"Miss Ann (sometimes Miss Anne) was [Karen's] forerunner, coming from Southern Black vernacular of the 19th century — the mistress of the plantation, the boss lady..."

"... (and proto-girlboss), with a mandatory honorific. While she was subordinate to the white man (Mr. Charlie), she still held a higher status in the hierarchy than Black people and exploited this for all she was worth, alternately imperious and dainty, belligerent and helpless, depending on context. The moniker has persisted: The writer Zora Neale Hurston listed it in a glossary appended to her 1942 short fiction 'Story in Harlem Slang,' the memoirist and civil rights activist Maya Angelou deployed it in her poem 'Sepia Fashion Show' in 1969 ('I’d remind them please, look at those knees, / you got at Miss Ann’s scrubbing') and as late as 2016, when CNN exit polls for the presidential election indicated that more than 40 percent of white women had voted for Donald Trump, the journalist Amy Alexander, writing on The Root, explained the results as the 'Miss Ann effect.' But as Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature, notes in 'Miss Anne in Harlem' (2013), by the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a more subtle white woman had come to earn the name — one who intentionally entered Black spaces at a time when other white people denounced such an act 'as either degeneracy or lunacy.' Some of these women were activists, others mere thrill-seekers or provocateurs, their motives and desires ranging 'from dreadful to honorable,' Kaplan writes, and they were greeted in the Black community with caution."

From "The March of the Karens/The name has come to represent an entitled and belligerent white woman. But what does this narrative say — and elide — about racism and sexism today?" by Ligaya Mishan (NYT).