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.

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