The Karen

This podcast contains explicit language.

So, just to start, can you tell me your name?

Well, my name is unfortunately Karen.

Karen Ruttner is an artist manager in the music business.

At the end of May, after I saw a pertinent tweet of hers, I reached out simply because her name is Karen.

When did it start to

become clear to you that there was something

going on with the name Karen?

I first started noticing it with that hideous haircut with the chunky highlights and people, you know, saying, oh, there's Karen demanding to speak to a manager.

And I want to see your manager, whoever's in charge, and I want the number of your corporate office.

And I want that young lady's name.

When it first started, it was pretty innocuous.

You know, it was like, you know, calling guys that punched the wall chet or something like that.

And then about, I don't know, it was like a week or two ago, I started seeing on Twitter the name Karen trending, Karen being a code word for racist white women.

There is an African-American man on second work.

He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.

I do not want to be in a category with a psycho like that.

I would say at least 10 different people have said something to me.

I was thinking of you today.

Or like, how are you feeling about this?

And it bugs you.

Of course, it bugs me.

It's embarrassing.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Every episode we take on a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

The Karen is a relatively new term for a particularly pernicious white woman, who has been described as the policewoman of all human behavior.

She's the type who belittles service employees demanding to speak to the manager who wants to personally mandate others' responses to the coronavirus and who, most of all, surveils people of color's every move, notoriously calling the cops on black people for having barbecues, selling water, birdwatching in Central Park, just for existing.

The white women who do these things, who have done these things, are, for the most part, not actually named Karen, but they're Karens nonetheless.

On today's episode, we're going to look at how the name Karen came to signify all of this.

The answer encompasses the terms' specific, relatively recent origins online, the crucible of the coronavirus, and a much longer history that involves a number of other names that black people have used to describe dangerous white women.

So, today, on to Kodarang, where does the Karen come from?

this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

If you are alive in America right now, you have likely heard a Karen in action.

Friends, look at the numbers and tell me why everybody's living in fear.

Tell me why we're putting these things on and not being able to breathe.

Calm down.

It's okay, I'm sorry.

He just apologizes.

It's my fault.

He apologized.

And you know what?

That didn't upset me.

But the bitch ass hoe.

Sorry.

She calling police on an eight-year-old little girl.

You can hide all you want.

The whole world gonna see you, boo.

Yeah, and illegally selling water without a permit on my property.

In that first video, a white woman is trying to police every single person dealing with the coronavirus.

In the second, one is scolding an immigrant cab driver.

And in the last, one is calling the cops on a little black girl for selling water.

This is just a tiny sampling of the hours and hours of Karen videos you can find online right now.

And though the widespread availability of videos like this is relatively new, the behavior they capture is not.

The Karen has been with us for a long time, even if she only recently got her name.

So that's where we're going to start with the Karens before the Karen.

There's a history in African-American culture of really thinking about the roles that white women have in racial oppression, systematic racial oppression.

Anne Charity Hudley is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

And so you can trace throughout black culture the use of these symbolic white names to describe these roles or these experiences that black people have with white women.

And this goes all the way back to the times of when people were enslaved, the use of the name Miss Ann.

Miss Ann is maybe the oldest of these names, of the proto-Karens, and it originally described the mothers, wives, daughters, sisters of slave owners.

But it's really particularly invested in watching and patrolling to make sure that enslaved people were doing the work they were supposed to do and then patrolling their entire being from like day and night.

Miss Anne stayed in use long after emancipation and up through the civil rights movement, and it had a male counterpart, Mr.

Charlie, which originally referred to a slave owner, but became slang for basically any white man.

Both Mr.

Charlie and Miss Ann were in-group terms that black people used with one another and that white people weren't always aware of.

You can see how this worked with Miss Anne, a song from Little Richard's self-titled 1956 album.

Supposedly, the Miss Ann in the title refers to a real white woman, Anne Johnson, who along with her husband took Little Richard in when he was just 14 and had been kicked out of his house.

But the song includes the lines, I want to hear, hear, hear Miss Anne, I want to hear her call my name, and I'm in love with Miss Anne.

And for a black artist to be singing about a Miss Anne, about a white woman, in this way in 1956, the year after Emmett Till was murdered after a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her, would only have been safe, possible, if the reference was largely going over white people's heads.

In the decades after Little Richard released this song, the term Miss Anne faded from the vernacular and another name with a related, though not identical connotation took its place.

Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt.

It is so big.

In 1992, with Sir Mixilot's hit, Baby Got Back, an ode to plump posteriors, the name Becky became widely known shorthand for a white girl lurking around black people and culture.

Even though, just decades before, Becky hadn't necessarily been white at all.

There's so many different songs in the history of black music about a Becky.

Dart Adams is a music historian and writer.

The Becky in these songs was usually black.

There's Led Belly.

He did a song called

back around 1935, he did a song called Becky Deemed She Was a Gambling Gal.

And Becky's supposed to be black in this song.

Becky

she wore a gambling gal.

Win all the money and she win it bell.

But in other songs back in like 1900s, 1920s, there were always songs about Becky, and Becky was always of a different ethnicity.

Often, Becky was Jewish, Becky being short for the Old Testament name, Rebecca.

There were lots of Beckies in early vaudeville recordings.

Fanny Bryce, the famous Jewish showgirl, sang Becky is back in the ballet in 1922.

That same year, Julian Rose released Becky the Spanish Dancer.

In this song, Becky isn't actually Spanish.

She's Jewish, but she's learning to dance like a Spanish dancer.

Becky, in other words, started out as an ethnic name, but over time, that association faded away.

Rebecca got more and more popular throughout the 20th century, becoming a top 20 name in the 1970s and 80s.

At the same time, coming out of the civil rights movement and the black power movement, black naming conventions were changing, and Rebecca, and so Becky became increasingly white.

So much so that by the 1990s, Becky could become the quintessential white girl name in Baby Got Back.

Even though, in a funny wrinkle, it's not actually Becky who's speaking in the song's intro.

I like big butts, and I cannot lie.

You other brother.

That's exactly where for me that started, right?

So you can imagine all the Becky dancing to the song.

And Charity Hudley again.

The Becky is exactly that type of girl who's

non-ironically dances committed and got back like flailing around, approximating black culture, black dance.

Like someone who used the word twerk a lot, like after she learned it from Miley Cyrus.

Exactly.

And thinks that that Miley Cyrus infinity.

Well, use me, use me, because you you ain't that average group.

I seen her dancing to hell with a romance and she's sweating.

Becky is not quite a Karen.

She's younger and she's more clueless, but she's not harmless either.

The Becky is a white girl who is racially obtuse, who doesn't get it.

And part of what she doesn't get is that just her presence in black spaces can be dangerous to black people, and particularly black men.

This more threatening aspect of the Becky would get a very public airing in another song.

This lyric from the Beyoncé song Sorry, off her 2016 album Lemonade, was widely understood to refer to the other woman in Beyoncé's marriage.

Though this woman was a woman of color herself, the lyric still accentuated the Becky's nefarious side.

A Becky is just more insistent on cultural appropriation of black people, particularly a narrative around black men, such that you may vilify black culture, but you may be attracted for some

exotication model, which still goes all the way back to slavery to black men.

So that's why you get Beyonce talking about Beckies with the good hair, right?

Because they have no interest and no cultural investment in blackness, but are fetishizing black men.

In the Beyoncé song, Becky is a menace in the private sphere, wrecking marriages.

But in April of 2018, she would become something even more dangerous.

A would-be killer who operates in public by making use of the violent power of the state.

In other words, a proto-Karen.

Yeah, I'd like to report that someone is illegally using a charcoal grill.

I'd like it to be dealt with immediately so that Cole don't bring more children and our city has to pay more taxes.

All right, and the person that's using the grill,

I need a description of them.

What race are they?

African American.

That's a clip from a 911 call placed by a white woman who for two hours harassed a black family picnicking and grilling in a park in Oakland, California, calling the police on them multiple times.

The woman who did this is named Jennifer Schulte, but she became widely known on the internet as Barbecue Becky.

An image of Schulte on her cell phone was photoshopped into a variety of settings, like the March on Washington, so that it looked like she was calling the cops on Martin Luther King Jr.

or Obama or the Jeffersons.

In another image, a picture of Schulte was accompanied by the text, hello, I'd like to report black people minding their own business.

I just was very fascinated with the BBQ Becky tweets.

April Williams is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the communications and media department and a fellow at Harvard.

Honestly, I thought they were hilarious.

I got lots of chuckles from them looking at it just sort of as like a casual Twitter user.

Well, I say casual, but also I research Twitter and social media, so nothing is ever terribly casual.

Since 2018, April has been studying the particular alliterative Twitter memes that BBQ Becky birthed.

She now has a data set of over 89,000 tweets, making fun of not just BBQ Becky, but also Permit Patty, a white woman who called the police on a black girl selling water, who you heard earlier in the episode, and corner store Caroline, a white woman who called the cops on a nine-year-old boy she falsely accused of groping her in a bodega, and golf cart Gail and Road Rage Randy, and so many more.

So with each new meme, most of the time it's a white woman who is using her power to sort of police black bodies in public spaces.

It wasn't just a meme to be funny, but people were actually

sort of extending the movement in a way, in particular the Black Lives Matter movement, because they were saying, look, these Karens are calling the police on black people.

No wonder Black people keep getting murdered by the police.

Naming and mocking and memeing these women and very occasional men may be funny, but it's not a joke.

It's calling attention to what is still happening and has been happening for centuries.

White women weaponizing their privilege and marshaling the power of the state to quote protect themselves and their preferences from people of color, even though it's the white women who represent the much more grievous and immediate threat.

That's the really important thing to understand about this type of meme.

The way less important part, one that's relevant to this particular podcast, is that through 2018 and 19, the women in these memes were not primarily being called karens barbecue becky was the first one who sort of started the trend and then from then on the subsequent women even though they were given a particular nickname like permit patty or bus breeder brenda for example um were still referred to as beckies so people would say oh we have another becky and it's permit patty right or we have another becky and it's bus bread or brenda so people were were calling them Beckies at the time.

And I think this shift from Becky to Karen is really interesting.

I do too.

And that's where I want to head next.

Imagine you could actually change fundamental law in this country.

What would you want?

Hey there, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Coast of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the Supreme Court and the law.

And you just heard from writer and historian Jill Lepore, our expert guest, on a recent episode of Amicus.

Jill provided the vital and timely reminder of the power and promise of constitutional amendment as laid out in her new book, We the People.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the Trump regime's lawlessness and horrified by the Supreme Court's complicity, have a listen to our episode, How to Fix Our Broken Constitution.

I think it will give you some much-needed hope and reminders.

The power to amend the Constitution comes from the people to Congress and then back to the people.

We're back with new episodes every Saturday.

That's amicus.

We'll see you there.

Hey, it's Mary Harris, host of Slate's daily news podcast, What Next?

This week, we're following the real-time collapse of public health in the U.S.

under Donald Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services.

One of RFK Jr.'s long-standing targets has been vaccines.

A porva Mandavili at the New York Times says, he's trying to make it difficult for big pharma to make them available at all.

Vaccines are not a moneymaker, and the only reason companies have stayed in the business is because of these protections, because of the guaranteed demand.

If those things go away, they have zero incentive to stay and continue to make vaccines.

Check out What Next, wherever you listen.

So, the pernicious and privileged white woman has gone by many different names over the years, but it's only recently that she's become known as a Karen.

And now, I want to get into how that happened.

Karen is a Danish shortening of the name Catherine.

It was a top 10 American girl's name for almost all of the 1950s and 60s, peaking at number three in 1965.

This puts Karens from the height of the name's popularity in their 50s now.

And just hearing the name, most Americans get that.

A name is handy as a shorthand because it brings the living, breathing person into view.

And it can also be handy because names tend to go in generations.

And so often the name immediately summons not only a type, but their age.

John McWhorter is a professor at Columbia and the host of the Slate Language Podcast, Lexicon Valley.

It's a very articulate articulate way of communicating.

You don't have to define it, even often you couldn't define it, and yet the two of you are talking about the same thing.

Say a name to someone and they will have a feeling about it, a vibe.

And that's fed by a lot of things.

Personal experience, knee-jerk judgments, an anthropological sense of its demographics, and pop culture.

And pop culture has been priming the Karen for years.

I had an epiphany, and here it is right here.

There is one person in every group of friends that nobody fucking likes.

This is a bit from the comedian Dane Cook's 2005 comedy special, Retaliation.

Example, Karen is always a douchebag.

Every group has a Karen and she's always a bag of douche.

When she's not around, you just look at each other and go, God, Karen, she's such a douchebag.

Until she walks up and then you're like, hey, what's up, Karen?

The Karen in this joke doesn't have any specific traits or any particular personality.

She just sucks.

If names are like a stew of associations, this Dane cook joke is a leading ingredient in the Karen stew.

Also in the stew, the Karen of Will and Grace, who is funny, but beyond entitled.

One of the lesser mean girls in Mean Girls, played by Amanda Sayfried.

Maybe even the way Ray Liota says Karen over and over in that one scene in Goodfellas.

We're all over the house.

Karen, that was worth $60,000.

I need that money.

That's all we got.

What was I supposed to do to you?

Karen, that's why they were in everything.

That's all the money that we had, Karen.

And then then into all of this plops one more Karen.

So on Reddit, I want to say around three to four years ago, you had a user.

Asia Romano is a digital culture reporter for Vox.

He actually had the now deleted user account, fuck underscore you underscore Karen.

So a Reddit user, fuck you, Karen, basically made his entire account about

shitting on his ex-wife named Karen.

And he kind of got to be known for it.

And he got to be known for posting these really long, elaborate, brutally angry stories about Karen.

The original posts along with the account have been deleted, but for a couple years, this user would pop up in various subreddits, the term for the themed discussion boards that make up Reddit, and go on in passionate, over-the-top, performative harangues about his supposed, supposedly awful ex-wife.

These posts turned into what Asia calls Reddit lore.

Because they became part of Reddit lore, Reddit did what it often does.

Another Reddit user made a subreddit devoted to just this guy,

sort of as an in-joke on the site.

And so he made the subreddit, Fuck You Karen.

The subreddit became a place where Reddit users shared memes and riffs and jokes about the Karen, lampooning her and in the process, fleshing her out.

I want to underscore that.

They weren't just sharing examples of Karen behavior.

They were creating a character, a detailed in-joke with a very specific set of characteristics.

She's anti-vaxx.

She's usually a Christian.

She's always white.

She might have multiple kids.

And she's one of those parents that's super, super, super like hyper-intense about how her children need to be cared for.

You know, she's probably on a diet.

There's something, there's a strand of the meme that I don't really understand that's associated with her buying box wine.

This Karen, call her Reddit Karen, is a very specific variation on the Karen.

Karens now are not necessarily Christians or moms or conservative or anti-vax or into drinking box wine, but the version of the Karen developed on Reddit was all of those things.

Coming as it does out of a subreddit based on a man's rants about his ex-wife, there was a real misogynistic streak to this characterization.

But the subreddit also did hone in one detail at a time on an idea of the Karen as a suburban, affluent white mother narcissistically ensconced in her own privilege.

And oddly enough, you can see that really clearly in her most notorious trait, her haircut.

Remember what Karen Ruttner, who I spoke with at the beginning of this episode, said?

That hideous haircut with the chunky highlights.

So the Karen's haircut is basically a reverse mullet, softening in the front, but all business in the back.

It's cropped short at the nape of the neck, but gets longer as you go up over the head until it asymmetrically parts at the crown, such that a chin-length chunk of blonde hair frames one side of the Karen's face.

Before working on this episode, I always thought of this haircut as the Kate Goslin haircut.

Kate Gosselin was the star of John and Kate Plus Eight, TLC's hit reality show that started airing in 2007 about suburban parents raising eight children.

The show became tabloid fodder and turned Kate into a kind of icon of proto-Karen-ness.

Literally, you candid it to a kid to hand out without wrapping it in foils.

It's not a big big deal.

Why are you letting them eat our lunch at this hour?

To this day, she is one of the default images of the Karen.

Like, if you Google Karen, Kate Goslin shows up, in part because of the haircut.

Anyway, in 2014, seven years after John and Kate Plus8 began airing on TLC and four years before the founding of the Fuck You Karen subreddit, a picture of a woman sporting this haircut was posted to Reddit with the text, the Can I Speak to a Manager haircut?

Immediately, it became a a thing.

But it wasn't a thing associated with a Karen yet because it predated the fuck you Karen subreddit.

But in 2018, the two became connected when some screenshots of the haircut were shared there.

And lo and behold, the Can I Speak to Your Manager haircut became the official haircut of the Reddit Karen.

It's like when you, I don't know, like when you put two things together in a game and they snap.

You know, it's like that, that idea of like instant magnetic, these things go together.

Now Karen is the one with with the can I speak, the manager haircut, because of course, she is

as the Reddit Karen began to percolate out to other social media platforms.

She lost some of her Reddit associations.

Some people on Twitter quickly began to see the Karen pretty much exactly the way we understand her now, and that has nothing to do with Boxwine.

But as she spread, the Karen did stay associated with the haircut and even more so with her entitled Speak to the Manager tendencies.

The idea of them, of the Karen torturing retail workers,

being overly specific in their treatment of retail workers in order to dehumanize them and demean them is a huge, huge part of this because I think it's one that is so relatable to so many people who have had blue-collar jobs and have worked those, have had those experiences.

The Reddit Karen's treatment of retail workers is the most damning and far-reaching thing about her.

It speaks to her deep and nasty entitlement.

But it also means that this version of the Karen was not primarily known as a person practicing racism.

It's not that the Reddit Karen wasn't racialized.

She was.

She's always white, but she worked her privilege and entitlement on anyone in the service industry, other white people included.

Racism might be inherent in her, but it's not her primary attribute.

So a Reddit Karen shares a lot of qualities with a fully racist Karen.

Both are entitled, cruel, and prone to calling the authorities.

They are not quite the same.

The idea of Karen originally was that she was sort of self-contained and would she might come to your store and bother you and ruin your day.

But now she's being seen as the person who could get you killed.

And one of the things that transformed the Karen from the former to the latter is COVID-19.

Hey, it's Dan Coyce from Slate.

I made a new word game, and I hope you'll come try it out.

It's called Pears,

like the fruit pears.

I wanted to make a word game that rewards not only random-ass Scrabble words, but the fun words that we use in our real lives: tankini, dillweed, gloopy, twink.

We'll post a new game every day, and your job is to make as many words as you can, to find great pear words, and of course, to beat your friends.

If that sounds like you're kind of fun, head to slate.com/slash games to find pears today.

That's slate.com/slash games and look for pears.

Even if you are trying to avoid watching the video of Charlie Kirk's shooting, social media makes it really hard.

And it's not like it's some crazy niche thing where you have to go and, you know, find a snuff film somewhere.

It's actually on the biggest social media platforms in the world, which is kind of crazy.

Now that platforms have essentially ditched content moderation, is this our future?

There's probably never been a time in human history where you had so much extremely graphic, violent imagery that not only was available to you at the drop of a hat, but also that in some cases, whether you wanted it or not, might end up showing up in front of you.

I'm Lizzie O'Leary.

Listen to my conversation with Craig Silverman, one of the smartest journalists thinking about the internet, on Friday's What Next TV Derever You get your podcasts.

So the way I've been thinking about it, I think the reason why Karen is having a moment is because we were seeing a lot of white entitlement in the age of COVID.

April Williams again.

I don't know if you all have seen the meme that says like, Karen wants to speak to the manager of coronavirus.

She wants the country to be reopened.

in the months since mid-march 2020 when america began shutting down to contend with covet there has been a seemingly endless stream of white people trying to enforce their own personal set of rules y'all karen is showing out in trader joe's she does not have on a mask and somebody said you leave

and she is having it up While most of these Karens have been aggressively lax and skeptical about public health protections, like the woman in Tennessee who brandished a sign saying, sacrifice the weak, reopen Tennessee.

Some have been overly strict.

Ready called the neighborhood watch on anyone not wearing a mask.

That anyone, more often than not, being a person of color.

All of these COVID Karens were more than just a scourge to service workers, though.

They were a problem for everyone and they weren't just ruining people's days.

They were potentially endangering and trying to control their lives.

Coronavirus, in other words, took the Reddit Karen and expanded her scope, her habitat, her notoriety, and her villainy.

For many white people, COVID Karen was a kind of crash course in the Karen, one they only undertook as they realized the Karen also posed a threat to them.

But once they were attending to the type, even they could be made to see that the Karen was a far bigger problem for people of color.

Which brings us to the incident on May 25th, 2020, when the Karen as we now know her, racist Karen, fully explodes into the mainstream consciousness.

Please don't come close to me.

Please, please call the cops.

Please call the cops.

I'm going to tell them there's an African-American man threatening my life.

Please tell them whatever you like.

That's a snippet of a video recorded by Christopher Cooper, a black man who was birdwatching in Central Park, when he asked a white woman named Amy Cooper to leash her dog, and she called the police on him.

The video was posted to Twitter by Christopher Cooper's sister, along with the following text.

Oh, when Karens take a walk with their dogs and someone like my brother, an avid birder, politely asks her her to put her dog on the leash.

This video, just the latest to show white people using the police as a weapon, became a huge news story.

And Amy Cooper became widely known as the Central Park Karen.

The Central Park Karen was named by black Twitter, working off Christopher Cooper's sister's initial tweet.

As a nickname, it's almost in the style of BBQ Becky or Permit Patty, but it's not quite because it's not exactly alliterative.

That would be something more like Central Park Cynthia or Dog Walking Debbie.

But at this point, mid-COVID, with Karen's so much in the zeitgeist, you just had to call a Karen a Karen.

And the epithet pulled everything together.

Central Park Karen is when the entitlement of the Can I Speak to Your Manager Karen and COVID Karen is explicitly connected to the racial violence of calling the authorities.

Its arrival, just the day before the nationwide protests sparked by George Floyd's death, began in Minneapolis, further underscored what was at stake when a Karen called the cops.

At this point, the dominant feature of the Karen became that of racial oppressor.

And with that, the modern Karen, the Karen as we now know her, had arrived.

But that's not all there is to the Karen.

Working on this episode, there were new pieces of Karen news every single day.

There were endless examples of escalating Karen behavior, like a white couple, known on Twitter as Karen and Ken, standing barefoot in front of their mansion, pointing guns at protesters, and a woman in Michigan who pulled a gun on a black woman in a parking lot.

Amy Cooper lost her job and was charged with filing a false report.

A potential law was introduced in San Francisco outlawing racially motivated 911 calls called the Karen Act, which starts with a C and stands for caution against racially exploitative non-emergencies.

And that's the concrete stuff.

There have also been so many arguments about the term.

Is it too cute?

Is it a slur?

Is it misogynist?

What about all the Karens who aren't white ladies?

I mean, call a Karen a Karen, if you will, but let's be careful we're not fighting racism with sexism.

This guy, he's a Karen.

That's from a segment that aired on the CBS Sunday morning show at the end of June.

And first, I want to say that in a racial context, there are some very concrete reasons that we don't really have a word for male Karens.

though Twitter is trying.

As Ann Charity Hudley pointed out to me, white women are the social workers and teachers and neighbors and shoppers that are typically in a position to surveil black people in the first place.

Meanwhile, as April Williams said, men have been socialized not to complain, not to call the cops, and barring that, to take matters into their own hands.

But the other thing I want to say is that when I see some of the quibbling and griping about Karen, I'm reminded of that moment right after Trump's election when there were all these pieces based on the fact that a majority of white women had voted for him with headlines like, What is wrong with white women?

and white women sold out the world.

As a white woman who did not vote for Donald Trump, I remember having this little twinge, but not all white women twinge, or I just didn't want to be lumped in with this group.

But this feeling of being lumped in, of being misjudged, of not being seen as an individual, of being equated to and held accountable for people you don't know, who may or may not be anything like you besides some brute demographic details, is an experience so many Americans have so much more frequently for so many less legitimate reasons and to so much more damaging and consequential effect than a straight white woman like me.

And for an example of all of this, I want to turn to one more name.

One white people have applied to black women.

I want to talk to you, supervisor.

I am my supervisor.

Yeah, what is your name?

Shaniqua Johnson.

Shanique, what a big fucking surprise that is.

That's a clip from the movie Crash, the infamously bad Oscar-winning ensemble film about racism from 2004.

Matt Dylan co-starred as the man you just heard, a racist cop, and the reaction to the name Shaniqua is supposed to be a shorthand for his bigotry.

Distinctively black names have existed since the 19th century and enslavement, but the names that were distinctively black back then, biblical names like Isaiah, and names related to enslavement and emancipation, like Freeman and Master, are really different from the ones that are distinctive now.

Those names, which include names like Shaniqua, began to appear in the 1960s and 70s as an expression of black cultural empowerment.

Black people were asserting a new cultural identity, one that was less tied to Eurocentrism and enslavement.

But these names, given to get some distance from racist white culture, had been effectively punished by white culture for that difference.

And you can see that with Shaniqua, which cracked the top 500 most popular names in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has often been used as a straight-up racist insult.

Trayvon Logan is a professor of economics at Ohio State University, and he's one of the authors of the study about the long history of distinctively black names that I paraphrased a minute ago.

Yeah, so these names like Shiniqua have a linguistic structure, which is specific to these new names that are popular among African Americans.

You'll remember the very popular character on the Martin TV show.

Trayvon is referring here to Shanene, the neighbor on Martin Lawrence's TV show Martin, who was also played by Martin Lawrence.

What do you want, Shanane?

Oh my goodness, if it isn't Little Miss Attitude,

why are you always over?

There's also a class dimension to this as well.

And a Shiniqua, a Shanane is a working class

African-American woman.

So when I hear people use these names in pejoratives, they're invoking a lot of things that are consistent with,

welfare queens and other sorts of negative stereotypes of African-American women that combine race, class, and gender.

You can hear a white man who is trolling Black Lives Matter outside the 2016 Republican National Convention using Shaniqua to imply all of these things when he hurls it at a black woman who has taken issue with his racism.

Calm down, Shaniqua.

Calm down, fatuit.

You know what?

We need some order out here, TD.

This sort of incident is just the beginning when it comes to the racism directed at black names.

The most famous study documenting this was done by Marion Bertrand and Sindil Mulanathan out of Harvard, in which they submitted job applications with both statistically white names like Emily and Greg and statistically black names like Lakeisha and Jamal.

They found that resumes attached to the white names were called back 50% more often and were the equivalent of eight years of work experience.

Or to put it the other way, having a black name was the equivalent of having eight years of work experience, just disregarded.

And this is only the most well-known study like this.

So, a very interesting study by Genia Francis, who is at UMass Boston, looked at whether guidance counselors recommend AP calculus to students.

And what they found was when they have a black female name, the guidance counselors are the least likely to recommend black girls for AP calculus just based upon their name.

Having certain names in this country comes with real concrete and punitive consequences, far beyond just being made fun of, which is pretty much all that's happening to Karens right now.

And if even that seems painful to some people, that's kind of the point.

The Karen is supposed to hurt because that's what she does to others.

As much as we joke about her, the things she does that make her a Karen can be lethal.

That's why black people have always given this type of woman a code name because they needed to talk about the specific threat she presents to black life.

What's really different about the Karen is that now white people know this code too.

That's the change this episode is really tracing.

The Karen has been here all along, but it's only recently that many white people are beginning to recognize her and to take seriously what it means for black people to encounter her.

So instead of trying to shrug her off, to brush her aside, to get past her, instead of focusing on how the term can be misused or trying to pass the blame or asking why white men aren't being called out to, make sure you're not being a Karen and that no one else is either.

Because that is the only way, whatever name she goes by, we're ever really going to be rid of her.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch.

Decodering is produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to Regina Bradley, Maria Konakova, Alicia Montgomery, Gabriel Roth, Danielle Hewitt, Christopher Johnson, June Thomas, Christian Caddo, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

See you next month.

Don't miss the EV lease incentive, ending soon.

And now, well-qualified current FCA lessees, get an ultra-low mileage lease on the 2025 Jeep Wrangler Sport S4xE for $189 a month for 24 months with $3,079 due at signing.

Tax, title, license extra.

No security deposit required.

Call 1-888-925-Jeep for details.

Requires dealer contribution and lease through Stellantis Financial.

Extra charge for miles over 10,000.

Current vehicle must be registered to consumer 30 days prior to lease.

Includes 7,500 EV cap cost reduction.

Not all customers will qualify.

Residency restrictions apply.

Take delivery by 9:30.

Jeep is a registered trademark.