Fred Joseph vs. Emma Sarley: The Tragic Manipulation of a Viral “Karen” Video
Over the last few years, much of our cultural and political discussions have been driven by short video clips taken on iPhones that get posted on Twitter and feed us narratives meant to spark outrage.
You always wonder when you see these videos – is there more context?
But that doesn’t matter because that is not the point of these clips. The point is to confirm some already pre-conceived world view in the quickest manner possible.
This past weekend, an incident occurred at a dog park involving a white woman and a black man that was then put on Twitter (see here) and has since led to two NY Post articles (here and here) and the woman being fired from her job.
Now I want to protect my own identity (so I write anonymously) and the identity of others (who will not be named) but below is an account of what actually happened at the dog park from firsthand witnesses who saw the incident from the beginning to end.
It’s Saturday, around dusk at the McCarren dog park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There is a dwindling collection of people there as the sun goes down.
In the northeast corner of the dog park, a small mousey-looking white girl in her late 20s is scolding an aggressive dog that was barking at her dog.
As she does this, the owner of the aggressive dog, a larger man in his early 30s, yells out his dog’s name “Stokely” and steps in.
Usually in these situations, the owner of the offending dog offers some de-escalatory response to keep things civil. This guy does the opposite.
“There are other dogs here barking and you just had to pick ours, didn’t you!” he protested. “This has happened to me before at the dog park, and it’s pretty damn racist. It’s because we’re black, isn’t it?” He’s referring to him and his female companion.
After the invocation of race, the girl was stunned for a second – in poker terms, she had been expecting a quick fold and unexpectedly got a massive re-raise. But rather than fold, she keeps going.
She continues to yell at him for being irresponsible with his dog – her responses are slurred as she appears tipsy. He continues to aggressively attack her for being a racist. This is all happening right at the gate of the entrance to the dog park.
When it is clear she doesn’t have any killer retort, she drops a bomb – “Why don’t you stay in your hood?”
The man’s female companion reacted by threatening violence to the white girl but then he told her to stand down and then she began filming, repeating the soundbite back to “Karen” to get her to admit to saying it, or to say something else controversial.
The couple then follow her out of the park repeating her offensive line and they turn to a white male bystander to get him to confirm that she had indeed said it (he confirms). She offers some drunk responses and gives him the finger and tries to slap his phone and scurries away.
A few hours later, this is all on Twitter and lo and behold – we have a trending video of a racist Karen trying to eject a black couple out of a dog park. It looks very ugly.
Several hours after that, it’s a story on the NY Post.
And shortly after that the girl is fired.
As it turns out, the white woman and the black man have names.
The black man is Frederick Joseph. He wrote a NY Times Best Selling Book called The Black Friend – an anti-racist tome about how white people can be better friends to black people by having a better understanding of their own microaggressions. He has a blue check mark on Twitter with 100k followers and writes frequently on various race issues.
None of this should be surprising given his dog’s name is “Stokely” after Stokely Carmichael - a black political activist. Carmichael was a 1960s Civil Rights Leader and member of the Black Power movement who left the Black Panthers and moved to Africa. Stokely left the Panthers because they were associating with white people.
The white woman’s name is Emma Sarley and she works at a firm called Bevy. We know this because Frederick posted the video and crowdsourced her identity. After receiving her identity, he went for her throat and launched a campaign on Twitter to pressure Bevy to fire her.
Bevy indeed fired Emma shortly thereafter, literally within twenty four hours of the incident.
Let’s be clear –
Emma made the comment (the eyewitnesses heard it) and it’s a comment that could be construed at the very least as racially charged and suggestive that black folks can’t live in a gentrified neighborhood.
But let’s also be clear about how the fight started. Fred’s official story states that Emma scolded his dog for something a different dog did, then launched a racist attack on him and his fiancé. Emma scolded the correct dog, “Stokely”, and Fred didn’t like that, so he launched racist accusations toward Emma.
Fred is someone who appears to have an economic interest in gaining internet attention on race issues and this also isn’t the first time that Fred has made a public case for racism on social media. Just a quick scan of his twitter profile and you see various examples of him being outraged at the behavior of white people.
He called out an airline for not yelling at a white passenger for putting their feet up.
He called out a white woman for asking him if his car was his car.
He called out a white woman for saying something to him on a train (which apparently was so horrific that he couldn’t tell the story).
Knowing this context – that Fred berated her and his history on Twitter – muddies a clean narrative here – which is that white supremacy is manifest everywhere, even at dog parks. That is not what the Twitter mob wants – they want good guys and bad guys and the ability to vindictively destroy people.
So with more facts and context on hand, I leave it to you the reader to decide.
Was Emma an evil racist who deserves to be forever ostracized or just a fumbling drunk idiot who made the wrong comment?
Was Fred a heroic victim, or an aggressive manipulator of social media for his own self-aggrandizement?
However you answer these questions, one thing should be unquestionably clear - and that is who has the narrative power here.
And that answer unquestionably is Fred.
He has a blue check mark on Twitter and is a thought leader within the new woke political orthodoxy that has taken over the establishment. He can both banish folks to the outer rungs of society if they question or violate his world views or he can also bless them as one of the enlightened ones – (that is if you pay him for an anti-racism talk at your company and offer him unquestioned support.) If our new world is some modern version of the Spanish Inquisition regarding woke thought, then he is one of the leading inquisitor priests.
You don’t cross guys like this - they are the power that be.
I write this anonymously because I and the other eyewitnesses are afraid of him and his power.
But speaking truth to power is important.
Watching society continuously condemn people to pariah status so quickly and unquestionably is scary. It is an abuse of a platform that could do actual good. Even the founder of the 1619 project, Ida Bae Wells came out and said as much (see here).
The reality is that if it can happen to Emma, it can happen to any of us. It could even happen to a high priest of this new order like Fred.
After all, there could have been an alternative news story where someone took a video at the beginning of the altercation, and we saw a large 6’ 2” man belligerently confronting a small 5’ 1” woman who was protecting her dog. That video could have also gone viral and told a different narrative about toxic masculinity…
The moral here, if there is any, is that we should all put away the guillotine and actually be empathetic towards one another - not pretend to be while indulging our most hideous impulses.