Today, Explained - Who’s “Karen?” And what’s BIPOC?

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

A Washington Post columnist named Karen explains her feelings about “Karen.” A University of Arizona linguist named Sonja explains BIPOC and the capitalization of “Black” and “White.” Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. This moment, this movement, Black Lives Matter has achieved, it's changing so many elements of American life. The mascots, the police, the monuments, but it's also changing our language. And some of those changes are a lot more complicated and even confusing than, say, no more confederate flags at NASCAR. Today, we're going to dig into how language is evolving right now and try and figure out how permanent some of these changes might be. I'm talking about capitalizing the B in black or the acronym BIPOC that you might be seeing a lot more lately.

I'm talking about Karen. It's easy to pronounce. It's five letters. To talk about what's going on with Karen, we found a Karen. My name is Karen Atiyah. She's an opinion writer at the Washington Post. My mom has spoken about how she knew exactly what she was doing when she named me Karen. She was just like, I wanted you to have an easier life with the sort of privilege of being a Karen. Up until recently, being named Karen had been a gift. I'm Black. My parents are immigrants, actually, from Ghana. And the

part that was sort of amusing to me about all of this was like, my parents chose not to give us like, quote unquote, like Ghanaian names, ethnic names, foreign sounding names. Like, it makes me pass. It gives me a certain level of privilege that typically or African American names or quote unquote, whatever you call it, you know, non-white sounding names, whatever that means, it's allowed me to move through spaces. That is, of course, up until a few months ago when the Amy Cooper video was seen by basically the entire country and everyone discovered Karen is more than just another two-syllable, five-letter name that's easy to pronounce.

I think for the most part, like, at least the original definition was, you know, it's usually a woman of a certain age who is not afraid to use her privilege, and usually against a person of color, right? This woman don't want to let a little girl sell some water. She calling police on an eight-year-old little girl. You can hide all you want, but the whole world gonna see you, boo. Yeah, and illegally selling water without a permit? On my property. It's not your property.

And the worst sort of behavior, of course, is using that privilege, that racialized and that gender-specific privilege, to victimize other people of color and black people. Hi, I'm asking you if this is your property. Why are you asking? Because it's private property. Because it's private property, sir. So are you defacing private property or is this your building? You're free to express your opinions.

No, you, we do. But not on people's property. Okay. So to me, at first we sort of laughed about all these things. And now as a black Karen, I personally, anytime I see Karen trending, I brace myself because I think, oh my God, there's going to be yet another video of like a white woman like terrorizing a black person. It's illegal to have a charcoal grill in the park here. No, it's not actually. I just looked at the map. It says this is a designated barbecue area. No, not for a charcoal grill. No charcoal grills are allowed. Do you want to see it? Growing up, to me, Karen was such a boring name. I didn't really think there was anything special about it.

I wanted my name to be changed to my middle name, Nicole, actually, but my parents wouldn't let me. I must have known something back then. There's been a real backlash to the usage of Karen to characterize white middle-aged women. Some people say it's misogynistic. Some people have gone as far as to say it's like the N-word, but for white women. And then of course, there are all the innocent people named Karen out there. You wrote about this backlash for the post. What do you make of it? There is this element of like people wanting to basically name and shame and impose consequences for this sort of behavior for casual, both casual and aggressive and violent behavior. And we've seen that this behavior can end in death

in a country where white women very often are to be seen as being protected or should be protected at all costs. Basically, you know, white women's tears and cries brings white men to come and protect them. And often that has meant death, maiming, violence, displacement, just being ejected from that space. It's just how race and gender have interplayed in a society that devalues Black lives and elevates white lives. So when people say like, oh, this is sexist, I'm like, no, it's being specific. It's being specific about how race and gender interplay when it comes to the caste system that we have in this country. This is also kind of being like formalized right now. A San Francisco lawmaker just introduced

legislation called the Karen Act to make it illegal to place racially motivated 911 calls. Before this gets codified into law, would you like to propose a different name, maybe just a different term so this isn't someone's name, your name? I mean, to be honest, Chad, I don't care that much. I mean, is it annoying? Sure. But I think if anything, what is more annoying or perhaps more problematic about how it all is playing out is more so that the term Karen might be too nice for what we're describing. In some ways, we might actually, the better term for describing what is happening is racist aggression. I think what we're tiptoeing around in this conversation is like, can we name dangerous behaviors in a comfortable way? I don't think anybody wants to take that to the

conclusion that you're saying, that you're basically saying you're acting in a way that is privileging yourself and dehumanizing others. I would think that's more uncomfortable and that's what they're reacting to. But I agree that we should have language to call stuff out when it happens. I was trying to be a Nicole this whole time. I wasn't even supposed to be here. Well, Nicole, I'm sorry you got roped into this whole Karen thing. I know. But you know what?

As my mom said, because my mom was like, I have no regrets about naming you Karen. She was like, now you can be a Karen. You can call the manager out on systemic racism. I'm like, yeah, mom. Like, you know, we're going to flip the script. Like, we're going to, you know, we're going to call out privilege. I'll be a Karen on that.

So, you know, to me, it's not that serious, right? Like, you know what's worse than being called a Karen? Being shot by police. I get called all sorts of things, including the N-word, actual slurs, when I actually write about race. So again, to me, in the scale of victimization, as I said in my piece, like trying to invent your own victimization when there isn't any oppression happening to you is like being peak Karen. So as a Karen, I'm just like, stop. After the break, BIPOC and the capitalization of the B in black.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Dr. Sanja Leinhart, we were just talking to Karen about Karen, but it feels like language is changing all over the map as a result of these protests for racial justice. Is that your sense, too, from the high chair of linguistics at the University of Arizona? I think language is always changing, and that's the nature of language. If it's not changing, then it's dead. We'd be talking about Latin now instead. But I do think that the changes that you are seeing may be more observable by a larger

group of people in a way that's beyond just linguists looking at language change. Okay. Well, let's talk about some of these changes that I've been noticing, starting with one that I think applies to you and to me. And I don't know if I'm saying it right, to be quite frank. BIPOC? That is exactly what I say. Perfect. I've been using the term BIPOC, and I do realize that BIPOC is used in a couple of different ways by people. So I use it as Black and Indigenous people of color, but there are some people who like or prefer Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Okay. And truly, I just started seeing this after the death of George Floyd, but how long has it been around? It's been around at least from what people can find, 2013.

It feels like a bit of a confusing term because for a lot of people, bi means something else. Bi means bisexual. And so classifying Black and Indigenous people as bi feels a little bit confusing. And then POC is pronounced P-O-C, but in BIPOC, all of a sudden it becomes POC, which to some people might be like a Japanese cookie snack for all I know. Like, is this term a little fraught? I certainly understand that. But again, that's sort of the nature of language and especially the English language. I don't know if you're familiar with George. Oh, I'm blanking on this.

He's a white comedian. He's the one who smashes the watermelons. Oh, it's Gallagher. Gallagher. Thank you. Yes. You got it. So he has a well-known clip. I use it a lot for my linguistics classes where he talks about the craziness of language, of the English language. And so he goes through, you know, this is pronounced this way, but then why is this other thing with the same spelling pronounced a completely different way? I tried to learn to read ahead of time, I'd ask my dad signs on the roadside, what does that say, Dad?

He'd say, good food. I'd say, why? They both end in O-O-D. Those words ought to rhyme. It ought to be good food. Or good food. Why is it good food? All right, H-O-M-E, home.

S-O-M-E, some? No, some. All right, S-O-M-E, home. S-O-M-E, some? No. Some. All right, S-O-M-E, some. N-O-M-E, numb? No. N-U-M-B. It's a great skit, but I think that is the nature of how English in particular works, because it comes from so many different places.

Okay, so deal with the pronunciation, but let's talk about the meaning. Is BIPOC like a modification of POC because POC wasn't hitting the right notes? Yeah, POC is fraught. I have issues with POC in the sense that it's one step removed from colored people. And so it has that. But also, it puts together a lot of people with very different connections to, if we're talking about this American, this U.S. context, with very different sociocultural histories in this country. For example, just to give people an example, you're like, it puts me a, I don't know what, like an Asian Canadian American in the same category as you, a African American, right? Yes, it does that. But also, I mean, issues around what's Asian is fraught. Part of that has to do with these terms that came from

colonizers of how they chose to group people as opposed to people grouping themselves. So that term has a lot of other things that are problematic within it, but it's a term that's been settled on for now to be able to group essentially minoritized people. But I think part of the problem with that is that it's not just minoritized people. But I think part of the problem with that is that it's not just minoritized people sometimes, because we have different histories. It's sort of like going back to how the Irish became white or the Italians became white. Who gets grouped as white, right? This term becomes everybody who's not white. But then who gets to be white has varied across history and is still going through some of that processing, right?

I think separating and actually having a term like BIPOC matters. Black and Indigenous peoples, their existence in the United States is different, uniquely different compared to every other group that we've minoritized in this country. How you get to a country has a long-lasting impact on your continued existence in that country. So, for example, for Africans in America who were enslaved here, being brought to this country as enslaved people, being forcibly immigrated to a country that did not come by choice, that the impact, the lasting impact on them in ways that it wouldn't have for people who are newly arrived here, even though they may still be classified as Black. I guess this is a great transition to another conversation that's going on right now and where a lot of changes are being made, which is the capitalization of the B in black. So, a lot of newspapers, print outlets,

online journalism are making this transition to always capitalize B. Yes, I have been fighting that fight for probably more than 20 years. So I am so glad. Yeah, I've had this issue in publishing, both in the books that I've published and in articles with issues around B, because I alwaysizing B when you're referring to Black people is because you are referring to a group or a race of people. choose terms like brown to refer to people from Spanish descent or who are from Latinx countries, those terms should be capitalized. But you bring up white. There is no movement to capitalize the W in white, is there? I don't think there's a movement to capitalize it. When I work, I capitalize all of those for any people. So if I use the terms white, black, brown, or whatever, I capitalize them. Huh. Yeah.

One of the things I'd worked on years ago was how limited the U.S. is in how it understands issues around race and ethnicity and naming practices that it has. When I was growing up in the U.S. as going to elementary school and whatnot, we were taught that there were three races and everybody was grouped into those races. And it was either Caucasoid, Negroid, or I think it was Mongoloid. Where did you go to school? I grew up in Texas, Houston, Texas. Caucasoid, Negroid mongoloid. Where did you go to school? I grew up in Texas, in Houston, Texas. Caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid.

Yes, so everybody was categorized that way. In the US, for a lot of its history, really thought about things in terms, either you were black or white, or essentially white and not white, right? And so I think that has helped us to come to a very simplistic way of thinking about even this social construction of race as opposed to what does humanity actually look like. So I think in the near future, we're going to be having these more complex conversations to get to something beyond maybe what people think about is crayon colors, right?

But thinking about this complex history of who people are and in what ways does that matter? And we are now trying to grapple with it, right? So right now we're doing a let's just try to classify everybody. Let's just make a box so everybody can be included, right? Yeah, but does it end up becoming meaningless? Like, are there too many classifications? Is that a risk? Like you said, at some point it gets to be like, well, you know, this isn't helping. This isn't making any sense for us. And we need to come up with a better way of understanding humanity outside of trying to get into these fine-grained ways, right?

Sure. I also wonder how you help people understand these changes, because, you know, some environments, social media, college campuses, can be very quick to adopt, but other people are, like, left behind, scratching their heads. The conversations that we need to have around Black and Indigenous people in this country, those are hard conversations that need to be had. And they're very different from the conversations that we would have for any other group of people

in this country that we have minoritized in some sort of way. And I think when you use that term, you're recognizing that you're calling out these two particular groups because it's bringing up a conversation that we need to have or several conversations that we need to have in this country. And right now, we are closer to having those conversations than we have ever been at any point in time, which is why we're talking about this term now. Because the term was there, but now people are talking about it because it is becoming part of their consciousness and their everyday lives in a way that it wasn't in 2013. But all of this is going to be dependent upon white people wanting to engage and being willing to listen as well as to act from those conversations. Well, Dr. Lainhart, I appreciate you having the conversation with me.

Thank you. Dr. Sanja Lainhart is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained.