The meme is therefore rooted in black American internet culture, says Attiah – an attempt to find humour in real-world racism and oppression.
The antagonist of one such clip, of a woman calling the police over a group of African American men having a barbecue in a park in Oakland, California, came to be known as BBQ Becky (another name applied to white women online). In 2018, it was among a handful of female names to become attached to a spate of viral videos showing white women racially targeting people of colour. It is that privilege that the meme sets out to skewer. “It has afforded me, I think, a certain privilege,” says Attiah. Her mother, who had immigrated from Nigeria, chose the name so that Attiah could “easily move around in a white-dominated world”. In 2018 there were just 468 baby Karens born. When Attiah was born in 1986, “Karen” was already in decline, having peaked in the US in 1965. “It was an unspoken thing, but Karen was a white, older lady’s name.” “Growing up as a kid in the 1990s, I remember people – particularly other black kids – being like, ‘You don’t look like a Karen,’” recalls Karen Attiah, an editor at the Washington Post. The choice of moniker has been linked to the 2004 film Mean Girls, where a character says, outraged: “Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask someone why they’re white” – a meme in and of itself.īut more likely, the name was chosen for its association with whiteness. “Whenever you want to signal that that character’s a Karen, you’ll just toss that haircut on,” says the editor-in-chief, Don Caldwell. Know Your Meme, a Wiki-style site that defines internet culture, added “Karen” last year as an extension of the “‘Can I speak to the manager’ haircut” meme, born of Black Twitter back in 2014. It’s supposed to be about people who want to speak to the manager.” “Anything you say, people can be like, ‘OK, well, whatever, KAREN’ – but that’s not even how the meme is supposed to be used. “I spend a lot of time on Twitter, so I find it rather annoying,” says Karen Geier, a writer and podcaster from Toronto. But as the meme has become more prominent in online discourse, its meaning has become confused, and criticism has been voiced that it is sexist – with real-life Karens caught in the crosshairs.
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