Apryl Williams, an assistant professor at University of Michigan told Fatherly: Posts with the hashtag include two separate clips of men harassing peaceful protesters (including some 15-year-old girls), a Lyft passenger refusing to wear a mask and using racial slurs against a driver, a shirtless white man standing on a street corner cracking a whip, and a maskless man harassing a coffee shop employee over a Black Lives Matter sign.ĭespite this kind of evidence, there have been suggestions that racially charged harassment-especially that which involves self-righteously calling 911-is an activity specific to women. On the back of the McCloskys, #KevinsGoneWild is finally picking up a little steam on Twitter. Quora and Reddit users are conflicted, with a mixed bag of suggestions including “Thad,” “Donald,” “Frank,” “Greg,” “Todd” and “Kevin.” In its reporting of the Beasley-Barajas altercation, SFist referred to Beasley as a “Ken”-a term that has also previously been used by the Fatherly website. Some corners of the internet have been actively trying to fill the Karen-adjacent void. (He said he didn’t think they looked like they belonged there.) And a few weeks ago, a man was caught on camera calling a Black man “boy” and telling him to “fetch me some water.” Despite no women being featured in the video, the clip was hashtagged “#Karens” and “#KarensGoneWild” on Twitter. In May, a Minneapolis man named Tom Austin called the cops on a group of younger Black men for using the gym in their shared office building. He shouted “White lives matter too!” in the middle of his phone call to 911. Last week, 57-year-old Steven Dudek called the cops on a party of five Black and Latino men and accused them of harassing him. Clips of men doing the same thing aren’t hard to find, but they often fail to garner the same degree of attention.
The hashtag #KarensGoneWild is a large section of Twitter dedicated to women who racially profile others, refuse to wear masks in stores, and generally behave with an inflamed sense of self-entitlement. But it also served to illustrate that we as a nation have been so laser-focused on Karens behaving badly, we forgot to even give a name to the men who conduct themselves just as atrociously. The exchange was, most of all, a jarring illustration that racism is alive and kicking in San Francisco.
When he told Barajas he was calling the police, Barajas responded: “That’s fine, call the cops! What are you calling the cops about, Karen?” The SUV driver, William Beasley, was caught on camera repeatedly getting out of his vehicle to threaten Barajas. Last week, a Mexican American man named Michael Barajas was blocked from entering his own parking garage in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood by a couple in an SUV.