My “Best Friend” Is a Karen

The Thread

I recently shared this personal story on Threads:

“In my 20s, I babysat a friend’s daughter while she, her partner, parents, and sister were at the cinema watching the new Batman movie.

The text I received from her later that evening:
Did you accidentally take one of our blankets?

Me: No.

Back then, I didn’t know I was Black.
Today, I know she was testing to see whether I had stolen anything.
Today, I also see that this so-called best friend was the epitome of a Karen.
This is the result of being trafficked and raised by ⚪ people.”

I could also have added that this was the consequence of extremely low self-esteem and a lack of self-respect, because that was true as well.

A commenter:
“It’s ugly when you’re in an abusive relationship, and you don’t know it because it’s all you know, and that 💩 has been normalised. Micro-aggression is still abuse.”

This comment is the truest of truths, and I replied with a minor correction:
“Yes. And also, I don’t think this is a microaggression. This is full-blown racial profiling. This is r4c!sm.”

My “best friend’s” text was not innocent. It was a test: a quiet accusation and investigation.

Karen & The Echo Chamber

My “best friend” and the group around her embodied what many of us now recognise as the archetype of a Karen: entitled, hypocritical, patronising, self-righteous, manipulative, and convinced of their own innocence.

“Bestie” was the kind of white woman who would say she couldn’t possibly be racist because her sister once dated a Black guy in high school.
The kind who believed that having me as a friend and following Black people on social media proved her moral purity.
And yet during our four-year friendship, “bestie” called me the N-word and mocked my 4C hair, saying it looked like pubic hair.
Her ignorance and arrogance ran as deep as her entitlement.

Whenever I reacted to the group’s racism, I was tone-policed, shamed, and made to feel dramatic. The problem was not their racism, but my reaction to it.
If there was a conflict, bestie and the echo chamber somehow had no part in it. Accountability was nowhere to be found. Gaslighting and deflection appeared to be their native language.
The list of racism and microaggressions is long, and the impact is long-standing.
You can find the Danish episode below if you want to listen to the heartfelt conversation between my friend Amanda and me about our experiences with racism in our close relationships. I go into detail about what I experienced in the “friend group.”

The Awakening

Awakening to my Black identity was one of the most shattering experiences of my life. It was not just an intellectual realisation but a reckoning.

Suddenly, decades of confusion made sense:
The jokes, comments, discomfort, subtle exclusions, and the way people monitored and questioned me.
The way people duped me into believing that I was “too sensitive” for reacting to their violence.
I could finally see the racism for what it was and how deeply I had been gaslit.

During this awakening, I was working with a white trauma psychologist.
After 1.5 years, I fell into a profound identity crisis and shifted to a Black trauma therapist and worked with her for about a year to “understand what it meant to be Black.”
Throughout this year, what changed wasn’t just how I understood white people. It was how I understood myself as a Black woman in a white society.

Releasing Shame

I still feel disgust and resentment when I think about Karen and the echo chamber, but I have released the shame and blame I carried. And that is everything because one of the least spoken-about aspects of healing from abuse is how deeply we blame ourselves for what we endured. We look back and ask:

How could I have tolerated that?
How could I have been so dumb?
What was I thinking?

I’ve asked those questions many, many times and was angry with myself for many years.
Today, I send that past version so much love because she did not know her worth, and I wish she had shown herself compassion rather than shame and anger.
Instead of being harsh on myself, I wish I had asked the following instead:

How was I supposed to know better when I came from severe abuse?

I did not grow up in a home where adults mirrored that I had value.
Adults did not model what respect or healthy love looked like.

Most childhood survivors of complex trauma received the bare minimum, if that.
How could we possibly have any sense of worth or even begin to grasp what high-quality relationships look like when we have never experienced them?

If you’re reading this and can relate to my experience in any way, please show yourself some grace.
Had you known you deserved better, you would have walked away.
It’s not your fault.

With care,
Jazzlyn