A viral confrontation between one white woman and several Black men outside a New York hospital over Mother’s Day weekend has birthed yet another heated debate about privilege, racism, and — given the details that have emerged since the incident — what I believe to be a harmful case of unconscious bias (to put it extremely lightly).
Since the incident, Sarah Comrie, the “Citi Bike Karen” in the video, has been placed on leave from her nursing duties at NYC Health + Hospitals. She has retained a lawyer and insists that the viral video, which has garnered over 40 million views on Twitter, has been taken out of context.
But let’s stick to the facts for now, i.e. what we can see with our own eyes and the details that have emerged since, starting with what actually happened in the video.
What happened in the viral video?
The viral video begins in the middle of a verbal altercation. Comrie is seen straddling a public Citi Bike dressed in scrubs while the young men around her urge the person holding the camera to “record her, record her.” Comrie, as you can see, is shouting for help.
“Help! Help me! Please help me! Please help me! Please help me, help! Please got off me. Please get off.”
Throughout the duration of her cries, the group of young men repeatedly tell Comrie that the bike is not hers and that they have already paid for it. “This is not your bike,” the young man closest to her says. “This is not your bike. What the f*** is going on? You know you’re not getting the bike. You’re not getting the bike.”
Here is where things escalate, as Comrie then snatches the young man’s phone out of his hand, clearly not in the correct state of mind to comprehend that her phone is already poking out of the breast pocket of her scrubs.
“You’re hurting my fetus,” Comrie says to the young man, to which he replies “I’m not touching you. You’re putting your stomach on my hand.” His hand is indeed latched onto the bike’s center console, which Comrie’s stomach rubs up against repeatedly, although the young man never moves his hand and he does not press or shove Comrie away.
After half a minute of shouting for help a stranger appears behind the group asking what is going on; he, too, is dressed in scrubs. Here, Comrie immediately bursts into tears, crumbling over on herself and dropping her face into her hand. When the stranger asks why the group of young men doesn’t just reset the bike, the young man who was next to Comrie can be heard saying “This is my bike, it’s on my account. Please move… I’m not resetting the bike… It’s on my account.”
Realizing the young men don’t intend to let up and that there is a perfectly good bike next to them, the stranger asks Comrie why she doesn’t just take that one. Here, those tears Comrie tried to exert immediately vanish and she steps away from the bike with a perfectly composed face.
What was the public reaction to the video?
It didn’t take long at all for the video to go viral and for comparisons to be made to the 2020 “Central Park Karen” in which Amy Cooper falsely told police officers that a Black man was trying to assault her when in fact he was just birdwatching; alongside the murder of George Floyd, the video became the beating heart of discussions surrounding systematic white supremacy and racism in the United States.
In a now-deleted Instagram post, civil rights attorney Ben Crump wrote “This is unacceptable! A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!”
All in all, the overall consensus was one of condemnation and disgust. On the surface, it appeared as though we had yet another white person using their privilege to justify their misdeeds while potentially putting a Black person in harm’s way as a result.
Did “Citi Bike Karen” pay for the bike after all?
In the days following the viral video, more details emerged from Comrie’s lawyer suggesting that she paid for the bike after all. Initially reported by New York Post and corroborated by The Independent, receipts from the altercation reportedly show Comrie’s Citi Bike account attached to the serial number of the bike in question. According to The Independent, “the receipts capture Ms. Comrie checking out the bike, then docking it a minute later, without paying a charge.”
Was the backlash against “Citi Bike Karen” warranted?
In the age of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, headline-catching incidents such as this make their way to the public’s attention long before all the facts are collected, let alone released. As it turns out, Comrie did reportedly pay for the bike, and the people who called her a Karen have been dragged over the coals for jumping to conclusions.
Indeed, the incident highlights a pervasive problem with journalism at the moment, one that is made muddier by the dominance of social media in our daily lives; a problem that favors clicks and views at whatever stage of development over the whole truth, which winds up prematurely shaping societal opinions whether or not it is merited. Or, at least, that is the opinion of this writer.
With all that said, it is hard to ignore Comrie’s behavior in the viral video. Facts or not, her reaction is — as her employer pointed out upon her suspension — “disturbing.” There’s no way to know for sure whether she would’ve acted the same had she been surrounded by young white men instead young Black men. Would she have felt the need to shout for help as though her life were in danger? Would she have resorted to tears at the sight of the nearest friendly (white) face?
Racism is a charged word, one that can immediately rub someone the wrong way. But it’s not nearly as dangerous as the violent acts committed against Black people and other persons of color; acts that have a historical precedent of being spawned from situations such as these, in which one white lady is not only given the benefit of the doubt against her Black aggressor, but then used as a vehicle for retribution.
Like the underlying issue at hand, the opinions about the “Citi Bike Karen” incident are split, with parts of the population using the revelation of Comrie’s receipts as proof of counter-racism and trigger-happy “cancel culture,” while other parts of the population can’t erase from their minds the image of a white woman crying for help from Black men who are quite literally standing still and doing nothing to harm her.