"How the 'Karen Meme' Confronts the Violent History of White Womanhood"

[Igneococcus]

This just popped up as a recomendation in Firefox when I open a new tab. I can't fully read it right now because I'm in a meeting any moment now (someone's still sorting out techinical issues), but a first quick scan makes me go "WTF" :

time.com/5857023/karen-meme-history-meaning/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

*It’s very interesting. However, it calls the test into question as all women seem to be biased against women when using the implicit bias test. I would actually think that is correct, and is essentially something others have argued here. There isn’t a real ‘sisterhood’, we are are divided in a way men are not. There aren’t discussions between men judging each other for their choices in bringing up children, they are not judged for being of child bearing age (their entire adulthood) etc...
If anything this article (especially the inclusion of the evidence showing all women are at least some part biased against women) cements my view that the implicit bias test does actually show bias and can predict where someone is likely to behave in a biased way. *

I think what it seemed to show is that black women were more positively biased toward white women than black women, not women in general.

Possibly you could justify that through some self-hatred explanation, but it's not obviously true.

The other problem was there is really no way to test whether the test itself is accurate - how would you know? If it says I am strongly biased toward white men, how would you falsify that? Especially as the results seem to have little or no correlation with people's behaviour.

I don't think the really have a clue what the results of this test show, if anything.

I suspect that hug is not a racist term as such anywhere. My guess is that it's been applied according to the meaning, to people like muggers or gang members or underworld debt collectors.

If however you live in a place where the demographics mean that a largish proportion of those people are black, it may create an impression that the word is being used racially. Maybe it would begin to be used that way in that place, too but usually it does still retain it's general meaning.

This is a problem though with disallowing word associations - you can't prevent them from occurring but it really isn't much indication of the speaker being racist.

@TheRealMcKenna

Something weird is going on with the word ‘thug’....

Do a google image search for ‘thug’
Do a google image search for ‘drunk thug’
Do a google image search for ‘violent thug’
Do a google image search for ‘drug thug’

What the hell is google doing to our brains?

That's a bit odd.

@TheRealMcKenna

Something weird is going on with the word ‘thug’....

Do a google image search for ‘thug’
Do a google image search for ‘drunk thug’
Do a google image search for ‘violent thug’
Do a google image search for ‘drug thug’

What the hell is google doing to our brains?

“Violent thug” gives me lots of white men.

“Thug” on its own, black American rappers. Presumably famous.

@SoVeryLost
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8441579/amp/Ex-policeman-thug-carried-safety-BLM-protester-used-work-undercover-hooligan.html

(It’s even in the url)

@peadarm

“ You don’t tend to see Thug being used for white violent criminals for instance, it is almost exclusively used against people of colour.”

That may well be true in the USA, but it really hasn’t been the case in the UK. (Or at least not yet.)

A recent example was the ex-cop rescued by the BLM steward - even the Daily Mail referred to him as a “thug”.

It is the politicians in the US who turned thug into a racist slur in the eighties. They have recently begun to apply it to any group of persons who exercise their 1st amendment rights to peacefully assemble. Doesn't make them one whit less racist. The frat boys who rage after sports, setting cars on fire and destroying neighborhoods are rarely ever referred to as thugs, because they are white I suppose.

We're not American.

The word thug does not have racist connotations here.

I am really tired of USA posters coming to a website in a different country and telling us off about our language.

I can easily accept that words have different meanings/ connotations in different countries. Why not vice versa???

To be honest I tend to associate thug with the (white) far right, but really any violent aggressive male would qualify regardless of skin colour. So it's not racist for me, nor do I think it largely has racist connotations in the UK.

As Shiny says, American English is different in many ways to British English. I don't think we need to change it to be in line with Americans, unless they are prepared to reciprocate in some things?

Part of the pleasure of talking with people who speak English differently in US UK and Oz is the comparisons and contrasts we indulge in sometimes.
I did not realize people disliked it so much.

"It pretty much just means "woman who's complaining about anything" ..." TheProdigalKittensReturn

Yes, I agree.

I think it is very much pathetic. It's something kids say too.

Im really interested if everyone here as offended by the shaniqua phrase and memes? Or are we only not cool about women being taken the piss out of if they’re white names?

The only people I have heard using these terms are defiantly racist people that I don't know. If you used them in my social circle, people would be pretty shocked and say that it was racist. By contrast, loads of people on my SM feeds etc. are using the "Karen" meme and nobody is criticising it.

I'm really not convinced that thug isn't used for the relevant sort of white individuals in the US.

I'm really not convinced that thug isn't used for the relevant sort of white individuals in the US

This BBC article refers to Obama using it and being criticised for it.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-32538487

It includes the unhelpful comment

Activists and cultural critics have pointed out the term is often used to refer to black Americans, and white Americans doing similar things would not be labelled the same way

Unhelpful because what othercword would be used? I can't think of one.

The objections seem to arise from the use to describe rioters in Baltimore in 2015. The (must say to me entirely spurious grounds) being that the rioters had every right to be angry and that criticising them for the pointless destruction of buildings in their own community was questioning that right.

If you ask a British person what picture springs instantly to mind when they hear the word "thug" the picture will be classic low foreheaded , pasty /spotty skinned, knuckle dragging, probably over - muscled and white. I very much doubt that for a white British person the image called up would be a black man.

I think that a white British perdon if reading an article about a violent, aggressive criminal accompanied by a picture of a black man would think "thug" - but they would do the same if photo was a white or Asian man.

There's a fab American company called "Thug Kitchen", who produce cookbooks full of profanities, attitude and good vegan recipes. The company recently announced on FB that they are giving up their name in support of BLM, as thug is a racist term. Cue lots of wtf remarks from non US fans and explanations of the original Indian background of the word, but said fans were just told to check their privilege. Thug kitchen then renamed themselves "Bad Manners" cue lots of Busta Bloodvessel memes from UK fans😂.

@TehBewilderness

Part of the pleasure of talking with people who speak English differently in US UK and Oz is the comparisons and contrasts we indulge in sometimes. I did not realize people disliked it so much.

There is such a thing as cultural imperialism? Formerly its source was England, now it’s the USA.

On the one hand, UK media have become increasingly parochial but obsessed with US public life and celebrity culture, adopting vocabulary, memes etc wholesale and without translation; and on the other hand there is a staggering ethnocentrism on the part of US liberals who, like so many others, see their society as the world.

On a slightly different tangent, do Americans still use the R word to describe people with SEN? I know a few years back it was deemed ok but shocking to UK ears.

There is such a thing as cultural imperialism? Formerly its source was England, now it’s the USA.On the one hand, UK media have become increasingly parochial but obsessed with US public life and celebrity culture, adopting vocabulary, memes etc wholesale and without translation; and on the other hand there is a staggering ethnocentrism on the part of US liberals who, like so many others, see their society as the world

Absolutely! You can't look at a piece in the Guardian these days without seeing that an increasingly large number of them have been written on an American university campus. Which is totally ironic given the British Left's traditional distaste for anything American.

I got told off once for using the term 'oriental' - which is, apparently, a racist insult in the U.S. Well it isn't here, where there is a university called SOAS ( School of African & Oriental studies).

A thug is someone, usually male, who commits random, unthinking, brutish acts of destruction and violence.

School of Oriental & African studies

There is a staggering ethnocentrism on the part of US liberals who, like so many others, see their society as the world

Good Read : Crazy Like Us' The Globalisation of the American Psyche

If however you live in a place where the demographics mean that a largish proportion of those people are black, it may create an impression that the word is being used racially. Maybe it would begin to be used that way in that place, too but usually it does still retain it's general meaning

It's the same with being stopped by the police whilst driving a shiny, expensive black car with tinted windows. That is not exclusive to expensive black cars being driven by black people. It happens on a daily basis where I live; I'm always seeing black cars with tinted windows being pulled over for a stop and search. And 99% of those drivers are white.

The reason. Such cars are the rather cliched choice of local criminals, gangsters and drug dealers.

'Part of the pleasure of talking with people who speak English differently in US UK and Oz is the comparisons and contrasts we indulge in sometimes.
I did not realize people disliked it so much.'

I don't dislike it at all.

What I don't like is when posters USA tell English people not to use words as they have connotations in the USA that they don't have here, and get pissed off when people say no I'm not going to change how I use my language because of your language

Which has happened on a few threads lately

It also means that threads keep getting into disagreements about use of language rather than the topic of the thread

On a slightly different tangent, do Americans still use the R word to describe people with SEN?

I can’t answer that one, but I did notice when travelling around California in 2019 that the word ‘handicapped’ is still in common use. It’s just not a phrase I hear in the UK any more. We stayed in a hotel room labelled a ‘handicap room’. In the UK it would be considered a bit ‘rude’ to refer to it in that way and would probably be labelled innocuously as ‘accessible’.

However, we call ‘toilets’ for what they are rather than referring to them as ‘restrooms’. Who would want to ‘rest’ in one?

Thug is white British to me. Probably a football hooligan. The Britain First protestors were thugs. Definitely not loaded towards black people in a British context.

There’s definitely a wholesale takeon of American sensibilities in this whole discussion which is absolutely not helpful. We do not have the same history as America. Our race relations are quite different. Let’s not just borrow their approach - in any case the US is hardly a decent global leader with regard to the treatment of, in particular, people of African and Caribbean extraction.