In the book, “white trash” Mayella Ewell testifies that her family’s Black neighbor, Tom Robinson, raped her. After all, the most potent echo of the Till case in literature comes from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, published five years after the 14-year-old’s murder. (“Half victim, half accomplice, like everyone else,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase.) If successive generations of schoolchildren can see that, maybe adults can too. The Karen debate can, and perhaps will, go on forever, because it is equally defensible to argue that white women are oppressed for their sex, and privileged by their race. (She was responding to the suggestion by Frederick Douglass that Black male enfranchisement was a more urgent issue than women’s suffrage.) There are also echoes in the Scottsboro Boys case, where eight Black men were wrongly convicted of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama and the rape of the “ Central Park jogger,” where the horrifying violence suffered by a white woman was the pretext for the state’s persecution of innocent men. Anthony in 1869 at a conference of the American Equal Rights Association.
“If intelligence, justice and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of women be brought up first and that of the negro last,” declared Susan B.
This includes the schism between white suffragists and the abolitionist movement, where prominent white women expressed affronted rage that Black men might be granted the vote ahead of them. Call Donald Trump “the ultimate Karen” if you like, but the word’s power-its punch-comes from the frequently fraught cultural space white women in the United States have occupied for generations.