Bold refers to countries, regions and territories in which the majority ethnic group is generally considered to be people of European descent. The Act was passed unanimously in October of that year, after which Williams noted “these memes are actually doing logical and political work of helping us get to legal changes”. In 2018 a former New York and New Jersey Port Authority police commissioner, Caren Turner, was filmed berating two Tenafly, New Jersey, police officers for pulling over a car in which her daughter was riding.
Education is highly respected in Karen culture. Children go to school from 5-20 years old, although some children do not start school until 10 years of age. During adolescence, some children must stay at home to take care of their younger siblings to allow their parents to work in the field. Sometimes the teenagers must work in the fields with their parents. School can get disrupted when armies invade villages and the people must flee for safety. There are no ceremonies to mark birthdays or rites of passage into adulthood.
Whitefish Karen coughed on a couple when they called her out for not wearing a mask inside a grocery store. Kroger Karen, named after the supermarket chain, blocked an African-American mother’s car so the woman couldn’t leave the market’s parking lot. San Francisco Karen sliding wooden fence gate called the police on a Filipino man stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on his own property. Hepatitis A, B, and C are common and people are aware of Hepatitis but there is little testing for it in the refugee camps and people don’t really understand the disease.
When a person dies, a feast is prepared and there is often chanting and drinking. Spirits are encouraged to leave the area rather than hang around the community. Ghost stories are related about deceased members of the community who have been offended and continue to haunt an area. Christianity was introduced to the Karen, and other ethnic groups located within Burma, during the early 18 th Century.
There’s a wide array of “white cop-caller nicknames” used in cases like Cooper’s, Schimkowitz said, where a white person calls the cops on a Black person or group of people out of entitlement. Also in 2018, memes about Karen being an ex-wife who wanted to take the kids in the divorce began circulating online, Know Your Meme said. “It’s a very easy, recognizable thing to meme,” Schimkowitz said, adding that just a name itself is hard to make memes out of, and the haircut imagery helped contribute to the Karen character. “All of these elements kind of blend together.”
The term was popularized on Black Twitter as a meme used to describe white women who “tattle on black kids’ lemonade stands” or who unleash the “violent history of white womanhood”. Bitch magazine described Karen as a term that originated with Black women but was co-opted by white men. In an article on high profile incidents in the U.S. of white women calling the police on Black people, The Guardian called 2020 “the year of Karen”.
