If you’ve ever had the misfortune to engage with race hustlers on the internet, you will be familiar with their refrain that deigning to explain their hateful ideology — to the limited extent that their beliefs form a coherent ideology and aren’t just thinly veiled hate — is a form of labor that they deserve reparations-style compensation for.
This is a logically untenable position, and unless you’re willing to cut a check right there on the spot, it’s a conversation-ender — which is fine for them. This kind of approach would be counterproductive if actually convincing people of anything by appealing to their reason and morality were actually the goal. It’s not.
They were never really interested in dialogue, which implies an equal exchange of ideas between the parties involved in the pursuit of some sort of consensus like would happen in a civilized society. Rather, racialist politicking, looting, etc. are means to the end of collecting a check as compensation for whatever historical wrong they are capitalizing on at any given moment.
That’s where a pair of racialist pieces of work — a black lady named Regina Jackson and an Indian woman named Saira Rao — enter the frame. They have pioneered a new business model in the form of a radical re-education program for white women called Race to Dinner.
A 2020 article from The Guardian explains:
A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”
Rao and Jackson believe white, liberal women are the most receptive audience because they are open to changing their behavior. They don’t bother with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. White men, they feel, are similarly a lost cause. “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now,” Jackson says.
White women, on the other hand, are uniquely placed to challenge racism because of their proximity to power and wealth, Jackson says. “If they don’t hold these positions themselves, the white men in power are often their family, friends and partners.”
It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US.
So to summarize, white liberal women with entirely too much disposable income for their own good and guilty consciences (the product of consumption of shows like The View) assuage their racialized anxieties by inviting a pair of race grifters into their homes for the world’s most awkward dinner party, graciously feed them, cut them a $2,500 with a “sorry” note, and in exchange receive racist abuse throughout the course of the meal.
The level of sadomasochism is nearly incomprehensible.