Radically honest conversations
One subject of one of Helen Lewis’s new gurus podcast is the “race2dinner” pair Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. Remember them? I did a post on them in May 2021. They’re the ones who charge five THOUSAND dollars for you to make or order in a fancy dinner with you (a white woman) and your white women friends where they (Jackson and Rao) tell you how racist you are. Peak social justice, and a nice little earner!
So they’re still doing it, which means there are still rich white women willing to spend five THOUSAND dollars for this treat.
It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as racism, or that white people shouldn’t confront it, or that white people shouldn’t be urged to examine their own dear selves for racism. It’s that, for one thing, it’s weird to single out white women as if women had all the power in this scenario, and that for another you could do far more useful anti-racist things with that five THOUSAND dollars than give it to a pair of snotty grifters.
The charmers just wrote an article for TIME three weeks ago. The blurb is not entirely forthcoming.
Rao and Jackson are the founders of Race2Dinner, a program that initiates and empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression. Deconstructing Karen, the documentary about Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s work, is out now. They are the authors of White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better
Notice something missing? TIME forgot to say that their program empowers radically honest conversations about race and oppression among white women. It forgot to say that they single out women for their interrogation and hostility, as if women were the dominant sex.
It also forgot to say that they charge $5K for these dinners (and that the white women pay for the dinners).
You’ll be amazed to learn that Jackson and Rao do the same thing themselves.
In 2019, we decided to host anti-racism events in white women’s dining rooms for one specific reason: To turn the age-old adage, “it’s rude to talk about politics at the dinner table” on its head.
This is what we’ve learned—if you don’t talk about racism, you can’t dismantle it. But it isn’t just over the dinner table that this “niceness” rules.
They do mention the “white women” angle but then they drop it, instead of explaining why they single out white women for their missionary work.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, you were eager, frenzied even, to do this work.
Wrong word. “Frenzied” doesn’t mean “very eager.” The right word would be “desperate”…but maybe they wanted to avoid that one because of the stupid insulting “desperate housewives” franchise. They are of course intimately related to that franchise, but I doubt they want anyone to notice.
A mere two years later, not only is that excitement for anti-racism work gone, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, into a verifiable whitelash against anti-racism work.
If white womanhood is a house, your need to be perfect is the foundation.
But white womanhood isn’t a house, so what’s your point? Why just women???
Being perfect is the key to your happiness, to your success, to your very existence.
Citation?
Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect grades. Perfect nails. Perfect weddings. Perfect bodies. Perfect adoring and supportive wife and mother. Perfect employee and colleague.
This is an extract from their book. It’s embarrassing.
Part of me applauds the ingeniousness of this business. It’s not a grift, really, because they apparently do deliver what they promise — they really do come to your dinner party and lecture you on how you’re racist.
This seems so much like a masochism fetish to me, and I guess my reaction is the same — if that’s where you get your jollies, then I guess it’s money well spent, but I’ll pass, thanks.
I know, I hesitated over it a little, but it seems kind of grifter-adjacent to put such a high price on something they present as social justice-type activity.
It’s quite impressive, in its own way: berate people for their race privilege AND get them to give you $5k for the treat.
George Floyd was murdered by a man, not a woman. So to make sure black men don’t get murdered, they attack white women. Makes perfect sense to me…no, it really doesn’t. But challenging white men about their racism is harder and probably more dangerous. Just like the TAs; challenging the people who actually murder the people they’re concerned about? Nope, too much work. Women are easier.
And if being a white woman is about being perfect, I guess I don’t know any white women. We’re not striving for perfection; we’re mostly trying to get by.
Iknklast, they actually address the “why only white women, not white men” question on Helen Lewis’s podcast, and their answer is a doozy: because they don’t want to get shot. People like Rao and Jackson talk all the time about how this or that word or behaviour is “violence” but when push comes to shove they know the difference between hurt-feelings violence and violent violence.
It’s a nice dodge, but the real reason is that males aren’t likely to be all that interested. Doesn’t play to men’s mental matrices the way it does to women’s (obviously not true in all cases).
Or it’s because men are so much more difficult to bully, especially for women.
If one were truly committed remedying racial inequalities, surely there are better ways to invest five thousand dollars toward that end than dropping it on a dining room struggle session. That money could, for instance, buy school supplies for several classrooms in a hideously underfunded majority-Black school district, to name just one of many possibilities.
I’m sure Jackson and Rao would be happy to explain to me why this is a bigoted racist thought and I am a bigoted racist for having it . . . but I can receive torrents of abuse for free online, and I don’t have to set the table or vacuum the carpet first.
My understanding of certain threads of anti-racist activism is that they emphasize getting white people to “check their privilege” and own up to their personal racism. That is very much the theme of what I’ve read by Robin DiAngelo, as well as others; personal racism rather than systemic. With that mind set, getting a whole table full of white women to acknowledge their racism and promise to do better would be a good achievement.