Good women are young, quiet, have pretty long hair (never dyed a unnatural colour though!) and never speak up about being mistreated, ever. You want to complain about a genuine problem? Sorry, you’re a Karen. Ask people to social distance? Karen. Nicely tell people to please be quiet during a movie? Karen. Ripped off by corporate greed and want a refund? Karen.
Be silent, be feminine and behave, woman.
It sucks because it actually used to describe real harrassment that black service workers experience. Now it’s just “Mouthy mom aged women with short dyed hair”
I’ve even seen a male black service worker be called a “male Karen” I shit you not.
A lot of the early examples I remember involved calling the cops on black people basically for existing.
For example, this article from 2021 which says, “It has gone on to become one of the most widely publicized so-called “Karen” incidents, where a white person, typically a woman, calls police to report a Black or brown person engaged in mundane activities.”
That’s not early, though. It was already pretty popular in like 2018 with the “she took the kids”
Its much earlier than that. The “Karen took the kids” meme was just when it became mainstream.