The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles told listeners of an interview he conducted with Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez that the name “Karen,” when used to refer to white women, is a “socially approved racial slur.”
During a Tuesday webinar hosted by the Heritage Foundation, an intellectual and policy powerhouse of the right-wing movement, Knowles and Gonzalez discussed the basis of Gonzalez’s latest book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free.” Gonzalez argued in his interview that identity politics and critical theory are wrongly applied to the education system and the workplace.
(Screenshot / Heritage Foundation Webinar)
Gonzalez and Knowles approached what Knowles called the “woman question”: why women are an “aggrieved minority” despite making up a majority of the U.S. population. Gonzalez said he had seen that dynamic shift and that white women were being moved into an “oppressor class.” To support these claims, the duo discussed the slang term "Karen," which has been popularized online as a way to satirize middle-aged white women filmed in viral videos committing obnoxious or racist acts.
“You have this new term, ‘Karen,’ that comes in and people are mocking women as ‘Karens,’ which is [a] really bizarre phenomenon to be happening,” Gonzalez said, adding that although he has not read Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility,” the book contains a chapter titled “White Women’s Tears.”
“I am with you. I have not yet mustered sufficient masochism to read the ‘White Fragility’ book, but it has become very popular as has this term ‘Karen.’ The term Karen, though it is in common use, is a racial slur,” Knowles said. “It refers explicitly to white women. The difference is it’s a socially acceptable racial slur.”
