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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I'll make a few brief observations.

  1. These videos are mostly an American phenomenon. Attempts at blowing up a banal social interaction to a national scandal doesn't happen in Europe. I'm not talking about something going viral on social media because it's funny or whatever. I'm talking about a genuine witch-hunt, invariably on racial grounds. Sure, there's public shaming in Europe but it isn't extrapolated to the person's race like it is in America.

  2. The victims of these witch-hunts are almost always white. I don't think this is a coincidence. For the same reason, when mass shooters are non-white, media interest drops off. For this reason, I think it tells of a societal sickness in the US which is missing in Europe. It isn't just "obsession with race" but rather "obsession with white people", always in a negative way.

  3. Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.

Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.

Many people have observed that terms like "Karen" and "white women moment" let people get away with blatant sexism that would be otherwise considered unacceptable. While I think the woke movement has gone too far in general, I think it's a real thing that a vocal minority of people hold anger and bigotry towards women. And where for a little while that bigotry was unacceptable in public discourse, it's situationally acceptable again as long as it's against a white woman.

"Karen" works because it describes a real and common (and gendered, at least probabilisticly) phenomenon. Crying "sexism" isn't going to make it go away, nor should it. Even if a particular person was misidentified.

A phenomenon can be real but also lead to over generalization and excess cruelty because of bigotry. E.g if many HBD theorists are to be believed, black people have lower intelligence than white people on average, as southern racists in the 1800s believed. But southern racists used that to justify unjust cruelty. Similarly, the "Karen" is a real personality archetype among women, but some people use that to justify unjust (mostly online) cruelty towards women. Nowhere near the scale of chattel slavery, but the same principle holds imo.

E.g if many HBD theorists are to be believed, black people have lower intelligence than white people on average, as southern racists in the 1800s believed. But southern racists used that to justify unjust cruelty.

I rather think you have it backwards. They weren't thinking "Hey, these people are dumb, so it's good to be cruel to them". They thinking "Hey, we like being cruel to these people, they must be dumb and deserve it".

And the phenomenon is classist, not racist (although America is sufficiently enstupidated by the culture war that most people struggle to tell the difference). The original Karen meme was the "can I speak to your manager haircut" - at heart a Karen is someone who demands that entry-level workers acknowledge her as a social superior, and demands punishment if they don't. I agree that calling a middle-class black woman who pulls rank on white service workers a "Karen" is non-standard usage, but if the shoe fits...

Oprah Winfrey is a total Karen. So was that Smith College chick who called in a cancel mob on the cleaner.

at heart a Karen is someone who demands that entry-level workers acknowledge her as a social superior

The issue is that Karens don't realize themselves as social superiors and see themselves as socially inferior to entry level workers. No one who truly feels themselves above someone else treats them poorly, that's absurd and insane. Karens emerged because the social roles have become so blurred in modern America that no one realizes they are above the minimum wage employee, hence the entire phenomenon of Karens acting ridiculously.

Oprah Winfrey is a total Karen.

I don't know what you are referring to specifically with her but if you perceive her as a Karen in some instance I presume it's because she lacked the grace or perspective to acknowledge her social superiority as well

I was mostly thinking of the race row she kicked off when the sales staff in a Swiss luxury-goods store were insufficiently respectful. It was back in 2013 when the Great Awokening was just getting started, so the Swiss laughed it off.

Oh, I remember hearing about that. I just read about it here. It's really too vague for me to comment on because one person said one thing and another person claimed another, and retail is a weird power dynamic to begin with in all sorts of ways (not to mention the store could just have that bag on hand not to really sell to anyone, combined with the sales person perhaps not knowing who Oprah was), and besides that the client-customer relationship is different in Europe compared with America- indeed, it may have been out of respect for the customer that the salesperson didn't want to show her such an overpriced item when most people shouldn't really be spending thousands on purses anyway

But yeah, I'd say that was Karen-like behavior from Oprah borne out of a lack of grace and perspective from her position as an American billionaire interacting with a salesperson, for her to weaponize her status in that way is weird and also self serving for her in that she tried to garner sympathy from it

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