I read an article in The Guardian recently about this thing called Race2Dinner.
It’s not a new article, nor, indeed, is it a new program. But I think Race2Dinner captures something critical about the neuroses of certain professional class liberals and progressives.
Let’s talk a bit about that.
What is Race2Dinner?
Here’s how Race2Dinner works: a liberal white woman hosts a dinner party for 7 friends. Each one pays $2,500 to attend. The money goes to Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, two facilitators whose main qualifications appear to be their professional class status and their ‘correct’ woman of color identities according to identitarian political norms.
That’s the model, though they’ve changed it for the Covid era. Zoom ‘dinners’, a ‘resident white woman’, and so on. They’ve also drastically raised the price of the ‘service.’ But the basic idea remains the same.
As best I can tell, Jackson and Rao espouse politics that veer from radlib to ultra-progressive and back again. Neither sports any links to real leftist movements, though Rao’s political history is much better known than Jackson’s. From a profile in The Cut, both appear to trace their background to petty bourgeois career endeavors.
But what do they do at these dinners? They appear to lead liberal white women through some kind of quasi Maoist self-criticism session. Attendees seem like well meaning but confused liberals with far too much money on their hands. They’re women with weird enough psychological issues to make them want to pay thousands of dollars to women of color to scold them.
It feels gross.
It is gross.
Why, Though?
Why would anyone think it’s a good idea to create something like Race2Dinner? What’s the motive? It’s clear enough that the project is a clever grift that relieves foolish, rich white women of their money.
But we can set that aside for the moment. It seems to also have a vaguely political rationale. What’s that all about?
The Guardian presents Jackson and Rao’s politics as basically identitarian. They see white women as a group more open than white men to changing their behavior. White women, on this view, are also uniquely positioned to influence power (which Jackson and Rao assume is always held by white men).
In short, the whole theory turns on the ordering of social power according to identity.
As a thesis, there’s not much to say for this. It veers from the banal and obvious (e.g., white men, on average, are closer to power) to the reductive and silly (i.e., race and gender define the major groupings of power in society). Race2Dinner seems built around stamping out individual prejudices rather than actual power structures.
All that is pretty standard fare.
However, if we dip below the surface, I think the model also draws on cultural pressures that define who would be into this kind of thing. As I’ve pointed out in past writing on white women, misogyny makes it easier to pressure white women into accepting this kind of moral scolding.
White men, by contrast, are more likely to pursue outlets that allow them to retain some form of control. At the milder end, they might pursue workplace diversity initiatives. At the wilder end, maybe they’d hire a dominatrix. Either way, they keep their basic sense of power.
Again, Why?
Let’s talk more about that second why – why do people sign up for Race2Dinner?
Here we return to the psychology and politics of white liberal guilt. Guilt drives these rich white women to sign up.
This is a far more powerful force in liberal and progressive politics than many realize. It’s incredibly important to the distinction between socialism, on one hand, and radlib and progressive politics, on the other. It even burrows its way into local activist orgs, especially when those orgs become too white.
White liberal guilt opens the door to every manner of grifter, from the financial to the political. Some grifters turn white liberal guilt into a business model. And that’s what Race2Dinner looks like to me. It looks like some kind of race flavored, pseudo-scientific therapy. Almost like the in-person equivalent to reading a book like White Fragility.
In the end, I think the entire experience shows the sharp limits of politics that are divorced from working class aims and concerns. Even (especially?) when those politics fly the ‘progressive’ flag.
