Photo: Karen, exercising her right to “FAFO,” Sparks, NV, November 6, 2025
University didn’t “radicalize” me. Being American did.
An Ordinary Errand, an Extraordinary Pattern
I was just there to get a new phone. Nothing dramatic. Two hours of data transfer, polite conversation, the hum of fluorescent lights, and the same helpful staff who had assisted me two weeks earlier.
I even ran into an old coworker from my Chick-fil-A days, a small-world moment that made the errand feel almost warm. Until she walked in.
You could feel her before you saw her: the sharp air of entitlement, the quiet expectation that the room would rearrange itself to serve her. A Karen.
She began pacing, muttering about spam calls and blaming Verizon for not having a “service” to block them. A worker, patient and polite, stepped away to assist her. Within moments, her voice sharpened. She called out another employee by name, accusing him of forcing her to buy a phone she “didn’t need.”
He moved politely, tried to show a fix on the iPad, gestured for a PIN, and offered the solution. She refused to cooperate. Her anger needed a body to bounce off. It needed escalation.
That body became mine.
At first, she tried baiting me with snide remarks from across the room for a while. I ignored her, giving her the Gen Z stare. Then she pushed harder. “Oh, what, you think this is funny?”
I finally urged, “I do not work here. I do not have to be nice to you. STOP TALKING TO ME!”
At first, her insults blurred together: ugly, stupid, bitch. The kind of words people reach for when they have run out of logic. Then it turned racial.
“You’re one of those dirty Mexican Latinos, aren’t you!” she spat.
The words landed like a stone in a quiet pool.
She threatened violence close enough that her breath brushed my face. I had to stand up. Then she body-checked me with more collision than a controlled jostle and stayed there, maintaining contact as if proximity would make her assault more permanent. I had to physically grab her, push her away from me, and say “you CANNOT be touching me!”
Everyone watched. The workers tried to de-escalate. The manager refused her service. She refused to leave.
After thirty minutes of hooting and hollering, the cops finally arrived. She theatrically challenged them. “Take me to jail,” she said, as if auditioning for martyrdom, pulling a phone to record the moment she had engineered. She suddenly declared herself disabled when it suited her, a posture meant to confuse authority and claim moral high ground. “You just don’t care, do you?” she snapped at the officer before looking straight at me. “Wow, lady, thank you. This is on you.”
There was no formal statement taken from me. No real paperwork for the assault, just the echo of her words and the knowledge that the law had been content to remove her, not to interrogate the breach of my personhood. That erasure of my testimony is a successful, intentional design in the system of racism.
The MAGA Virus
Her racial remark of “You’re one of those dirty Mexican Latinos, aren’t you!” — carried the echoes of a culture saturated with anti-immigrant rhetoric. Years of messaging portraying certain bodies as “illegal,” “dangerous,” or “less than” seep into everyday assumptions about who belongs, who is trustworthy, and who can be openly attacked without consequence. That kind of messaging doesn’t just appear in headlines or ads; it shows up in voices like hers, in the entitlement to police someone’s presence, and in the expectation that authority will side with her.
This moment is a small snapshot of a larger system. Propaganda, fear-mongering, and normalized xenophobia shape behavior long before a person steps into a store. Racism isn’t created in a vacuum; it is taught, reinforced, and circulated through the stories we are told about who is “acceptable” in society. Her words were not just personal, they were a flare-up of a larger contagion, a virus of MAGA propaganda and anti-immigrant messaging that infects attitudes and behaviors, priming hostility toward those deemed outsiders. By the time it reaches someone like her, it has already rewritten the rules of civility, making public aggression seem justified. Her attack was a direct reflection of that social conditioning.
The Script She Was Following: Unpacking the Karen Blueprint
The woman who attacked me wasn’t just a rude customer. She was performing a role America built for her, the Karen archetype, white femininity weaponized by entitlement and fear.
The Karen isn’t a meme. She’s a social script that lets certain people turn inconvenience into persecution and power into moral authority. When she felt challenged, when the workers stayed polite instead of submissive, she shifted gears from frustrated customer to victim-in-waiting.
That’s the thing about Karens. They don’t come out of nowhere. They’re raised in a country that teaches them their discomfort is a crisis, their fragility a weapon. They learn that their feelings are law, that their word defines who belongs and who doesn’t. And when someone like me disrupts that, when I don’t shrink, don’t bend, and don’t appease, they break.
She is a reminder of what white supremacy looks like when it’s dressed in athleisure instead of uniforms. Racists don’t always wear badges or white robes with pointy hoods. Sometimes they wear Lululemon.
Usually, it doesn’t start with slurs. It starts with assumptions: I’m owed this, you work for me, I can demand it! But when those assumptions don’t materialize, all hell breaks loose. The tone changes, the posture changes, and suddenly everyone has to be civil because she can act crazy and claim ownership of what civility even means. The rules bend around her. Her outburst becomes a weapon to enforce deference, to dictate who is polite and who is guilty, and to make her rage the standard by which the room must operate. In that moment, civility is no longer mutual; it is a tool she wields to assert dominance and silence anyone who threatens her narrative. My existence, young, ambiguous, female, unbothered, was enough to short-circuit her delusion.
White fragility is the engine behind the Karen performance. It’s the panic that erupts when whiteness loses the comfort of dominance. The rage isn’t just about a phone. It’s about power slipping through manicured fingers. That’s why she needed to name me as something, anything, that reaffirmed her hierarchy. Ambiguity played into her hands. Not knowing exactly what I was allowed her to escalate freely, to assign blame without logic, and to frame the situation so that her outrage dictated the rules. My identity became a tool she could manipulate, a way to confuse everyone around her while keeping the focus on her own performance of power.
She didn’t know what I was, but she knew I wasn’t white. That’s all whiteness ever really needs to know before it decides who to punish.
The Logic of Whiteness
It activates white fragility. The reaction is panic disguised as righteousness: How dare you not maintain my sense of superiority? That’s when shouting starts, when insults get racialized, and when the performance of victimhood kicks in. She needed the story to end with her as the injured party. That’s why she reached for the oldest tool in the book, a racist insult, to reassert hierarchy and rewrite the scene in real time. She is both the aggressor and the only person worthy of being sided with.
When white people can’t tell exactly what category you belong to, they feel both threatened and entitled to decide it for you. They project their own stereotypes until you fit their narrative. It’s a uniquely American reflex: the demand to racially label, to classify, to rank. The violence isn’t just in the words or the contact; it’s in the insistence that you must be placed somewhere on a racial caste that upholds their sense of order.
That’s why these incidents feel both personal and structural. The woman who attacked me wasn’t inventing something new; she was reenacting a script written into the country’s social DNA. The performance of superiority, the panic at losing face, the racial remarks, and finally the plea for sympathy, “be careful, I’m disabled,” (after insiting she could “take me”) is all a choreography designed to preserve power while pretending to be powerless. Whiteness in America sustains itself through these contradictions.
In that sense, the store wasn’t just a store. It was a microcosm of the social condition: a place where privilege feels endangered by equality, where they initiate violence when dominance is denied, and where the right to occupy space still depends on a fucking caste system.
Whiteness is not just a color; it’s a membership. And members protect each other by pretending confusion. “We didn’t know what she was.” “It couldn’t have been racism, she isn’t thaaaat black.” But they always know enough to remind you that you’re not them. That’s how supremacy endures, behind politeness, behind plausible deniability, behind the performance of not knowing, and most of all, narrative control.
This is why her words and actions mattered beyond the immediate insult. When she said, “you’re one of those… not us,” she was trying to erase me, my identity, my belonging, even my claim to being American. She wanted to define me as someone outside the boundaries of what she considered acceptable and to remove my legitimacy in the room.
And yet, at the same time, she needed me there. My presence made her complaint real to the people watching. By standing in front of me, directing her anger at me, she turned me into a witness and a symbol. I became a prop in her performance of victimhood, the evidence that her outrage was justified.
Ambiguity made me the perfect instrument. I was too brown for some, too pale for others, never fitting neatly into her categories of who belonged. That uncertainty made me a screen for her anxieties. This cognitive instrumentalization, denying my identity while simultaneously using me as a tool, shows how marginalized people are both excluded and exploited, rendered powerless in the very act of validating the power of the oppressor. Her behavior was not random. It was a rehearsed script that let her claim control over the story, enforce social hierarchies, and weaponized my existence to reclaim her own fragile, ego-driven sense of self-worth.
Final Reflection
What happened at Verizon wasn’t about a phone. It was about a system that trains people to assert dominance over bodies it cannot categorize, a system that enforces hierarchy through fear, entitlement, and inherited privilege.
This is the reality: racism is not only individual; it is structural, performative, and deeply woven into the institutions we navigate every day. The law, the workplace, and the streets all reinforce hierarchies that punish those who do not fit the “acceptable” mold. Karen’s actions were personal, but they were also systemic, a glimpse of how normalized aggression, entitlement, and the policing of identity maintain white supremacy.
The question isn’t why this happened…
The question is WHEN will they stop pretending racism is someone else’s problem, someone else’s words, someone else’s “bad day?” WHEN will they stop smiling past entitlement, ignoring the violent scripts they inherit, and start checking themselves and each other? WHEN will they recognize that being silent, being polite, being complicit, is reinforcing our racial caste system.
Hate crimes are not accidents. They are inevitable. Every unchallenged joke, every shrugged-off insult, every defended act of privilege feeds the machine. White supremacy is not a theory. It is a lived social system. It persists when white people protect each other, excuse cruelty, pretend they are individuals apart from the collective, and fail to imagine equality or justice.
Until white people own their responsibility for the networks they live in, for the empire they inherit, for the harm they enable, I will not be safe, nor will other Americans.
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