Talk about a recipe for indigestion. Perhaps proving true the apocryphal saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” liberal white women across the country are paying big money to host/attend dinners at which they can be lectured about their “privilege” and “racism” — and perhaps be brought to tears in the process.
If you guess who’s coming to dinner here, no, it’s not Sidney Poitier. It’s the co-founders of “Race to Dinner” (RtD), “Regina Jackson, who is black,” the Guardian reports, “and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American,” whatever that’s supposed to mean (perhaps another 1/1,024th genealogy result is in the offing).
How it works is that a “white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women — often strangers, perhaps acquaintances,” the Guardian informs. Once there, Jackson and Rao “challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious,” as the paper puts it — and all for a measly $2,500.
I perhaps would partake — right after paying $1,500 to be kicked hard in the shin with a steel-toed boot — but no dice. Not only do the activists say they’ve written off the 53 percent of white women who voted for President Trump, but also that white men are completely off the list.
“White men are never going to change anything,” the Guardian quotes Jackson as saying. “If they were, they would have done it by now.” These are the people who are going to teach us about prejudice, mind you.
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At the dinners, the white women are asked one by one, “‘What was a racist thing you did recently?’” the Guardian relates. And, unsurprisingly, these attendees appear to be embodiments of leftist clichés.
The paper cites, for example, dinner host Jess Campbell-Swanson (I’m shocked at the hyphenated last name — shocked, I tell you!). “‘I want to hire people of color. Not because I want to be … a white savior. I have explored my need for validation.… I’m working through that.… Yeah. Um … I’m struggling,’ she stutters, before finally giving up” trying to encapsulate her whiteness woes, the Guardian writes.
But none of this is as striking as what the paper doesn’t relate: What’s actually on RtD’s website. You’re greeted with, “white women: let’s talk about racism and your complicity,” in bold letters, with the first one actually lower case. Then right below in its mission statement the site proclaims that black and brown “people of color” “are on the receiving end of white supremacy while white people… white women… YOU are on the giving end.”
It gets better, too (worse, actually). On the our-team page, Jackson writes of the violence that made a lasting impression on her growing up, the “violence perpetrated on innocent people going about their lives, by white people,” as she puts it.
Yet most violence against blacks is committed by other blacks, and 92 percent of all black homicide victims are killed by other blacks; moreover, Jackson’s bio states she was born in Chicago, where this percentage would be higher still. So if her problem was “white violence,” she must have lived a quite rarefied existence, indeed.
Furthermore, Jackson mentions Robert Kennedy’s assassination when complaining of the white violence, fascinating since he was shot by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. Of course, technically Arabs are Caucasian — but, then again, so are Indians such as Jackson colleague Saira Rao.
Speaking of Rao — whose bio states she is undergoing “the painful process of dismantling her own internalized oppression” — she complained in a tweet, “The American flag makes me sick,” the Guardian tells us. Another tweet reads, “White folks — before telling me that your Indian husband or wife or friend or colleague doesn’t agree with anything I say about racism or thinks I’m crazy, please Google ‘token’….”
Ironic here, though, is that another Jackson colleague is one Lisa Bond, who RtD lists as, and I quote, its “RESIDENT WHITE WOMAN.” Bond is “committed to deconstructing her whiteness,” her bio states, while also describing her as “the average Becky” (a derogatory term for a white female).
She is integral to the operation, though: The $2,500 fee includes “post event consulting with our Resident White Woman,” as RtD’s website puts it.
Of course, perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone monetized certain whites’ masochistic tendencies. But you can still be a white punching bag on the cheap. In November I reported on the “Deep Equity” curriculum, which without charge instructs that a white person should accept how he’ll be learning about overcoming his white privilege his “whole life.”
Then there was the 2019 “anti-racism” event where whites weren’t allowed to ask questions. Just sit and listen.
But RtD’s dinners certainly are cheaper than a Baltimore college professor’s 2015 proposal: that whites give all their money to black people. Business has been good, too. In less than a year, “15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US,” the Guardian tells us.
Other than bitterness, bile, and leftist bromides, though, one could wonder what’s served at RtD events. Certainly not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; it has been suggested that offering one to the wrong person could be “racist.” Forget cauliflower perhaps, too, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once likened growing it to an act of colonialism. Don’t register “unwoke” disapproval, either, as British leftists asserted years ago that saying “yuck” in response to foreign food can reflect bigoted tendencies (at least if you’re a toddler). Sheesh, against this backdrop, RtD almost seems sane.
Of course, one could just mock RtD, targeting it with merciless sardonic wit.
But I’ve already done that. So let’s get serious.
While it’s easy to dismiss the self-flagellating white women as self-absorbed, a characterization no doubt often accurate, it’s also true that many actually are searching and soul-searching. But RtD’s opening line, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” raises other questions: What was a lustful thing you did recently?
What was a greedy thing you did recently?
What was a prideful thing you did recently?
What was an envious thing you did recently?
Then again, we could just sum up: What was a sinful thing you did recently? The point?
Our civilization has “racism” on the brain. Even if we do accept this Lexicon of the Left term, “racism” is simply a sub-category of wrath, which itself is just one of the Deadly Sins. Racism is not the end-all and be-all — you could purge every vestige of it from yourself and still be a horrible person.
In other words, while moderns might scoff at Puritans, we are with race what we fancy they were with sex: completely hung-up. We perceive impure “racist” thoughts, words, and deeds everywhere and seek to purge them and punish those guilty with the zeal of any ISIS jihadist.
Yet all this value-signaling just further blinds us to how what mainly ails our nation has nothing to do with race. Lust is a characteristic problem, for instance, with licentious thoughts, words, and deeds everywhere, encouraged, and even celebrated. Hence our Great Sexual Devolution. Then, of course, there’s the veil of moral relativism which facilitates this blindness.
As to what leads to that, RtD’s website states, “In the end, we hope white women choose gender over whiteness.” But how about choosing godliness over both?
This gets at the real issue. To paraphrase Belgian author Émile Cammaerts, “When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they start to believe in nothing. It’s that they’ll believe in anything.”
Everyone needs meaning in his life, and in our atheistic time people so often attempt to fill that God-shaped hole at their core with worldly agendas. But as you fill yourselves with fine food, ladies, know that top-dollar value-signaling won’t satisfy — nor will it improve the world. You’d accomplish far more by just giving the $2,500 to the poor.
Image: monkeybusinessimages via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
