Of Cops and “Karens”: Language and the Bureaucratic Arm of Policing

This essay considers how racial paradigms in the United States produce white subjectivity as part of a broader structure of policing Blackness that becomes bureaucratically encoded through law enforcement agents and their discursive practices. Given this, it is not unexpected that the figure of the “Karen” and agents of law enforcement police similar behaviors and figures, given they embody the same ethos of white supremacy, differentiated largely by virtue of the bureaucratic structures in place to direct, reproduce, and legitimate anti‐Blackness within an institutional framework.