Assistant Professor of Communication and Media, Apryl Williams, was quoted in TIME Magazine in June 2020. The TIME article discusses the 'Karen Meme' and #Karen, both going viral on social media. Apryl Williams cautions against letting the at-times humorous nature of Karen memes minimize the ways in which white womanhood has long posed danger to black lives.
From the article: "According to Williams, Karen memes can serve different purposes for different audiences. For white people, it can help them recognize a pattern of behavior that they don’t want to be a part of it, but might be complicit in and can be an easier way to have a conversation about white fragility, entitlement and privilege; it also holds them accountable for racism. For Black people, the memes can act as a news source, evidence, and an archive of the injustices, the attempts to control bodies and situations, or as Brock puts it, 'microaggressions that often scale to macroagressions when the police are called in.'"
She further states, “On the one hand, the humor is a way of dealing with the pain of the violence, so in that way it’s helpful, but on the other hand, the cutesy-ness or the laughability sort of minimizes or masks the fact that these women are essentially engaging in violence.”
This TIME article was also highlighted in the July 1st edition of the University Record.
