There are few things more devastating to a white woman than to be labeled a Karen.
A Karen is a woman who gives side-eye to a black patron at the grocery store because she’s waiting for him to shoplift. But a Karen is also the woman who smiles at that same shopper, so he knows that she doesn’t think he’s a shoplifter, and she’s doing her best to approach the world through an antiracist framework.
A Karen is a bipartisan busybody — an archetype of a woman who uses appeals to authority to get others in trouble or is just plain nosy. She is stereotypically blonde and white. She is almost always obsessed with race.
By this definition, there may be no greater Karen than Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, the book every liberal put on her bookshelf in 2020 to demonstrate that, when it comes to the fraught race relations in America, she is on the right side of history.
DiAngelo would likely balk at this characterization, arguing that as a white woman myself, I am simply attempting to “obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium” — a quote from her book. But DiAngelo and antiracist “race experts” such as her have turned us all into Karens, making it impossible for white women to think or speak coherently about race. Just take DiAngelo as an example.
In his new film Am I Racist?, conservative commentator Matt Walsh tricks DiAngelo into producing one of the most uncomfortable on-screen moments in recent history. Dressed as a soy boy with a man bun, Walsh questions DiAngelo about how he can use her framework to be as antiracist as possible. Then Walsh summons a producer of the film, who is black, to pay him some cash as “reparations.” DiAngelo, who looks visibly uncomfortable, initially pushes back that “reparations is a systemic dynamic and approach” rather than a personal payout. But when Walsh presses her, she runs out of arguments and gets up to grab her wallet.
Most normal people who saw a white guy paying a black guy money out of sheer guilt would comment, “That was really weird,” as DiAngelo did, and leave it at that. But DiAngelo has made her career out of fueling the narrative that white people are more racist than they think, they must listen and learn from black people but not burden them with the weight of educating white people, and they must respect and admire their nonwhite peers without romanticizing them. It is good to say “I am a racist.” It is bad to say “I don’t see color.” It is best, it seems, simply to wallow in shame.
DiAngelo’s credo has come to dominate corporate America, the entertainment industry, and the applause lines of left-leaning politicians since the racially changed summer of 2020. That year, white celebrities were atoning as far as the eye could see, from the mawkish #ITakeResponsibility video to the #BlackoutTuesday campaign that encouraged white people to signal their silence and solidarity on social media by posting a black square. Rather than confer woke points, however, the latter campaign ultimately made participants a target of criticism after it resulted in the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag pulling up endless photos of black squares rather than content related to protests and activism.
Much of the language white people employ in these struggle sessions sounds, frankly, racist. “Beautiful, beautiful white women,” opined actress Connie Britton on the recent “white women for Kamala” video call, quipping, “Karens for Kamala?”
After watching Am I Racist? in theaters, I was suddenly self-conscious when I left the screening room. As I happened to make eye contact with a couple of black theatergoers, I gave them a smile. Aware of the various antiracism teachers’ constant conversations about race, I suddenly wondered if this friendliness was because of my Southern upbringing or whether I was exhibiting racism by being too friendly to black people, as if I were trying to present myself as an ally. Or is it racist to think that one can be “too friendly” to black people? No wonder white women in antiracist workshops break down in tears.
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Black author and professor John McWhorter calls White Fragility a “racist tract.” Considering DiAngelo’s incredible wealth and fame, not to mention her astronomical speaking fees and the recent allegations that she plagiarized the work of nonwhite scholars, DiAngelo seems not to have the purest of intentions.
Despite what the white people profiting off racial tension will tell you, most white women are probably in danger of thinking about race too much, rather than not enough. Common sense is more likely to produce a healthy interaction between members of different races than DiAngelo’s framework, which makes “really weird” scenarios suddenly seem like the norm. Rather than helping, the current antiracist narrative is most likely to create a cohort of paranoid, frenzied, and irrational women — in other words, Karens.