it to bring up children and manage businesses, woman-haters are trying to keep them from doing those things well by attacking them with the claim that some sort of stereotype of a woman who wants to talk to the manager, who knows what she's paying for and intends to get it, is...not being a Nice Girl. But these days the majority of American women are well past wanting to be seen as any kind of "girl" and are more concerned with being good women, as in grown-up, responsible, prudent, frugal--and not leaving the store without what we're paying for. So the haters escalate the attack by projecting some of their own racism onto the stereotype. Because these people are serious haters they imagine that the incompetent employee who's going to be punished for being caught cheating this woman is always going to have darker skin than she has.
Nobody in per right mind seriously believes that it's kind to let people cheat and steal in order to pamper their emotional feelings. In fact, if the manager happens to be honest, the incompetent clerk is likely to be penalized for having too much cash in the drawer, as much as for having too little. When we demand honest, ethical trade, we are being kind to the typically young or newly hired people at the bottom of the company hierarchy who may not have intended to cheat us--the first time: we are teaching them not to cheat.
In real life, women who intend to get what we're paying for don't know or care what the incompetent employees may look like. What we want to punish is incompetence. There may be, in some places, a correlation between Blackness and incompetence. In the notoriously corrupt crony system that used to be Washington, D.C.'s, city government, such a correlation was easy to spot. Corrupt crony systems provide sinecures for incompetent White people in other cities and towns, but in the few places where it's possible for the ruling party to discriminate in favor of Blackness, or Hispanicity or Yiddishkeit or even Nice White Girlhood, then a non-causative correlation between minority status and incompetence is almost guaranteed to form!
My mother often reminisced about her first grown-up job. Back then "lace-curtain Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" Protestants wer part of the mainstream but Irish Catholics were still a distrusted minority, working their way up; there was a serious question whether an Irish Catholic like John F. Kennedy could ever be electable. Mother's first employer was an Irish Catholic just like the young men, stereotypically all called "Paddy" after their patron saint, who dominated several city police forces; but she judged policemen by their body shape rather than their Irish-ness. "See that fat policeman out on the street? You know he's a crook. Hangs out in places that give him free drinks and snacks all day, never gets any exercise. If he bothered to chase any thief that tried to rob a shop like ours, he couldn't chase the thief ten yards before he'd flop over dead! It's about time for a new politician to promise to reform the system. Then we'll see a lot of slim, trim policemen who will actually do their jobs...until they start hanging out in the places that feed them, and then it all starts over again."
Identifying incompetence with obesity makes more sense than identifying it with skin color. In Washington when I was there, the shiftless, clueless, working-to-rule or actively-sabotaging-the-office bureaucrats who "lost" payments, misdirected mail, took an hour to do what their counterparts in the suburbs could do in three minutes, but at least were easy for those inclined that way to cheat because they didn't care, were without exception Black--but so were the honest, hardworking people who made the city work. Too many people in the city were Black to make it possible to use "Black" as an identifying trait if you wanted to describe an individual others might want to support or avoid. "Black" was the default. It might be worth the time to mention that someone was not Black. But quite often the incompetent ones were also fat. A correlation between obesity and incompetence can be produced by disabling thyroid disease, or by a tendency to indulge in the Deadly Sin of Laziness.
When a responsible (and virtuous) woman insists on correcting a bill rung up by a chatter-cheating cashier, on getting a replacement for the object that was broken in the box, on making the person who sprayed poison around the power line replace her now stunted and barren fruit trees, generally getting what is due to her and her family, it's not about the person who could just apologize and correct, or pay for, the mistake. But if that person fails to correct the mistake, but adds insult to injury--telling her she's not acting like a Nice Girl, horrors, she's being a kvetch, a yenta, a strega, bossy, intimidating, domineering, a shrew, a harpy, a "honey," shrill, strident, abrasive, "crazy," "hysterical," "emotional," an emasculating b***h, or these days "a Karen"--nice to drag in all those thousands of random older women--then, perhaps, all of us should be making it a point to go punish that person. The hater.
"She's just a Karen" is almost as loaded an insult as "honey" is; it manages to insult the generation of White women for which "Karen" was a trendy name, all Black people, and the Karens of that tropical Asian country that can't make up its mind what to call itself in English, all at once. If you really want to insult that many people all at once, nice going, Trash Mouth, you are telling the world you're a serious hater.
It's time to push back against the haters.
What do nice people do when a woman, especially an older woman of European or Japanese descent who may still be dealing with the baggage of the Nice Girl stereotype and whose manner may consequently be brittle or shrill, is standing up for her rights? Why, they stand beside her, of course.
Say, "Yeah!"
Say, "Right on!"
Say, "What she said!"
Say, "Hey, me too!"
Say, "Go, girl!"
If any of those anti-woman dogwhistle words have been used, say "I heard that! Now you do whatever the lady says, fool, because you've got witnesses! What's your name, anyway? What's your job description? Who hired you, and what was the matter with them?"
These days, if a White person uses the N-word in public, per career is over. Why is there still any difference between that and a man using any of those anti-woman words?
We might even want to sing a little chorus of,
"Dare to be a Karen! Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known!"
The last time I went anywhere on a Greyhound bus was the worst bus trip ever. It started innocently enough--for some reason the bus just was not moving at traffic speed, so it was further behind schedule at every scheduled stop. Then for the middle third of the trip the driver was visibly in an altered state of consciousness; he was rude, hostile, racist, and mean, and everyone knew it, and everyone also knew that our only chance of getting to where we were going that day was to ignore the driver's drugged-out condition and pray that he didn't crash the bus. Then there was a long sweaty delay in the Great Dismal Swamp while a bus in working condition was found. Everyone was thoroughly sorry they'd bought bus tickets.
For what it's worth, the drugged driver, against whom I wrote a complaint the next day, was White. He was also obese. The nice driver who just couldn't get the bus going, on the morning shift, was also White. The tired, surly, but competent driver on the evening shift was Black.
Nobody was very friendly or cheerful as we boarded the working bus with the grumpy driver, but finally we rolled into Washington. I stood up to remove my duffel bag from the luggage rack, as people have always done on all the bus trips I've taken in my lifetime, and the driver squawked, "Sit down while the bus is in motion!" as if he thought he were driving a school bus. I stood there loading my bag onto my shoulder, and the idiot driver said, "I can put you off this bus!"
I looked out at the Union Station, which was where everyone going to Washington wanted to get to anyway, and called back, "Yes please!"
It was terrific. The bus exploded with laughter and relief. "Yeah, me too!" "Me three!" People stood up and laughed and cheered.
On that particular occasion, the sight of city buses and trains still at the Union Station, meaning that some of us were going to get home that night after all, undoubtedly had something to do with the change in the atmosphere on the bus.
Nevertheless, standing beside women who are claiming their due, for the benefit of humankind as well as themselves, feels wonderful. Try to find a way to do it today.
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