Much has been said about anti-racism, the formal name of the ideology advocated in critical race theory. This is the self-parody version. Except that the organizers and participants lack the self-awareness to realize how out of touch and completely idiotic they all are.
Behold Race2Dinner, a reality show if only it were televised. It's a scheme where groups of 8 white women pay a couple rich women of color, Regina Jackson (capital-b Black) and Saira Rao (Indian American), $5,000 to meet them "for dinner" over Zoom (that's right, they don't even get dinner for it) in order to be lectured about their racist micro-aggressions and grow as people. There's a designated crying room on the rare occasions they gather in-person for an actual dinner. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from The Cut's ludicrously polite article:
Spoiler!
When they first started out, they charged $2,500 per dinner, to be covered by the host or divided among her guests.
“That’s peanuts,” Jackson told me when we spoke over Zoom. “People pay more than that to go to a yoga conference.”
It only equates to 12 or 13% of my annual income. For one dinnerless dinner. So they doubled the price for their non-service, whereupon...
Spoiler!
(Bond ["Race2Dinner's resident white woman"] had initially balked at the cost, but after seeing a post from Rao and Jackson about how many white women balked at the cost, she resolved not to be like the others.)
Not being a racist sounds fucking expensive.
Spoiler!
...Jackson and Rao ask guests to describe
racist things they’ve recently done and press them on any evasions. Often the examples that emerge involve silence: failing to speak up or intervene. Sometimes they consist of thoughts or feelings: assuming that the Black teens pulled over in a white neighborhood must have been doing something wrong. Sometimes the guests struggle to think of what to say. “Not knowing is classic white behavior,” Rao told me. “You don’t know, because it would ruin your entire image of being the perfect, nice white lady. I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with this, being a white woman.”
Spoiler!
One of the past year’s few in-person dinners took place three days after the attack on the Capitol. Rao said that one woman — “the only woman in the group who seemed remotely willing to do this work, period” — had a question at the end of the evening. She looked at Jackson, and she looked at Rao, “and she goes, ‘Do you see any difference between us and the people that stormed the Capitol?’ And we both said, ‘No.’ ” The assembled women, a group of Colorado business and nonprofit leaders, “lost their entire minds,” Rao recalled. “So this notion of not all white people, not all white women — that is completely unchanged.”
To recap, these are supposed to be anti-racist gatherings.
Spoiler!
Begun in 2019 by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, Race2Dinner gathers groups of eight white women at the home of a white host, where Jackson and Rao facilitate a discussion about race over dinner. Early in the evening, for example, they will often ask the white women whether they would prefer to trade places with Jackson (who is Black) or Rao (who is Indian American). The women will almost uniformly choose Rao. “So they know,” Rao said. “They know the entire ecosystem.” The idea is to bring such submerged racial judgments to light, however uncomfortable this might make the white women. ...
Speaking of submerged racial judgments, personally I'd trade places with either of them in a heartbeat! I'd love to make $5,000 an evening doing literally nothing but explaining how I'm a victim! That sounds like an excellent racket and one damn easy life.
Anti-racism, so-called, is an industry, folks, and it can't be said that I've got more respect for it than I do for any other in particular. These women are not victims. None of them are. They are wussy, fragile, pathetic, entitled, disingenuous, elitist, snowflakey, arrogant snobs who are too good for the working class and too oblivious to realize how pampered and privileged all of them are compared not to other races, but to normal people.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 30 May 2021
