The Real Karens would like to speak to the manager, now

The jokes about the Online Karens started out funny enough, Real Karens said.

“Karen” is social media shorthand. You know the type: middle-aged, entitled white women; SUVs; spoiled kids; demanding to speak to the manager.

The Real Karens got it. They didn’t mind. At first.

“At first I thought it was funny because it was mostly light-hearted,” said Karen Kurtz, an editor at

“Then it turned dark.”

Now the moniker is used to describe racist white women behaving badly.

“Central Park Karen” was caught on video, calling the cops on a Black birdwatcher in New York who asked her to obey dog-leashing laws. The San Francisco Karen called police on her neighbor for writing “Black Lives Matter” with chalk on his own property. The convenience store Karen in Phoenix who berated a woman with racist language and told her to “go back to her country.”

There have been other names. “Barbecue Becky,” who in 2018 called police on Black men barbecuing in an Oakland, Calif., park. “Permit Patty,” who in 2018 called San Francisco police to stop an 8year-old Black girl from selling water without a permit.

Somehow, Karen stuck.

The Real Karens I know, seven of them, middle-aged and outspoken, almost all white and driving SUVs, aren’t like those Karens.

The jokes can feel personal, they said. But they know it’s nothing compared to people who have faced raciallymotivated discrimination for generations. Maybe this is the difference between Online Karens and the real ones: “You can’t compare the five minutes that ‘Karen’ has been a bad word to what has happened to other people,” Karen Bayless Feldman said.

Still, Feldman won’t shy away from speaking up in certain situations.

Just the other day, Feldman lamented to the woman behind the bakery counter at A.J.’s Fine Food how few shoppers wore masks. The woman asked, “Will you talk to our manager?” Feldman responded, “Will I? I was born to talk to the manager.”