Amy “Central Park Karen” Cooper Has Changed Her Story. In Other News, Water Is Wet.
I'm not disappointed or surprised. I'm just tired.
As I write this update about Amy Cooper, the woman who’s fearful of Black birdwatchers in Central Park, I’ve come to the exhausting realization that I don’t even have to explain what a Karen is anymore. There have been so many incidents where a white woman loses her shit because a Black person is breathing the same air as her that when I say Karen, folks already have an image in their mind of who the woman in question is.
Like. We just had this conversation a month ago.
Still, something about Amy Cooper stands out in the character select screen of white women who call the police on us because it’s a day that ends in why.
Maybe it’s because she’s gone from “apologizing” to having the caucasity to “sue her former employer for discrimination” to, well, completely changing what she said had happened.
Time for Amy Cooper 2.0 Final Mix!
According to NBC News, Cooper went on a podcast by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss called “Honestly.” Full disclosure, I’m already annoyed at the nerve of this woman, but I’m even more annoyed that people are treating her story as some kind of “we must uncover the truth” moment when 1) there’s video of what she did, and 2) she apologized back when it happened, which implies that she knew she was in the wrong to the point of needing to say, at bare minimum, that she wasn’t racist.
Then again, the description of the episode is as follows:
Amy Cooper was not the internet’s first “Karen” — the pejorative used for a demanding, entitled white woman. But as the Central Park dog walker who went viral for calling the police on a black birdwatcher last year, she quickly became the paragon of the archetype.
Within 24 hours, Amy Cooper had been doxxed, fired from her job, and surrendered her dog. She wound up fleeing the country. She hasn’t spoken publicly since last summer. Until now.
In a wide-ranging interview with Kmele Foster, friend of Honestly and co-host of The Fifth Column, we revisit the story of what happened in the park that day. We show what the media intentionally left out of the story. And we examine the cost of mob justice.
In the new game+ version of Cooper’s story, we’ve got dog treats and the potential use of a bike helmet as a weapon. According to Cooper, “He’s holding these dog treats in one hand and a bike helmet in his other hand, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, is this guy going to lure my dog over and try to hit him with his bike helmet?’ And if I end up over there, am I going to get hit by this bike helmet?”
Many thanks to NBC News’ Wilson Wong for pulling quotes from the podcast so I didn’t have to listen to an hour and a half of this garbage on a Friday morning. Wong also points out the following:
She told NBC New York at the time: “When I think about the police, I’m such a blessed person. I’ve come to realize, especially today, that I think of [the police] as a protection agency, and unfortunately, this has caused me to realize that there are so many people in this country that don’t have that luxury.”
On the podcast, however, she said, “I don’t know that as a woman alone in a park that I had another option but to call police.”
So there’s your update on Amy Cooper, in case anyone was under the misguided impression that this woman may have been using this past year to reflect on her actions and become a better person. Every time someone tells me that I’m jumping to conclusions when white women go off on us, get videotaped going off on us, go on their little apology tour, then change their story a year later, I’m gonna tell them to Google Amy Cooper.
“I am going to call the police and tell them an African American male is threatening me” does not translate to, “I had no other choice.”
— Harribly Bigly (@blindforjunk) August 4, 2021
(image: Christian Cooper)
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