OK, there's still enough confusion about this Karen situation that I'll cross-post something that I shared elsewhere. This was in response to the question: Is the term "Karen" sexist?

Repost follows. Please get to the end before going off. No, I don't try to answer the question.

This issue is so complicated. Lots of things are true:

1) The original use of the term Karen wasn't sexist. It was most often used by black women in the USA, talking about white women in the USA, who were flexing their privilege and situational power on service workers.

2) The term has been co-opted by white mainstream popular culture, both in the US and internationally. There are more white dudes online than black women, and they're louder.

So the term "Karen" is now most often used by white men, talking about white women, who have less situational power than them.

So we wind up with white women complaining that the word Karen is sexist based on their real lived experiences being called a Karen, and black women saying "GTFO it's not sexist at all. I'm still calling you a Karen."

It sets up a conflict between black and white women, where white women are just trying to push back against white men, but black women feel that they're being silenced by white women.

For my part as a black man, I never used the word Karen in that manner, but I did use it as a generic stand in for any woman's name, because it used to be a name without baggage (unlike say, Becky).

In my examples, Karen was the *recipient* of unfair treatment by dudes. But the word is loaded now. I've switched to "Lindsay" to avoid the whole thing.

So many black words get co-opted and twisted. "Cancelled" now means "Doxxing and Internet pile-on." Most of the folks complaining about being cancelled were never loved by the black community anyway, so they can't be cancelled.

And cancelling was the *removal* of patronage, not the *addition* of vitriol or doxxing. Chris Brown can be cancelled. R. Kelly can be cancelled. Brett Stephens can't be cancelled. "Barbeque Betty" can't be cancelled.

/fin

I didn't try to answer the question of if it's sexist because I'm not a woman, so my opinion on whether this is, or isn't sexist, isn't valid.

What I did try to do, was provide the context that's so often missing when black women are separated from culture they create.