The Latest Karen Is Toilet Karen And She’s Telling Us She’s Here to Make America Jim Crow Again (2024)

Last week, at a multi-floor law office building in Buffalo, New York, a Black woman, an employee of one of the firms, recorded a white woman, a Karen, threatening to call security on her. Why? Because the firm that the Black woman worked for was on a different floor than the floor–and the public employee bathroom–that Toilet Karen (TK) went all Christopher Columbus on.

TK had apparently seen a Black woman enter the multi-stall restroom and waited to pounce the moment she exited. The sister recorded the event and uploaded it to TikTok where viewers witnessed Toilet Karen threatening to call security because of this–what….horrific breach?– caused by a Black colleague using the bathroom on TK’s floor? In fact, Toilet Karen was so sure in her white supremacy, that she reported the incident to security in person.

Telling stories like this was not what I imagined those first magical years of being a Black journalist in the 1990s and early 2000s. We were immersive storytellers, living inside the lives of the hip-hop generation we came of age in. We were cultural critics, lifting up the art of Black geniuses, from Tupac and Biggie to Mary J., Jill Scott and Badu, from BlackStar to dead prez. We were political analysts, talking to the Mandelas in the decade after apartheid, talking to Black Panthers still incarcerated–or liberated as in the case of Assata Shakur.

As we grew, we began following social trends and tragedies in Black life, the beautiful ones like Dr. Johnetta Cole becoming Sister President, Kara Walker’s life-giving sculptures, the words of Edwidge Danticat, Pearl Cleage, jessica Care moore. But we could not and would not ignore the terrible ones. Our communities in the age of AIDS. The ever-expanding American punishment system. You couldn’t throw a stone and find a Black family who’d not lost someone to HIV-AIDS and you couldn’t find one who didn’t have a loved one in prison.

But these two deadly issues were so coated in shame, humiliation, stigma and silence, that we felt it our duty to say that which was otherwise whispered. I think we saw ourselves as the alarms, the warning shots.

Which brings me back to Toilet Karen and the Black woman she attacked for using the “wrong” bathroom?

Think: Hidden Figures.

Think Dr. Lisa Wade, Tulane University Professor who documented that segregated bathrooms were justified in the Jim Crow South in part because nigg*r women would give white women STIs.

A bird watcher minding his own business having the cops called on him by a Karen, who had her dog wrongfully off-leash and pretended she was being threatened? Think: Slave Where’s Your Pass?

Soho Karen falsely accusing a Black child of thievery and then physically assaulting him–and not having to do jail time?

Think Dred Scott and [Black People]…have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Toilet Karen, Central Park Karen, Soho Karen–their actions, and far more deadly actions of other Karens—is them actually telling us that while they may have some association with Black people in a less (?) segregated America, their ultimate goal is to Make American Jim Crow Again. If the mass incarceration of Black people for offenses white people commit more and more often wasn’t enough, if the public executions of our children and loved ones wasn’t enough–if all of these were well-intended but poorly executed policies or else some kind of one rogue apple issue–how do we miss these Karens literally telling us that it’s about to 1950, nigg*r.

We can make all the videos we want, all the memes and gifs. They’re critical because they get the word out. But now, since the word is out, and now, in an election year, don’t we need so much more?

SEE ALSO:

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I’m White. We Rule! Latest Karen Video Shows What All Karens Think While Harassing Black People