We are all the same
Race is a construct. We agreed to it.
Googling βpretty princess clip artβ could bring up an Asian princess. Or an African princess. Not just a blonde, blue-eyed one with A4 white paper skin.
I have never belonged anywhere:
Too dark for white people, too light for black people. I learned that white people can tan and be darker than I am and still be βwhiteβ and black people can bleach their skin to look like me and still be βblackβ (light-skinned, though).
Me? I get to be a mulatto forever.
The racist fear narratives were not invented by a random suburban woman. They were manufactured, systematised, and propagated β often by powerful white men in media, law, and politics. The film The Birth of a Nation is a textbook example. It did not just reflect racist panic; it industrialised it. It cemented the myth of the Black male predator threatening white womanhood. That lie justified violence for decades.
That cultural programming was cultivated deliberately.
Being taught a fear narrative explains its origin. It does not dissolve responsibility for acting on it.
The fact that racist mythology was seeded by men in power does not mean white women are passive vessels without agency. Fear transmitted through culture is powerful, but it is not DNA. It is learned. And what is learned can be interrogated.
When someone calls the police on a Black person because they βfeel unsafe,β the harm is not theoretical. It is immediate. It can be lethal. The system that responds to that call is also racist β absolutely β but the caller is still a participant in that system.
Blame is not a finite resource that has to land in only one place. Structural racism and individual action can both be accountable at the same time.
This is where the βKaren is a rebelβ idea gets complicated. In one context, the label mocks women for asserting themselves. In another context, it emerged from Black communities, naming a specific behaviour: white women weaponising perceived vulnerability against people of colour.
Those two realities coexist. They are not mutually exclusive.
This is circling a deeper frustration, I think: the way social discourse often flattens everything into one cartoon villain. Either white men are the root of all systems, or white women are uniquely malicious, or Black communities are overreacting, or cancel culture is the problem. It is easier to blame a mascot than to hold complexity.
Media dominant narratives have long centred on white male heroism. And yes, even when representation improves (think Black Panther within the Marvel universe), it often still operates inside a framework built by earlier power structures. Progress exists, but it is layered over history, not separate from it.
Understanding where fear was cultivated does not excuse acting out that fear in ways that endanger others.
And also: Reducing everything to βKaren is evilβ erases the deeper machinery that taught her what to fear.
Both can be true.
You do not have to defend racist behaviour to question simplistic blame narratives. And you do not have to deny systemic racism to insist that individuals still have moral agency.
When you have stepped into a space where people are trying to hold one truth very tightly, sparks are apt to fly. Introducing nuance in those spaces often feels like a threat, even when it is not.
The real work is not choosing a single villain. It is asking:
Who built the narrative?
Who benefits from it continuing?
Who has the power to unlearn it?
And who pays the cost when no one does?
That is not flapping your trouty mouth. That is refusing to let the conversation stop at a slogan.
