This Pandemic Exposes the Malignant Entitlement of White Women

The only community many white women seem to want to protect is their own. For the last few months, Americans have been asked to come together as a community to take care of each other by wearing masks, keeping our distance, and making sacrifices.

These everyday inconveniences have saved countless lives, and could have saved more if we had started earlier. But as the pandemic stretches toward June, too many people have given up on the idea of protecting their neighbors.

Some Americans appear to have decided they’re tired of the pandemic and can just opt out. They want to have a normal summer, crowding with hundreds of other people at the lake, strolling on the boardwalk, or packing in by the thousands at a raceway.

The standard-bearers of this revolt against common-sense safeguards seem to have one thing in common: They’re white women. Whether berating a grocery store employee because they don’t want to wear a face mask, or refusing to leave a playground that’s been shut down for community safety, the most visible faces of the anti-lockdown movement look quite a lot alike. While men who want to “reopen” America have been employing scare tactics — like bringing firearms to protests — white women are making their unhappiness known in more every day, mundane settings.

Call it the rise of the Karens: This pandemic has brought out the worst kind of entitlement in white American women. It’s not enough their local nail salon is open for service, they’re offended their pedicurist would dare wear a mask because it’s “depressing.” Maybe these women will wear a mask because they’re being forced to, but they’ll cut a hole in it to make it “easier to breathe.” The police got involved? Not to worry, they can scream in a cop’s face without fear of harm coming to them.

Women are disproportionately the people in a family who plan vacations and outings; they’re the ones most likely to be in charge of the household social calendar, interaction with the broader community, domestic work, and child care. It makes sense that they’d have strong opinions and emotions at this moment.

But these pandemic opt-outs reek of privilege because it’s clear why white women aren’t afraid for their own families: They don’t believe they’re really at risk and they apparently don’t care about the people who are. (Black people are dying of Covid at a rate three times more than white people.)

As CNN commentator Jess McIntosh put it, these women aren’t protesting to reopen America for the “right to be waitresses and hairdressers, they’re fighting for the right to have them.” And that’s the rub. What seems to be driving so many of these women who have made social media waves is their desire to live their lives in the same comfortable way they always have — the health of others be damned.

Ironically, these are the women who are probably presidents of the PTA, or plan block parties for their neighbors; they’re the gatekeepers of their communities. But they also seem to think that “community” begins and ends with their own families or desires. There’s been some backlash claiming the idea of “Karens” is a sexist trope, that singling out white women’s behavior is unfair. But the way these women are weaponizing their privilege is important — and it’s likely to have a resounding impact on our collective public health in the months to come.

It’s true that the major failures around the response to Covid aren’t the result of individual choices, but systemic ones; state governments and the White House should have acted sooner and they continue to wobble in their response to the coronavirus. But we have to owe each other something as neighbors and community members. There has to be some kind of social contract that we will try our best to keep each other safe. That means keeping social distance at the park, wearing a mask even if it’s uncomfortable, and forgoing that pedicure. Keeping each other safe shouldn’t be political.

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