CW: Sexual objectification, oppression
The joke of “being a Karen” feels like a recent meme, but the idea behind it is as old as feminism has been a movement, and our very own amazing Karen is here to talk to you about it. She’s going to address being a white woman named Karen, but really, she’s going to talk about white feminists and the origins of the movement, the not so intersectional nature of it, and how people without melanin historically have been Karens toward the POC community. Finally, Karen and M talk about using white privelege to boost black creators and be an ally.
In this first link, we’ll tackle the question “What is critical race theory” because Karen mentions it fairly early into the episode, and I think it’s a good idea to get a really good source in here about what CRT is. This is an academic focused source meant for educators or people who are into education focused topics, but it’s not a dry read, and it’ll tell you how CRT is implemented at various age levels versus how you would actually study CRT as a class at the college level like how Karen is talking about and how people think of it.
Next, we’ll address what a microaggression is. You probably think you aren’t racist, and it’s very likely that you aren’t being outright racist. You might be an amazing ally, but even people who are doing their best can still be unintentionally harmful. Microaggressions are those unintentionally harmful actions that people raised outside of a minority culture commit and we need to all learn to recognize them.
So this link will take you to a history of the Karen meme and how we got to where we associate it with problematic white women.
Karen mentioned an article from Harvard about how the Karen meme touches on the history of white womanhood and white feminism and the way white women have treated and used people of color throughout U.S history. This isn’t the Harvard article, but it does reference it and use quotes from it while talking about the topic.
And finally, here’s a nice slideshow on the history of the different waves of feminism and what each wave was doing, including how they used POC to boost the position of white women. This link will come up again when we do an episode on feminism for Women’s History Month.
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