Remembering Mrs. Oleson

The transformation of the name Karen from a popular women’s name to a pejorative came quicker than the graph above would suggest. Call someone a “Karen” and she will be deeply offended, as will any person named Karen in a 3-block radius. “Karen” now has racial connotations, because it’s used to mean a white woman who inappropriately demands something, usually that authority figures intervene to stop a person of color from persisting in everything from birdwatching and barbecuing to not seating them quickly enough. It’s also a sexist term, because it implies that the white woman does not have the authority herself and is calling on society to protect her because of her femininity (and white fragility). “Karen” has joined “douchebag” as one of the rare white racial slurs that actually hurts the person who the slur is directed at. (If you aren’t familiar with Michael Mark Cohen’s theory on white racial slurs, please read this.)

Before there was Karen, there was another name for this type of woman: Mrs. Oleson. Mrs. Oleson was the mean, gossipy shop owner’s wife on Little House on The Prairie. She was Nellie’s mom; Nellie is the blonde town girl who faked a disability and bullied Laura Ingalls constantly. (Remember when Laura pushed Nellie’s wheelchair down the hill to prove Nellie could walk? That was satisfying, although it probably wouldn’t pass legal review now.)

For a long stretch of time, if you called someone a Mrs. Oleson, everyone knew what you meant: A snide and cruel woman of wealth and privilege who elbowed everyone out of her way to get to the front of a social line she had the money bypass anyway. I doubt there were many real women named “Mrs. Olesons” who were offended by the character. She was singular even though she was universal. The only reason she wasn’t more obviously racist (that I can remember) is that the TV show didn’t have any Black or Brown characters for her to demean. The one episode that had Native American characters, Freedom Flight, concerned Charles Ingalls and Doc Baker helping a boy whose father, an Indian chief, was sick. They protected him from an angry mob that wanted to massacre the Indians.

This was a tidy little white savior narrative to redeem the Little House series, but in fact, the whole story is rooted in the theft of land from indigenous people and the dehumanization of Native Americans. They didn’t need to gild the lily by making Mrs. Oleson be more obviously racist; it was already a part of her constitution. (Here are some other things to read about racism and ethnic cleansing in LHOTP. Here’s a video about the experience of Native and African Americans at that time.)

I’ll pause my meandering in this essay to note that “Mrs. Oleson” would be a good substitute for “Karen” so that all the Karens can stop feeling sad about their name and start thinking about the impact of the behavior of white women who assert their privilege to the detriment of others, which is the actual point I want to make today.

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The other night, I had dinner with some colleagues as well as one of their wives. Somehow talk turned to the question of race-based college admissions and this woman, who insisted she was absolutely more liberal than anyone I knew, seemed to feel personally attacked because I challenged her view that the high school students of her town in Maryland were completely and totally equal. I’ll back up and explain her argument: Silvers Springs, MD, is incredibly integrated because for several decades most of its residents were government employees who worked in similar jobs at similar pay ranges. All their children had access to the same excellent public education. But when college admissions letters arrived, a Black student ranked 54th had gotten into the University of Virginia, while a white student ranked 37th hadn’t. They were in all other ways equal, she believed; the white family felt that a tremendous tragedy had occurred.

As you might expect, I wasn’t terribly saddened by or sympathetic to No. 37. My dinner companion found my attitude to be offensive. In reality, I am sympathetic, I guess. I didn’t get into Brown University and that made me sad for ten minutes, but the fact is, none of us know the admissions factors at play at UVa in that particular year with those specific children. My arguments fell on deaf ears. It didn’t matter that No. 37 hadn’t even been this woman’s kin; she was outraged on behalf of her acquaintance’s grandchild’s friend. It was that attenuated.

As annoyed as I was by this Mrs. Oleson moment, the reality is she is not that far off from me and other parents I know. Anxiety about college admissions is probably one of the main sentiments I hear these days since my kids are “that age.” (The other main sentiment is “perimenopause sucks.”) Most people are too mindful of the implications of mentioning that they think “other” kids are given more consideration and that it’s unfair, but it’s true. Other kids are given more consideration, and it is unfair, but it’s always been unfair, and as long as we throttle the number of colleges and universities (and other schools) that are well-resourced, it will always be unfair, whether preference is given to students of color, white students, cellists, student-athletes, international students, or academically high achieving students. There are not enough spots for all the kids at the best schools, and we need to stop thinking that there are “best schools.”

And what we really need to stop doing is personalizing everything. This woman has decided affirmative action should be ended because she knows one “deserving” white kid who didn’t get into a college that an academically lower-ranked Black student did get into. That’s how tenuous her hold on her principles was.

This makes me ask: What principles am I in danger of ignoring because I am having a personally uncomfortable reaction to a policy or principle that doesn’t affirmatively help me? I am asking myself this because that’s what I want all the women named Karen, and all the other white women (and men and people generally), to ask who are shocked that mountains will not be moved for our comfort and security.

Here’s another example: criminal justice reform has been very popular in California (and elsewhere) over the past few years. We’ve seen decarceration of juveniles, the reform of three-strikes sentencing, sentencing parity, compassionate release, expungement efforts, and “ban the box” initiatives. Just as criminal justice reform efforts are coming to fruition in these policies, there are complaints about a rise in crime rates, and individuals are quickly willing to claim they feel less safe because of the increase in property crimes that are evident to us all. I’ve seen car windows smashed in broad daylight on a busy street. Flash mobs burglarize popular stores. Sunday, hundreds of kids converged at the local mall and fights broke out, with at least one gunshot heard and one kid stabbed (non-fatally).

Do these anecdotes mean that I/we should stop supporting criminal justice reform? The answer for me is no, but I suspect that answer differs quite a bit for other people. Even their anecdotal experience is enough to push them off their principles. This is because the anecdotal experiences of people who are like them resonate more than the generalized experiences of the people who are not like them.

When my kids were younger, their elementary school talked a lot about resilience, and resilience became an even more desirable trait during the pandemic lockdown. But resilience uncoupled from compassion is just selfish survival instincts. When the going gets tough, whether in college admissions or criminal justice, we are most at risk of becoming Mrs. Oleson. It’s exactly in those moments that we have to use our compassion to imagine the hopes we have for our larger community and all its members. This is another way of saying that “all the Karens can stop feeling sad about their name and start thinking about the impact of the behavior of white women who assert their privilege to the detriment of others,” which, as I mentioned is the point I wanted to make today.

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