And it’s not ‘Karen.’
By now, you may have heard about the story of the newest New York City “Karen” (the term refers to an officious or panicky white woman freaking out in public, usually in a supposed expression of racial bias or generalized “white privilege”). Her name is Sarah Comrie, she is a nurse at NYC Bellevue Hospital, and on May 13 a video was posted to the internet purporting to show her having a “freak-out” while trying to take a Citi Bike (New York’s bike-rental service) claimed by four young black men. The narrative being sold is that this woman tried to steal a bike that one of the (many) men in the video had rented and cried “fake white-woman tears” to try and get them in trouble before backing off. That’s it, that’s the story.
As expected for world-historical crimes documented by camera, the reaction on social media was immediate, escalatory, and insanely brutal. Noted spotlight-seeker Benjamin Crump, who is a “civil-rights attorney” in the same way that Al Sharpton is a “reverend,” saw the video and confidently tweeted: “A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!” (I would have linked the tweet, but he deleted it this morning; you will soon see why.)
A lesser-known grifter went commensurately further for attention:
A suspected white supremacist woman tried to steal a Citi Bike from a Black kid after he paid for it, and when him and his friends wouldn’t allow her to steal it, she went thru all the Karen tactics to try to get the Black youths hemmed up:
*Screaming for help
*Fake crying
*Mayo Babbling
The vilest slur of all came from a clickbait website called NewsOne (I will not link to it), which made the immediately viral claim that Comrie was the modern-day equivalent of the white Southern woman whose false accusations led to the murder of young Emmett Till, one of the most infamous crimes of the Jim Crow era.
And it was all based on complete nonsense. Oh, well.
As it turns out, Comrie has, and is more than willing to produce, the receipt for her bike purchase. NBC New York then went and cross-checked it with the viral video and found that the serial numbers matched up. She was innocent. It was her bike. I have no idea whether those kids thought that they had a genuine case or whether they were perpetrating a staged “racism prank” on her for viral kicks, but they were 100 percent out of line in every respect.
After all, something about the “Karen” narrative should have seemed amiss immediately for anyone viewing the video. Even though Comrie was instantly compared online to the infamous “Central Park Karen” (another wildly misunderstood case, incidentally, but with far more grey area than this one), nothing about her demeanor in the video suggests that she was responding inappropriately. (She’s having a bad day, but in this situation, in her shoes . . . you would be too.) She is pregnant, exhausted from a twelve-hour shift, then suddenly surrounded by aggressive young men who are claiming her bike, mocking her with insults about her fake tears and how her “baby gonna come out retarded,” and filming her for posterity. All in a city where, famously, things can go bad fast and without any warning. O ye brave souls: Imagine yourself a 5’4” late-term-pregnant woman unexpectedly surrounded and prevented from going home by four angry young men. How would you handle it? She cried a little and called for help.
More than anything else, one cannot help but be utterly revolted by the reaction of Comrie’s employer, NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue. In a shameful replay of the sort of corporate cowardice we are now sadly accustomed to, Bellevue, rather than support Comrie, immediately put her “on leave pending review.” Her evidence is utterly airtight, and her lawyer is righteously angry; surely she would have presented the evidence to her superiors had she been given the chance. Instead, a pregnant nurse, innocent of all but being the randomly chosen victim of a viral hate hoax, has been punished by her employer, has had her name dragged through the mud (the vindication always gets far less play than the original slander), and has had her career potentially damaged.
We all know why: The endless demand for intoxicatingly narrative-confirming stories of panicky white women who are overreacting to black men. These stories — and they obviously make up a sub-genre at this point — seem to scratch some sort of thinly veiled sadomasochistic itch among white urban progressives. (One imagines their pleasure centers lighting up as they shout, “GOD, yes, we are so awful, we’re the worst, oh, I love it, give me more.”) The outrage machine grinds on endlessly because it produces temporary endorphins (and clicks, always clicks), so who cares about poor Sarah Comrie? She’s just more grist for the mill, and there’s a narrative to fuel here.
Well, I care. Sarah Comrie was set up to take a fall during social media’s most recent round of slash-and-burn reputational destruction for no better reason, near as I can tell, than certain people’s being bored and this being “something to do.” She was blameless, a scared caregiver, pregnant and vulnerable, just wanting to get home after a twelve-hour day of nursing. And she suddenly became a pariah, was suspended from her job, and was tarred as a racist for no reason. All the while she was the same person, just viewed through two different lenses: one in proper focus and the other distorted. So, if anyone deserves justice, it is her, and proper justice would be to give Comrie her good name back — all of it. That name is Sarah, not Karen.