Women Named Karen Appear On Live Television Calling For End Of Stigma
Image via Shutterstock
If you’re a middle-aged white woman with strong opinions against face masks, weirdly get filmed in public all the time, and consider your magic words to be, “I’d like to speak to your manager,” congratulations—you fit every criteria there is to be a Karen. It doesn’t matter if your name is Karen.
The moniker has had a pretty bad rep of late. It typically refers to difficult and self-centered middle-aged women, who are oftentimes racist too. Unsurprisingly, many real Karens aren’t too pleased with the associations, and a group of them from the UK turned up on the Monday segment of ITV’s This Morning to plead for the end of the stereotyping.
During the livestream, the Karens stressed their belief that racist people should just be labeled as “racist.
One of the panelists, Karen Masters, also started a Change.org petition asking tabloids and other channels to “stop the use of ‘Karen’ to describe racist women.”
“My name is Karen, and I’ve had enough of my name and my Karen friends being used to describe racist women in the tabloids,” Masters wrote in her campaign. “This also applies to all other names like ‘Susan’ to be described as a collection of terrible people in the media. It’s unfair to use a name to describe a collection of women who are racist or not law-abiding.”
Masters also commented in the petition that “the irony is not lost” on her that, as a Karen, she was attempting something a Karen was expected to do. “I enjoy a laugh and have done so at some of the silly Karen memes and TikTok content,” she added. Thus far, the petition has amassed over 800 signatures.
On live television, Masters shared, “We’re labeled as racist, entitled, anti-maskers and we’re just not that sort of person. It’s totally unfair and we want the media and the tabloids and the papers to stop using our name to describe racist people. I think you should describe racist people as racist and not use our name.”
The group of women named Karen said that while they had taken the “Karen” jokes lightly and found them funny in the past, things took an extreme turn when their shared name became growingly attached to women going on racist rants in response to Black Lives Matter protests, drawing more hurtful and inaccurate portrayals from memes and the press.
'We're labelled as racist, entitled, anti-maskers and we're just not that type of person and it's just totally unfair!'
— This Morning (@thismorning) August 3, 2020
Three women called Karen tell us why they want people to stop using their name in a negative way.
Watch the #ThisMorning chat 👉 https://t.co/Q7IV48mXLV pic.twitter.com/R1xxYc1Qcg
[via Newsweek, cover image via Shutterstock]
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