Montclair, New Jersey, saw itself as a progressive utopia, until a video of a white woman calling the police on her Black neighbors went viral. For the latest issue of New York Magazine, writer Allison P. Davis looks at the fallout from the incident and what it’s like for the couple, six months later, to still share a property line. About the “Karen” next door, Norrinda Brown Hayat tells Davis: “I would be happy if she moved. It would not make me happy if she was in jail.”
The cover artwork is by Portland, Oregon–based painter Julian Victor LaMarr Gaines, who first collaborated with New York on the magazine’s “I Voted” cover project. Gaines began his “Karens” series at the height of quarantine, when he had time to reflect and wanted to creatively express his negative personal experiences with white neighbors.
Gaines says that there were two quotes that inspired him to start channeling the adverse situations that he’d experienced into art: One was Nina Simone’s “An artist’s duty … is to reflect the times,” and the other was Maya Angelou’s:
"You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it."
