Dinner Party From Hell

Is there any force more powerful in America today than white guilt? That is the question that springs to mind reading Regina Jackson and Saira Rao’s new book, White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better. Jackson and Rao, who get invited and paid to ruin perfectly lovely dinner parties by lecturing attendees about their “complicity in upholding white supremacy,” have found the white guilt—the soft spot in the skull of earnest liberals—and just keep poking their thumbs into it.

Jackson and Rao are the founders of an organization called Race2Dinner. For $5,000 the two women will attend your eight-person dinner party and bring along “Lisa Bond, our Resident White Woman.” For that price, they will berate you about your racism. They will share their own experiences with racism, which sometimes don’t sound like actual racism. But if you object or even if you agree, they will tell you that’s what white women do and you’re part of the problem. The two have a lot of observations about “what white women do.” White women are mean to each other, for instance. When they are accused of racism white women accuse black women of being “angry” or “crazy.” White women also say they’re not racist. White women like dinner parties. And they like to say they’ve donated money to the ACLU. If you suggest that black women may be mean to each other or that they may like dinner parties, you’re also a white supremacist. Because how would you know? Don’t say you have black friends because that too would be a sign of white supremacy.

Questioning whether spending $5,000 to have people call you names is also “white supremacy,” and the authors explain, “we are tired of it.” The fact that you are complaining about the price is evidence that you “see this work as charity. You doing us a favor. … White supremacy culture has you believing that you are doing us a favor by even caring about racism or antiracism. This results in your incessant demands that we educate you—on your own racism, on a system you created to harm us for your benefit. For free.”

Too often, the authors explain, black and brown women have “provided free labor for you.” It used to be slavery but now they are brought into boardrooms to discuss diversity, “tagged in Facebook conversations where