How White Woman-Bashing Became a Bipartisan Sport

Sorry to every woman named Karen. Since 2020, your name has become shorthand for "entitled white woman." Now there's a new villain in town: the AWFUL — Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.

After ICE watchdog Renée Good was shot and killed while monitoring immigration enforcement activities, conservative commentators rushed to paint her as the archetypal AWFUL. Fox News' David Marcus called women like Good "organized gangs of wine moms," while right-wing YouTubers described AWFULs as "a cancer on the nation."

But here's the twist: Conservatives didn't invent this playbook. They learned it from the left.

The Karen Chronicles: From Legitimate Critique to Generic Insult

The Karen meme started in the right place. Emerging around 2018 and exploding in 2020, it originally called out real instances of white women weaponizing their race against Black people. Think Amy Cooper calling police on a Black birdwatcher, or Lisa Alexander reporting a Black man for chalking "Black Lives Matter" on his own property.

These were clear-cut cases of racist behavior that deserved to be named and shamed.

But Karen had a problem: She was born from one man's bitter Reddit rants about his ex-wife named Karen. As Aja Romano documented for Vox, the r/FuckYouKaren subreddit compiled this personal grievance into a broader meme about "annoying women in public." The racial justice angle provided cover, but misogyny was baked into the foundation.

By 2020, Karen had lost her political edge. As Guardian writer Hadley Freeman discovered when she criticized the meme's sexist undertones, men gleefully called her "Karen" and told her to "make them a sandwich." The tool designed to call out racism had become a weapon to silence any woman deemed annoying.

White Feminism: When Valid Criticism Goes Viral

The "white feminist" critique followed a similar trajectory. Black feminist scholar Monnica T. Williams made vital points in 2019 about how mainstream feminism prioritized white women's experiences while ignoring issues affecting women of color — like the fact that Black women die in childbirth at three times the rate of white women.

The 2017 Women's March became a lightning rod for these critiques. While some called it "the most diverse march for women's rights ever," many women of color felt unwelcome. Even the pink pussy hat became controversial (not all pussies are pink, not all women have pussies).

But legitimate criticism morphed into broader dismissal. Comedian Bill Burr captured this shift in his 2020Saturday Night Live monologue: "White women somehow hijacked the woke movement... I have never in my life heard so much complaining from white women! 'My life is so hard with my SUV and my heated seats.'"

Suddenly, any woman in a pink hat protesting Trump was fair game for mockery.

The Conservative Switcheroo

The AWFUL meme pulls off conservatism's favorite trick: the reverse-racism maneuver. It takes leftist critiques of structural power dynamics and flips them to claim conservatives are the real victims.

Compare the stereotypes:

Both memes offer the same social cover: "We're not attacking women for being women — we're attacking them for their politics/racism/classism." But notice how Karen's male counterpart "Ken" never gained traction, and conservatives haven't coined a catchy acronym for white liberal men.

The pattern is clear: Women having opinions in public makes people uncomfortable, regardless of political affiliation.

The Entitlement Trap

What unites Karen, the white feminist, and the AWFUL is the accusation of entitlement. Used sincerely by people genuinely concerned about racial justice, these critiques can highlight real issues with white female complacency. Used in bad faith, they become excuses to tell women to sit down and shut up.

Democratic strategist James Carville exemplified this shift when he told the New York Times in 2024 that Democrats were dominated by "too many preachy females." The party's message, he argued, was too feminine: "Don't drink beer. Don't watch football. Don't eat hamburgers... Everything you're doing is destroying the planet. You've got to eat your peas."

By 2024, feminism had become a liability for Democrats. It was too tame for the progressive left, too radical for the right. Who wanted to be associated with those "cringey" women in pink hats?

The Intersectionality Solution

Perhaps it's time to return to Kimberlé Crenshaw's original concept of intersectionality — the idea that people experience multiple, overlapping forms of oppression. Crenshaw developed this framework to help courts understand that women of color face discrimination based on both race and gender, not just one or the other.

Intersectionality was meant to give us language for discussing more forms of oppression, not to rank them or tell some oppressed people to be quiet.