Listen: We’ve seen a lot of strange Karen activity over the years. We’ve seen encounter after encounter involving the most entitled of wayward white women spotting Black people in their neighborhoods who they don’t think belong and deciding it’s their unofficial duty to mind everyone’s business but their own and weaponize tears, white fear and/ police presence in order to reinforce their non-authority. But imagine being a Black person who comes home after a long day to find a Karen in the wilds standing on your property while questioning you about whether you live there only to call you a liar and run away frantically after you inform them that you are, in fact, the homeowner.
Such was the experience of Black real estate developer Mike Jenkins. A viral video taken from the doorbell camera on Jenkins’ affluent Ohio neighborhood home shows his encounter with a white woman, later identified as Michelle Bishop, who showed up on his front porch with her two small children just as he was walking up to his house.
Bishop can be heard asking Jenkins if he lives at the residence, to which he responds by telling her he does, to which she responds, “I don’t believe you,” and then runs away with her children in tow so fast that she leaves a baby stroller careening down Jenkins’ front steps. It looked like when a Looney Tunes character runs away in a burst of wind leaving their hat spinning in the air before falling to the ground. The video then cuts to her running frantically past the side of the house screaming “Help!”
It was certainly a different kind of Karen encounter. Usually, they stay long enough for the cops to show up after they spent the last 15 minutes or so fake-crying to a 911 dispatcher.
Later in the video, Bishop is seen talking to Jenkins and his wife after a man who appears to be her husband showed up at the home to see what was going on. Bishop explained that she was afraid because she was alone with her children and she saw Jenkins in his vehicle driving slowly so she pretended the home she walked up to was her own residence in order to get away. She described it as if she was “chased” to the house by a man who intended to do her and her children harm. She explained that as the man walked up, he asked her, “Can I help you?” to which Jenkins’ wife responded, “Yeah, because that’s my husband.” Jenkins then stepped out of the house, which seemed to be the moment it finally dawned on Bishop that she should have believed him when he told her he lived there. As Jenkins and his wife both seemed to suggest in the most polite way possible that neither her fear nor her weird explanation of it made any sense, Bishop can be heard demanding that they “understand my point of view.”
Look, I understand that this world is often not a very safe place for women and children, but this Karen logic is something else. Bishop is claiming she was walking down the street of her affluent neighborhood and saw a random car driving down the same street — a thing cars tend to do, and slowly if it’s a residential area — and that caused her to become so panicked that she ran to the closest house for help. How does she literally ever leave the house if she’s really that jumpy?
Of course, nothing in Bishop’s Karen-splanation explained why she refused to believe Jenkins when he said it was his house. She even said in the video that when she saw Jenkins she thought, “This could be his house.” Yet, when he told her it was his house, she didn’t believe him.
“But you didn’t say, ‘THIS IS MY HOME, you just said, ‘Are you looking for somebody?’” Bishop exclaimed, as if “THIS IS MY HOME” would be the more natural response to finding someone on your doorstep, as opposed to simply asking the person if they need help.
Naturally, once the video footage went viral, Bishop got to see herself dragged all up and down social media with people accusing her of racial profiling and exhibiting the kind of frantic behavior that can get Black people killed.
“The man was pulling into his own home, without any threatening words, body language, or gestures. She assumed he was out of place because he is Black,” one person on X noted.
So, Bishop put out a series of white-tearsy videos explaining that she’s not racist and that it was all just a big “misunderstanding.”
“I was on edge, because I was like, he doesn’t live here,” she said. She also claimed, “I never thought it was a Black man. I thought it was a white man in that truck.”
Suffice it to say, folks on X and Reddit weren’t buying it.
“The moment she said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ it turned into a 100% racist moment. If the guy had been white, she would have believed him,” one user commented.
“This is how people of color get shot by police—white people yelling for help when they should just mind their own business,” another person remarked.
If only Black people had the option of screaming “HELP” after spotting a Karen. If only our logical fear was taken as seriously as the most illogical white fear.
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