I have rewritten this post three times. 

Originally, it was entitled “Rehumanizing Karen.”  I ran it by my smart, Gen Z, teen-aged kids and found that it said things I did not wish to say, so I revised it, made it more nuanced, and peppered it generously with disclaimers.  Then I ran it by my brilliant friend who is a college professor and found that no matter how I parsed the words, the act of singling “Karen” out for humanization, at this point in our shared history, even as a proxy for a broader, contextual conversation, was itself a communication.  It said, “this is still Karen’s hour, still the white person’s time,” even in a moment when centuries of pain are being lanced, exposed, and hopefully beginning the long process of healing.  The act of rehumanizing her said that, all by itself.

Perhaps that’s why there are so few in our national discourse who are coming to Karen’s defense.  She is widely lampooned and reviled, with not a redeeming, humanizing trait to be found.  There are plenty of articles interviewing unfortunate subjects of the name itself — “what does it feel like to a Karen, now?”  And it has been argued that the meme is more social commentary than stereotype. 

Yet the fact remains that, like all memes, “Karen” has morphed beyond its original boundaries and is exploited to a multiplicity of ends.  Stereotyping, reducing a person to a few salient traits, inherently objectifies, and therefore dehumanizes its subject.  Therefore, Karen is still an effective proxy for cultural self-examination, though I have removed her from center stage.  I fully acknowledge that we find ourselves, finally, it seems, entering into a period of restorative justice with all that entails.  Truth telling.  Reconciliation.  Structural, cultural and institutional reformation.  We have a violent past.  Slavery was violent.  Its repercussions are real.  They are with us today, and they are imbedded in every aspect of our culture. By bringing Karen forward, I risk undermining the full realization of those repercussions.  We may be tempted to say to ourselves, “well, Karen is human too.  All lives matter.”  And that becomes our ticket to dissociate, once again, from our violent past. 

But I also see that humanizing Karen is the new minority view, and along with universal empowerment, the embrace of minority expression is part of the liberal ethos.  We can only really learn about humanization by approaching both perpetrator and victim, by seeing the relationship between the two, and by recognizing that they are enmeshed in a broader narrative that is — like all things — given by context. 

And so, to begin:

hu·man·ize

/ˈ(h)yo͞oməˌnīz/

1. make (something) more humane or civilized.

2. give (something) a human character.

It sounds simple on paper.  Why does our first, childhood lesson, the Golden Rule, still plague us on our deathbed?  So simple.  So hard. 

We live in a time when civility in public discourse is at an all-time low, and yet our scrutiny of certain terminology has never been greater.  This in only one instance of “dissonance.”  Contrast, for instance, the empowerment of minority voices against the silencing of “establishment” views.  Note that I point only to the contrast — I do not say it is wrong, that it has no justification or purpose within the context of our broader evolution.  I only assert that the dissonance is there, worth recognizing so that one can be responsible for the dangers inherent in applying different standards.  If being “liberal” is not just established by a constituency, by being for some people more than others, if it is established by an ethos or a set of principles, then it is perilous to forget those principles, or to fail to universally apply them, particularly when you need them most.  Particularly when you don’t want them.  And if we pull back the lens far enough, if we consider stereotyping structurally, stripped of its content, it reveals to us our own inauthenticity.  That is a valuable exercise, regardless of conclusions to be drawn. 

 “Karen (pejorative)” has acquired its own Wikipedia entry, an ignominious distinction:

Karen is a pejorative term used in the United States and other English -speaking countries for a woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is appropriate or necessary.  A common stereotype is that of a white woman who uses her privilege to demand her own way at the expense of others. Depictions also include demanding to “speak to the manager,” anti-vaccination beliefs (sometimes in favor of the unproven medical use of essential oils ), being racist , or sporting a particular bob cut hairstyle. As of 2020, the term was increasingly being used as a general-purpose term of disapproval for middle-aged white women.

Sort of a grab-bag.  Stereotypes are the original memes, long before the digital age, valuable for expediency, not precision.  They can easily shift with the times, aggregating and shedding qualities as needed.  The Karen stereotype goes back decades, even centuries.  As Wikipedia tells me,  “[…] before there were Karens and Beckys, there was Miss Ann, [who] was a Jim Crow-era cheeky, in-group shorthand amongst black people for white people who used their privilege as a weapon.”

Stereotypes tell us both about their object and their source.  They are a nexus of information.  We can see in Karen’s contours a multitude of individual, flesh and blood women, down the long years, specimens of the type who wielded their cultural power with unconscious ease.  That’s the nature of entitlement; it is taken for granted.  We can sense the swallowed outrage of Karen’s historical victims, those who have borne their subjugation through resort to language used among peers, often in humor, as a means of reclaiming lost power. And, now, as the landscape shifts, Karen comes out of the shadows, and its open season. 

Stereotypes.  What do we make of them?  They are agents of cultural power, used to both arm and disarm, to empower and disempower, and yet they do not do so equally.  Perpetrators stereotype their victims to dehumanize them, enabling violence; victims of cultural or physical violence stereotype in an effort to rehumanize themselves.  How can we compare the two?  And yet, any stereotype remains, by design, dualistic, an expression of “Us vs. Them,” and a purveyor of a status quo in which known battle lines are drawn — even as those battle lines shift, altering the stereotypes themselves in a dynamic process.  They act as digital prisms of analog experience by distilling, and distorting, the aggregate experience of communities over time: they have flat surfaces but surprising depth.  Power accrues to wielder of the term, away from its object, and therefore it is better to sling mud than you find yourself besmirched.

Or is it?  Who gets dehumanized?

I have long had a fascination with Nazis, psychopaths and other perpetrators of horrific deeds.  My interest is not sensationalist in nature.  I’m impressionable and will spend years regretting knowledge I have acquired that disturbs me, things seen that cannot be then unseen.  Still, I wrangle over their awful deeds in my mind, trying to understand how such people could come to perform such acts, and why.  How does one live in such a reality, and at what cost?  And I do this from some instinctual certainty that our humanity is inextricable, linked by a kind of frontier.  When I reach the end of what I can humanize in them, I will have found the limits of my own humanity.  My ability to humanize others is the agent, and extent, of my own humanity. 

This is different than condoning: we are not justifying hate.  To humanize a perpetrator is to attempt to step into their shoes and encounter the horror of their existence. 

This brings one into contact with the second aspect of inextricability.  What we inflict on others, we inflict on ourselves.  How does the perpetrator come to perform horrific acts?  By dehumanizing the victim.  And because the extent of one’s humanity it bounded by one’s humanization of others, the perpetrator abrogates his or her own humanity in direct proportion.  This is a truth established by logic, but equally apparent through intuition or observation.  The perpetrator must either disassociate from the violence or justify it, and either choice engenders division within the self, with the accompanying loss of love, accord, joy, fulfillment, and all the other hallmarks of a humane existence. 

So, back to stereotypes. 

Let me say again, not all stereotypes are created equal.  In fact, they are created so unequally — in content, purpose and effect — as to seem dissimilar in nature.  To disregard these distinctions is to compound their dehumanizing effect. And yet, they are bound together by dint of universally dehumanizing in two respects: all stereotypes dehumanize, and they dehumanize both the wielder of the term, and its object.   

Karen is generally used to critique, shame, and rectify racist and elitist behavior, to make it visible and brand it as socially unacceptable within a new framework that acknowledges the worth of all humans equally.  And for that narrow purpose, it works.  And yet, one need only hop on the internet to see that self-scrutiny in the use of the Karen meme is largely absent. Consider the transgender “Karen,” born “Kevin,” who took the name before it was a meme:

In her view, it’s a misogynist putdown, used to shut up women, especially on social media or in mainstream media comment sections.  “They treat me like a woman and unfortunately, being a woman on the internet is not a very pleasant thing,” said Woolley. “I find myself monitoring myself and checking myself. Because more often than not, there will be some douche-nozzle out there that will totally just be, ‘OK, Karen’ and dismiss what I have to say. And it’s getting worse,” she said. 

www.cbc.ca, “New Brunswick Karens recoil from social media stereotypes.”

There is also dissonance in how we contextualize Karen’s behavior, or refuse to do so.  For though we are likely to place the behavior of a minority offender, perhaps even the perpetrator of a violent crime, in the context of their upbringing, their relative disadvantages, and to abrogate their personal responsibility proportionately, we resist seeing Karen also as a “victim” of her upbringing.  Again, this is different than condoning her behavior, just as no one would condone gang violence by means of acknowledging the environment that breeds it.  But we are pulling back the lens as an exercise to illuminate double standards.  And from that distance, we can see that we do not afford the Karens of the world, the actual human beings behind the name and the misconduct, the same “humanizing” recognition of how they have been shaped by their environment.

She is not one of our constituents, and that means that being liberal is about belonging to a club, after all. On the right, there are few airs of universiality, which is why we liberals enjoy our own unique brand of hypocrisy. We stand for universiality in principle, but not always in practice. The whiff of hypocrisy suggests two things.  First, that the dehumanizing nature of the stereotype is itself antithetical to the liberal ethos of universal empowerment.  And second, that our intense scrutiny does not extend to all language and all groups: it is selective and therefore as subject to abuse as any exigency. 

But perhaps the stereotype’s true flaw is this: its power is illusory.  It cannot produce a real transformation in human relations, for it is constructed from the politics of division.  In the words of The Who, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  Transformation is only, and always, produced by a shift in context, not by the creation of new content to fit an old paradigm.  Content matters.  I will say a third time, the stereotype used to dehumanize the victim of violence differs so greatly from that used to reclaim lost power that they are almost unrecognizable as kin.  Each term tells us a unique story, one that we need to hear.  Content is to context as the terrain is to the map: one must know the terrain in order to read the map, and one must know the map it one is ever to set it aside.  But there are dangers implicit in exploring the terrain, pitfalls, and the tendency to mistake one’s view for the whole horizon. 

Who maps the terrain, and what are the measures — or are they supplied ad hoc, in order to achieve individual objectives?  How do we define marginalization?  Does it include economic, cultural, or educational stigma?  Just as an exercise, consider the term “white trash” or the stereotypes drawn in old episodes of “Hee Haw” or “The Beverly Hillbillies?”  How about an inbreeding joke or two?  Do these inspire outrage?  Why, or why not?  One might posit that some of the backlash against the “elite left,” against science and the “expert” and even fact itself, is a response to stereotypes of ignorance, backwardness and poverty — a response expressed sometimes as a conscious, defiant embrace of “ignorance,” a repudiation of the orthodoxy from which they have been excluded, and a rejection of its underpinnings.  And what about the term “Karen,” co-opted and then wielded by a working class white, male?  Has the oppressor now become the oppressed, rendering the term offensive?  Is that our test for political correctness?

There are more questions than answers.  But this much seems clear: if we cannot be bothered to systematically explore the terrain, how can we understand the map that describes its contours, let alone reinvent the landscape?  We risk becoming tone-deaf to our own rhetoric.  We gather pitchforks and torches and assemble by moonlight, but who is the ogre?  And if we kill it, have we not become what we feared?  Have we learned nothing from the Hitlers of the world, that as we treat others, so we treat ourselves? 

Which brings us full circle to my new title.  Humanization… period? 

For it seems very hard for us to do.  Consider my argument here, not as an apologetic for misrule, but as a plea for critical thinking.  The Golden Rule is the Golden Rule.  It is universal, or it is nothing.  This is structure.  It is principle.  We have pulled back the lens from the real, incredibly important consequences of our shared history as an exercise.  We have exited the narrative to look at the story.  Can we examine our own tendency to dehumanize as enthusiastically as we bemoan the abuse of others?  Do we hold our own language, our conduct, our intent to the same standard we demand of others?  Isn’t all examination, in the end, self-examination?  Who are we unwilling to humanize, and what does that tell us about ourselves?

Can we trot out the Golden Rule from the nursery and into the legislature, the newsroom, and the family den?

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  So simple.  So hard.