“Scrub for the Soul”: The successful $ 5,000 dinner for rich white women to discover their hidden racism

Regina Jackson and Saira Rao are two American women, one African American and the other Indian of American descent, who created an effort focused on teaching wealthy white women about their racist thoughts and behaviors and how to overcome them.

With this idea in mind, in 2019 they created an initiative called “Race2Dinner” with which they intend to promote conversations about race in the United States, however uncomfortable and difficult it may be.

“You are causing immeasurable pain and damage to black, indigenous and mixed-race women. We’re here to sit down with you and frankly discuss how “exactly” you are causing this pain and damage. Dinners are a starting point ”, says the letter to white women found on the project’s website.

This declaration of intent is accompanied by the rules of the game of these “Penance dinners”: each dinner costs $ 5,000 plus what the hostess (who must be white) spends on food and organization, participants – who can be up to eight white women – must have at least read White Fragility ‘(White Fragility), by American writer Robin DiAngelo, as a way to have context and to channel the conversation.

One of the discussions Jackson and Rao facilitate is asking white women if they’d rather switch places with one or the other. Majority of women choose Rao, who is an American Indian, over African American Jackson, showing how much they have internalized structural racism and how, even though they don’t like to express it, they understand. how hard it is to be black in America.

“So they know”, Rao said in an interview with The New York Magazine. “They know the whole ecosystem.”

Another highlight of the dinner is when their promoters ask white women to describe racist acts they’ve committed recently and prepare to challenge them to any breakouts.

“Not knowing is the classic behavior of white people”, explains Rao. “You don’t know, because it would ruin your whole image to be the perfect nice white lady.”

Rao points out that uncomfortable silences are usually a big part of dinner parties, and they help meet typical preconceptions about the breed.

This experience, which is not described as something strictly pleasant or economical, is attracting more and more audiences, to the point that the prices they charge for dinner have doubled in less than three years, starting in 2019 at $ 2,500 to $ 5,000,000 now.

“It’s a peanut,” Jackson says in the same interview. “People pay more than that to go to a yoga conference.”

But the question remains, what attracts white women to these dinners? According to Jackson and Rao, it is an unsightly but transformative experience, like a “Exfoliation for the soul.”

This experiment again attracted significant demand amid the pandemic due to the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matters movement, a time when Race2Dinner’s ‘punishment dinners’ began to be held in a virtual format.

Si bien esto les sirvió para mantenerse vigentes, ambas promotoras dicen que la virtualidad no es lo mejor para la experiencia, que se noura mucho de la interacción, de las miradas, del lenguaje corporal y de las sensaciones que se producen al compartir un espacio con other person.

One of the few in-person dinners last year took place three days after the Capitol attack. Rao said one woman, “the only woman in the group who seemed by far willing to do this work, period”, had a question at the end of the night. She looked at Jackson, and she looked at Rao, “And she said, ‘Do you see a difference between us and the people who broke into the Capitol?’ And we both said, ‘No.’ The Reunited Women, a group of business leaders and nonprofit organizations in Colorado, have lost their minds completely. ”Rao called back. “So that notion of not all white people, not all white women, hasn’t changed at all.”

With all of this, Jackson and Rao believe their message has started to permeate, and they are convinced that the way is to continue in the task of deconstructing the “toxic whiteness” that helps perpetuate racist and hate speech engrained in religion. American company.

They are now planning to write a book called: “White women: everything you already know about your own racism and how to do it better”; and they are launching another format called Race2-Community, which consists of an eight week seminar and focuses on “deconstructing whiteness”.

“Whiteness hurts people of color, but worry about yourself. Stop worrying about us, that’s also paternalistic, ”says Jackson.

This seminar is led by Lisa Bond, a white woman who became partners with Jackson and Roa after hosting one of their dinners. She says: “This idea that we white people have to go out there and do these great outside actions, that’s just white supremacy. “This work inside is hard work; it is the work that never ends ”.

Dinner is served.

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