chat

I remember it originally meaning any expression of upper class privilege in the feminine. Picking on retail staff, the “don’t you know who I am” kind of attitude.

Various names have been used as ‘white women calling cops on black people nicknames’.

• 2018 BBQ Becky - YouTuber posted a video entitled “White Woman Called Out for Racially Targeting Black Men Having BBQ in Oakland”.
• 2018 Permit Patty - Oakland, California woman called the police on an eight-year-old black girl and her mother for selling water outside her apartment. Her profession as the CEO of a medicinal marijuana company for animals was pointed at as illustrative of the difference between being white and black in America.
• 2018 Pool Patrol Paula - Arrested for accosting a group of black teenagers while trying to forcibly remove them from a public swimming pool in South Carolina.
• 2018 Baggage Claim - A female baggage claim attendant who was filmed refusing a black woman the name and contact of a manager, after the attempted to report a customer service issue at Logan International Airport in Boston.
• 2018 Cornerstore Caroline - A female resident of Brooklyn, New York, who became the subject of a online scutiny, after accusing a nine-year old black child of sexual assault and calling the police on him. The allegations were later refuted by surveillance footage of the incident.
• 2018 Golf Cart Gail - A white woman who was the subject of controversy, after calling the police on a black father watching his son's soccer game.

6 major incidents in 2018 alone. But a 2020 viral incident that got ‘Karen’ to stick.

• 2020 Central Park Karen - The incident that led to the internet coming to a consensus, much to the chagrin of nice women named Karen everywhere. "Central Park Karen" is the white cop-caller nickname of Amy Cooper, who was recorded calling the police on an African American birder in Central Park in New York City after being asked by him to leash her dog in the park.
• later in 2020 San Francisco Karen - A white man and woman confronted a person of color who was stenciling Black Lives Matter in chalk on their own property. In the video, the woman, Lisa Alexander, assumed James Juanillo was not the property owner and called the police.

A white couple call the police on me, a person of color, for stencilling a #BLM chalk message on my own front retaining wall. “Karen” lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here.
https://twiiit.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240

Since then it’s been almost entirely “Karen” and like “woke” and so many other appropriations of Black culture, has been taken from original anti-racist meaning to just be another misogynistic term for “disliked woman” or “man acting like an entitled woman”.

A lot of the early examples I remember involved calling the cops on black people basically for existing.

For example, this article from 2021 which says, "It has gone on to become one of the most widely publicized so-called "Karen" incidents, where a white person, typically a woman, calls police to report a Black or brown person engaged in mundane activities."

it absolutely did not