A Racist Documentary Revels in White Guilt
In a made-for-TV grift dubbed Race2Dinner, guilt-ridden white women pay two women of color to tell them how awful they are.
P.T. Barnum may or may not have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but a group of self-flagellating white woman have certainly helped prove the point.
In a stunt of a TV show called “Deconstructing Karen” — a show that’s too nauseating even for Woke America to have conjured up — a gaggle of white women pay good money to be accused of racism at a dinner hosted by a black woman and an Indian woman. Ya cain’t make this stuff up. CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Great White North’s version of PBS, describes the documentary this way:
In Deconstructing Karen, white women attend the wildest dinner party of their lives. The main course is a radically open and honest conversation on racism. While sipping wine and passing the bread basket, these women go on an eye-opening journey, discovering how they uphold white supremacy every single day. For some guests, there are epiphanies. For others, there is resistance. But for all the women, something changes, and they can never unknow the painful truths revealed over dinner.
Setting aside the commonly understood — and, let’s face it, racist — definition of a “Karen” as an entitled and irritating white woman, the documentary feeds on white guilt, which, as author and social researcher Shelby Steele has described, is an exaggerated effort by whites to atone for past sins and retain their moral authority by absolving and taking responsibility for the problems plaguing today’s black community — behavior that only reinforces those problems by branding blacks as victims rather than acknowledging them as equals.
The spectacle follows a group of white women who attend a bizarre dinner in Denver that’s hosted by Race2Dinner cofounders Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. As the New York Post reports, “Jackson, who is black, and Rao, who is Indian American, launched their dinner-party venture in early 2019 as a way to inform white women how they are racist — often charging the groups $2,500 a pop.”
We have to marvel at the entrepreneurial audacity of Jackson and Rao, who’ve found a way to emotionally abuse white women and get paid handsomely for doing so. Their heads-I-win, tails-you-lose approach sees white supremacist behavior wherever they look, whether through insufficient outrage toward a perceived racial slight or an expression of shock toward the same circumstance. Here, we get a sense of what a Marxist struggle session must be like.
“When people of color trust you enough to tell you their story, believe us without expressing shock because when you express shock, it pushes you away from the blame,” Rao lectured. Such behavior “upholds white supremacy,” she helpfully explains.
Jackson, for her part, tells her dupes, “I expect nothing of you because you have never given me anything. I can’t trust you.” When asked whether she’d ever trusted a white woman in her life, Jackson replied, “Let me put it this way: The ones I have trusted have come back to disappoint me.”
And so, if you’re a white woman wracked with white-supremacist guilt, these two grifters, Jackson and Rao, have got just the gig for you. For a mere $2,500, they’ll come to your home, eat your food, and tell you and your besties just what awful, racist, privileged human beings you are.
Thank you, ladies. May we have another?