The Rank Bigotry of ‘Karen’-Shaming

By Wilfred Reilly

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

 

Earlier this month, we citizens saw another seemingly irrelevant story of local racial conflict trend nationwide.

 

A Caucasian New York City nurse/physician’s assistant, Sarah Comrie, found herself dubbed “Citi Bike Karen,” after a young black man alleged that she had tried to take one of the big-city rental bikes from him during a brief street scuffle. From what I can piece together of the teenager’s story, he claimed that he had paid for the bike and that an angry and exhausted Comrie — who was six months pregnant and had just completed a twelve-hour shift — attempted to jack it from him and a group of several of his friends.

 

This claim appears to have been simply believed verbatim, at face value. Following the release of a cellphone video depicting a heated confrontation between her and the group of teens — which included the use of epithets like “retarded” for Comrie, contact with her distended stomach, and her screaming for help — the PA was temporarily put on leave from her job at Bellevue Hospital, and pilloried in the press.

 

There’s a lot here. First and unsurprisingly, the initial narrative turned out to be complete BS. Within days of the conflict, Comrie and the lawyer she was forced to hire provided the New York Post and other Big Apple outlets with formal receipts showing, as the Post paraphrased, that “she was the one who purchased the [bicycle] at the center of the viral incident . . . [and] rented the bike first.” Possibly, the group of young men attempted to steal the thing from her, before passersby intervened, and the machine was locked back up. Or, as Bike Bro No. 1’s sister has passionately argued, there may simply have been a good-faith dispute here: A young rider who had just used one particular Citi Bike wanted to call “dibs” on it so that he could enjoy 45 more minutes of ride-time at a reduced rate. Arguments, I suspect, have broken out over far less than that in New York City — a town where a cab driver once screamed “Chicago sucks!!!” at me and dropped me off early after I told him where I was from. (He wouldn’t have dared tried pulling that in the Windy City.) In any case, if this even needs to be said, one pregnant lady did not strong-arm five young men.

 

Second, at a deeper level, it was an absurd act of sensationalism and narrative compliance for Gotham and even national media to pretend that this almost certainly had happened. Has there been one case in recent memory of a heavily pregnant yuppie white woman robbing a bunch of streetwise young men, of any ethnicity? (I eagerly await your submissions to Wilfred.reilly@kysu.edu.) And, more troublingly, the decision to run hard with this story did not exactly stand alone.

 

By this point, we must all have noticed that the usual hunger of the press for edgy man-bites-dog stories is amplified 100x in cases of racial and ethnic conflict — especially when these can be presented in terms of “white” abuse of blacks. Take race as a catalytic element away from the Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely, “Central Park Dog Gate,” and even George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin cases, and we can say with near-certainty that none of them would have been more than local items in the police blotter. With no sarcasm: How much better would American race relations be today had that remained the case — across the matters just cited and so many others?

 

The plain reality that the mass media regularly construct martyrs out of people involved in day-to-day scuffles (if they have the right demographic profile) highlights yet another key fact about the Citi Bike case: The nurse and expecting mother in fact did nothing wrong here at all — and the attacks leveled at her reflect some distinctly sexist ideas we need to put to bed. The main criticisms of Sarah Comrie from “pro-black” outlets such as the Grio, which is still attacking her while claiming that it was “not about the bike,” are that she acted as a “Karen” and weaponized her “white woman tears.”

 

It’s worth breaking down exactly what this means. What Comrie’s critics are objecting to is the fact that she did not immediately submit to her opponents. Being a “Karen,” in this context, meant not giving up the bike that she paid for, and engaging in “call the manager”–style behavior by pulling in male citizens to help her out. Her “white lady tears” literally just refer to the fact that she was weeping, as an exhausted woman involved in an ugly argument.

 

Why, exactly, would someone have even a theoretical ethical problem with a fellow human being doing either of those things? With no humor intended: because Emmett Till was once lynched. Basically, the “woke” claim is that white women should control their behavior even during male-initiated conflicts — because crying white women have caused harm to men and especially to black men in the past. The Grio piece says this very explicitly: “This was a dispute over a rental bike . . . but she escalated it in a way that could have caused harm to these young Black men, and we cannot lose sight of that.”

 

The same argument has been made over and over in the recent past. Despite his own insanely creepy behavior (“Then I’ll do what I want . . . and you won’t like it . . .”), bird-watcher Christian Cooper famously described his sparring partner Amy Cooper’s threat to call the cops on a black man as well over the line following their own New York City tête-à-tête.

 

The electronic streets apparently agreed: Female Cooper was fired and even had her dog repossessed following the viral argument, while male Cooper went on to significant success and now hosts the National Geographic show Extraordinary Birder.

 

“Trans women” now often make similar claims — violently shutting down events for female speakers such as Britain’s Posie Parker while simultaneously declaring that women’s beloved voices have been weaponized against a still more vulnerable minority: themselves. Enough: This is all absurd. Mark me down as a Karen Respecter.

 

Obviously, the era of lynching was a shameful and ugly one. But there has not been a recorded lynching in the United States since 1964 (according to the archives of the historically black Tuskegee Institute). Today, black Americans commit crimes against white Americans significantly more often than the reverse; men offend against women something like ten times more than vice versa.

 

In this real world, it is insanely unrealistic to say that members of some groups are not merely forbidden to use a few Magic Words, but also to engage in specific common behaviors . . . while everyone else can do these things at will. It is hilariously archetypal prejudice to say that only women — or, yes, only white ladies — become villains when they stand up for themselves and ask to talk to a boss, or get upset and yell during an argument.

 

Some of the “Karen” noise strikes me as sexism — today, I notice that you can say almost any damned thing about women if you add a short modifier like “white” or “cis” — and some of it as racism, but none of it as good. Only a truly broken society would look at a weeping pregnant woman arguing with five laughing men and think: “Why is she attacking them?” We have our flaws, in the U.S.A. of 2023, but let’s not go there.