Freddie Krueger Who? Karen is the Real Face of Terror For Black America
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Carolyn Bryant and Juanita Milam (1927-2014), the wives of Roy Bryant and John William Milam, who stand accused of the kidnap and murder of Emmett Till, sitting in their husbands’ lawyer’s office across the street from the courthouse, reading newspaper accounts of the trial at Sumner courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, September 1955. Black teenager Emmett Till was alleged to have whistled at Carolyn Bryant. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Her visage is more frightening than that of Freddie Krueger.
Jason’s hockey mask has nothing on her.
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Doesn’t matter if the Black person in question is a man or a woman. Doesn’t matter if they are strong or weak. Doesn’t matter if they are an adult or a child.
Karen can get them. She can still drag them to hell.
Karen’s terrible power is not new.
How many enslaved women were sent packing or out to the fields because Karen resented her presence or sought to put distance between her husband and the enslaved woman?
How many enslaved men were whipped merely because of the suggestion that they had dared to look upon Karen with anything other than subservience?
That was the spark that lit the conflagration that consumed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921. Two years later, it lit the white supremacist tinder that burned the Black community of Rosewood in Florida.
Karen pointed the finger that resulted in the horrific beating death of Emmett Till in 1955.
Even when Karen herself is a killer, she still has the power to make a Black man’s life a nightmare on Elm or any other street.
What Black man in Union, South Carolina was safe in 1994, when Susan Smith told police a Black man had carjacked her and taken her toddler sons?
For a while, at least, police there dutifully did that Karen’s bidding in hunting for a non-existent Black kidnapper before realizing that Smith had murdered her own children.
Cell phones and social media have begun to chip away at Karen’s awful might.
That brother in New York didn’t get strung up three years ago for being Black while bird watching in large part because there was footage of Karen’s attempt to weaponize law enforcement against him.
She was caught lying, pretending to be a victim when she was the offender. Social media and news accounts actually sent her to the proverbial sunken place; she was fired from her job and lost the discrimination suit she filed against her former employer.
Still, for every Amy Cooper, there are other Karens out there, intolerant of anything but Black fealty and readily believed when they point the finger.
Karen’s mask isn’t on sale this Halloween. And yet she lingers in the American consciousness, more vengeful than Samara Morgan, more dangerous than Annabelle or M3GAN.
Wayne Washington is a brilliant journalist based in Florida
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