Drowning out Karen in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

A villainous figure emerges in the convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued extrajudicial lethal violence leveled against Black life in the United States: the Karen. The Karen figure is so recognizable that it has exploded as a viral cultural trope.¹ The Karen compounds the layers of sedimented grief and violence that characterize ongoing racialized oppression, communal loss, and collective mourning. Karens are recognized in contemporary cultural mythos as figures with unchecked capricious entitlement and impulses to dominate others. Karens can both marshal the law and openly exist above the law in public spaces. Exposing the constructed façade of white women’s innocence, this figure is captured in public discourse, circulating in social media, often lashing out in violence or vitriolically refusing to decenter her desires even when her whims openly transgress the law or threaten the safety and well-being of others around her.

Videos of the Karen figure in social media often depict her as a potential viral super-spreader, such as when white women refuse to wear a mandated facial covering in crowded public space during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps precisely because they do not belong to communities who are disproportionately overrepresented in COVID-19 deaths. Other videos feature white women who spew anti-immigrant xenophobic sentiments as venomous expressions of right-wing nationalism and US patriotism. In some cases, Karens even deputize themselves as immigration officers and can be seen commanding others to go back to their countries. In their most malicious manifestations, Karen figures summon the law under the aegis of false, non-emergency police reporting to affront Black life, pose a threat to Black safety, or simply disrupt Black joy by weaponizing law enforcement. Racist, non-emergency police phone calls are so insidiously associated with the Karen figure that in 2020, San Francisco’s Shamann Walton introduced the CAREN Act (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergency Act) in response to a documented rise in false 911 calls. Similar to California’s AB 1550, the CAREN Act is a bill that proposes to make a person who is falsely reported as a perpetrator of a crime the victim of a crime. Under this act, non-emergency false reports can be considered punishable hate crimes.

Homonymic legislation aside, in all the viral instances, the Karen violently leverages her positionality as a white woman “on account of the insulation that white privilege affords” her (Kendall 172). She wields her privilege to the detriment of people belonging to communities who have historically been made more vulnerable by what Beverly Daniel Tatum calls the rife “smog” of white supremacy (6). In our current moment, this ubiquitous smog thickens under the confluence of communicable disease and police brutality. One cannot understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States without also contemplating the manifold and ongoing process of attrition fomented by the experience of exclusion, racialized violence, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression. It appears that the Karen figure traffics in this dense smog, although she invites scorn, ridicule, and derision. She is peddled as a Halloween costume and even an action figure doll. Levity notwithstanding, this figure undeniably connotes a recognizable source of woe, wrath, and brutality in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the Karens of the world have an extensive history, and Black feminists continue to ask Karen figures to reflect on their own positionalities, to consider how they directly benefit from wielding privilege in a predatory fashion, and to decenter themselves by simply sounding the imperative: “Mute your mic Karen!” (see fig. 1).²

Half a century prior to the ever-proliferating viral iterations of the Karen figure found in digital space, Black feminist literary luminary Paule Marshall presciently depicts a Karen figure through her character Harriet Shippen Amron in her 1969 novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Marshall’s novel offers a warning about white women’s unwillingness to reckon with their own implication in histories of racism and their outright refusal to name, decenter, and relinquish their privilege. Although it has been previously theorized that the relationship of the characters Merle Kinbona...