Em-URGE-ing Voices

Posts Tagged: harrassment

The Problem with the Karen Archetype

Dear White Girl (all white people really) who made the Tik Tok compilation video of her admittedly fashionable, quirky, yet still, very white mother with a caption that reads  “Y’all were raised by Karens, but I was raised by a Veronica”,  I’m assuming the “y’all” you are referring to is other white people who have high-strung and difficult mother figures.   For the sake of being thorough,  I’ll define what a Karen is to me.  “Karen” is a term for entitled, demanding, racist white women who weaponize their perceived fragility and victimhood to enact harm on any person(s) they deem fit, which is usually Black people just existing.  (See a karen compilation here) With a definition such as that, and a whole wikipedia page dedicated to this type of character, I… Read more »

Sexual Harassment in the Lives of Working Students

by Moira Bowman, Deputy Director, Forward Together I saved up money to go to college by working in restaurants–and continued working at restaurants my first year of school. Some days I sat fancy people at fancy tables and served them fancy food and cocktails. Other days, I slung what felt like hundreds of plates of deep fried fish cozied up to big steak fries and counted the hours till I could shower off the coat of grease from my face and arms. I haven’t thought back on those experiences for many years–but recently my organization, Forward Together, began working on a research project in collaboration with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) to look at experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the restaurant industry.  And I’ve been taken off guard at… Read more »