MONITOR
Amy Cooper and the White Embrace of Racism
Lynchings abound, and ‘Karens’ keep calling
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Lynchings are as endemic to America as apple pie and baseball. Even as we witness the crippling devastation of Covid-19, Black America still can’t escape lynchings. In the last three weeks, we have watched two videos documenting the last moments of both Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and now George Floyd in Minnesota. Between these two recorded murders, we have also learned about the murder of EMT worker Breonna Taylor, asleep in her own home when law enforcement busted in, opened fire, and shot her eight times. They had the wrong address.
What does each of these fatal incidents have in common? The presumption of guilt and criminality associated with Black skin and the power that accusations by White people hold. Amy Cooper, a White woman responsible for the latest outrageous case, knows all about this.
The latest interrupted lynching involves a Black man who was birding in New York City’s Central Park when a White woman threatened to call the cops and tell them an African American man was threatening her. Luckily, he videotaped the interlude, and thankfully, the police didn’t show up. We know all too well what typically happens when White women accuse Black men of anything — especially in Central Park. Look no further than the Central Park Exonerated Five — the five Black boys, now men, who spent years in prison after being falsely accused of raping a White woman in the late 1980s.
White, liberal women with Black friends and Black clients — and perhaps Black family members — can still be racist despite proximity to Blackness.
Amy Cooper presumably knew about the Exonerated Five, and her Central Park episode is the latest in a string of “Karen”-related incidents where White women call the police on Black people because they can. In parks, playgrounds, on our stoops, and in our own backyards, there have been countless calls made to police by White women who claim Black people just existing are interfering somehow with their lives. We, by our mere presence, are an issue that needs to be handled in their eyes. Our Blackness is a criminal marker that the…
