Earlier this week, Uber put head of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department Bo Young Lee on leave after workers complained about a pair of sessions she ran titled “Don’t Call Me ‘Karen’” that focused on race and being a white woman. Young is Asian, but that means very little when the people complaining are black and Hispanic, the golden geese in a race-obsessed industry where Asian executives are a dime a dozen. On Slack, one person remarked, “I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting.” Others questioned the premise that the word “Karen” shouldn’t be used.

A decade ago, one would have wondered why “Karen” would have come up in a DEI meeting at all. Back then, the term had little to do with race: it referred to a middle-class, middle-aged, entitled suburban woman with an asymmetrical bob haircut. She was a caricature of the sort of impossible-to-please tyrant one encounters while working in customer service — nothing more or less.

But in 2020, “Karen” took on an explicitly racist connotation after a New York woman named Amy Cooper called the police on a black man named Christain Cooper, who she thought was threatening her and her dog. Previous controversies involving white women calling the police on black people for frivolous or racially motivated reasons were usually alliterative and related to the situation: for example, there was BBQ Becky and Golfcart Gail. Why Amy Cooper was labeled “Karen” — rather than “Dogwalker Donna” or “Leash-Law Lisa” — isn’t clear, but the circumstances of the case forever changed the meaning of the word.