Race2Dinner Experience

Let's workshop this piece about the Race2Dinner Experience, a "whiteness-dismantling initiative" that would seem to have been modeled after Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares

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Race2Dinner Experience

As we have seen with the garbage-bag policy of many schools and corporations (“using white garbage bags instead of black serves to dismantle the longstanding equation of white supremacy (black = garbage) and at the same time gives whites a taste of their own goddamn medicine”), we have witnessed a bloom of “whiteness-dismantling initiatives”—initiatives aiming to “provide people of color at least a small pocket of breathing room in an apple-pie culture of racism radiating from every porch flag”—like the popular Race2Dinner Experience, which features two non-white women (the Gordon Ramsays of antiracism) attending dinner parties—watching, scrutinizing, provoking—in order to “capture the inevitable signs of xenophobic and downright slave-master behavior” exhibited by the white host and her white guests (a perfect spectator-sport parallel to Kitchen Nightmares)—and always, yes, the same basic pattern, a pattern brought into stark relief in the charged excerpt below: (1) hounding all the white women in the room (each of whom dishes out $500 to attend these punking-flagellating-humiliating events of narcissism-feeding “racial reckoning”), hounding and hounding (Maoist-struggle-session style) ultimately until these red-faced women confess their “collusion with white supremacy,” and then right after the confessions (2) pointing out how the confessions themselves, on top of being too insincere, are somehow tainted by whiteness (whitespeak, white tears, white fragility, white values, white logic, white privilege, white silence).

SAIRA

Saira's gaze scalpels through the gathering of women, dissecting their unbearable whiteness with the same scrutinizing precision reserved for a newly-conquered serfdom. Shoulders squared and formidable like the buttresses of Stalin’s Kremlin, her eyes narrow upon her subjects with the mercilessness of Catherine the Great. Each accusatory syllable she utters lays claim to the room, annexing its very air (as if it were her own personal playscape). Having already proven the ruthlessness of her interrogation technique, Saira corners her next victim onto the chopping block with a glee almost too ferocious to restrain—as if savoring that never-old tremble of prey beneath the grim shadow of the guillotine blade.

“Actually Margaret, you didn’t say yours.”

MARGARET

As the clinking of wine glasses and silverware dies into a tense silence, all eyes turn to Margaret. Her complexion blooms with a telltale crimson, a silent beacon of her distress under the scorching scrutiny of Saira’s withering glare. The other white women—loyal to their “Queens,” grateful to be out of the hotseat—nod with grave servility.

“What?”

SAIRA

Saira's voice drips with a saccharine disdain that could rival the simpering malevolence of Dolores Umbridge, each note tinged with a venom thinly veiled by an outward composure. Saira would be the modern-day version of Annie Wilkes from Misery, itching to flip from maternal to violent in the flash of a razor’s edge, if only her wardrobe were more provincial, more homely. But her tailored blouse of silken black—power-chic, officious even—veers decidedly from the domestic, evoking nothing homespun. An authoritarian menace more cosmopolitan in appearance, people will most likely think of Hillary Clinton before Annie Wilkes.

“Your racist thing, thing that you’ve done. . . . You have something inside of you that’s racist. So you must have, you must have examples in your own life.”

MARGARET

Margaret’s eyes shimmer with vulnerability, wide and imploring like those of a woebegone puppy. She is the picture of trepidation, round face pink with bewildered embarrassment like young Neville Longbottom. Her demeanor shrinks, exactly the reaction expected from a white supremacist unaware of her guilty complicity. In her private silence of visible jugular and forehead throbs, she is clearly grasping for any answer—a lifeline—that might appease her tormentor. No doubt she knows by this point that to stay silent would be an expression of white silence: the practice of refusing to speak about race-related issues, a practice especially egregious—toxic, triggering, terrorizing—when a Black person is asking for something more than silence. The other white women squirm in painful empathy, chairs creaking in commiseration. Margaret’s panic is palpable, like a kid braced for the bully zeroing in on him at the bus stop before school. Rapid-fire jump cuts magnify the drama, the urgency and intensity, exactly like in Kitchen Nightmares. Beads of sweat on her brow betray her inner turmoil, the weight of accusation literally hunching her over soup (now salted with the essence of her ordeal).

“I also work in environmental engineering. I have absolutely no people of color, or minimal people of color (possibly the exclusion being slightly Hispanic).”

NARRATOR

In the measured timbre of a discount Sir David Attenborough, the narrator's voice makes an appearance. The quintessential white British accent lays down each syllable with the resonant and reassuring clarity of nature documentaries: detached and yet still imbued with a sense of wonder. (Given the credible and intellectual connotations of such knightly elocution, its inclusion almost seems to undermine one of the struggle session’s chief missions: namely, to show that white does not make right—indeed, that it often makes wrong.) The camera zooms in on Saira’s Hitlerian fingers tapping out a staccato rhythm of amphetamine impatience.

“Saira doesn’t like her attitude.”

SAIRA

Saira pounces on her wounded Karen with the gotcha tone of the apex predator she is—seasoned beneath a cunning cloak of victimhood. Her smile, regal in its decree of imperial contempt, skewers like Vlad the Impaler. Her hand gestures, timed impeccably for each incontrovertible pronouncement, reanimate in miniature the theatrical bombast of Benito Mussolini on his balcony.

“I can say a racist thing you’ve done. I can say it because it just happened! When you talked to me the way you just did [(stressing the “me,” as if Margaret failed to showcase enough groveling respect)]. This is how white women [(Saira gestures to all the sorry white women)] talk to us all the time. These are microaggressions.”

MARGARET

Margaret writhes with confusion and distress. She clearly does not understand her sin. That itself is a sign of whiteness (just like the alcoholic’s denial is a sign of alcoholism). She falls into the trap of trying to defend herself. That itself broadcasts her racist fragility at bullhorn decibels—yes, even though her Neville tone radiates a genuine desire to learn and be better as much as it radiates terror.

“But I say the exact same thing to my white girlfriends.”

SAIRA

Saira removes her glasses. A smug satisfaction unfurls across her face, as if she were a street apologist who just witnessed the unsuspecting atheist swallow the rhetorical bait of a leading question. Saira’s gaze, steely and probing, rivals that of Joseph Stalin's. It holds a chilling depth, penetrating beyond all pretense (yes, much like the General Secretary's notorious scrutiny of his subordinates). Saira’s voice has the force of Hitler deep in an oratorical pocket of jazz, each term bearing the heavy inevitability of historical edict.

“I don’t care if you talk to everybody like that. The way you just spoke to me was straight-up white supremacy. You actually just answered with racism!”

NARRATOR

The narrator provides context for why the cat torments the mouse instead of just killing it already, his detachment belying the cruelty on display. Our instinct as viewers might be to wish we could rush in and save Margaret, who has be reduced to a Biff-bullied George McFly from Back to the Future: insecure, stammering, twitching, mumbling. But the narrator, in effect, tells us not to let our emotions get the better of us. That would amount here to defending white supremacy.

“White supremacy is said to be hidden in innocuous phrases and banal behavior. The smallest things could be considered racist. It’s enough that a person from a minority group feels insulted.”

MARGARET

Margaret stands alone in a narrow hallway for a talking-head segment, the aftermath of the thumb-screw questioning still visible on her. Her face is sweaty and red, not in defiance (or rage at the feeling of having been raped by ideologues) but in a way that indicates an inner capitulation. It has been a victory of antiracism. She now seems ready to admit that she perpetuates racial injustices (often invisible to her kind) and that her most important contribution to society is to do whatever she can to stop committing them—or, more realistically, whatever she can to lessen their impact. That is her newfound responsibility: to curtail the harm she can never fully stop committing (barring, of course, going through with the sotto voce suggestion throughout the dinner: suicide, self-erasure, “kill yo self”). Indeed, a special—albeit twisted—honor comes with facing that you are a werewolf and then taking measures to prevent yourself from wreaking havoc come the full moon.

“Yes. Yes. I’m sounding terribly white.”

SAIRA

Saira is now in her own talking-head-segment next to Regina, the other interrogator (more like the good cop) and co-author of White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How To Do Better (with a guide to start the unlearning). These proud women of color, called to do a thankless job more traumatic in a way than ER surgery and Alaskan crab fishing combined, exchange sidelong glances and weary head shakes. Both look as exasperated as a thoroughly slimed crew of Ghostbusters after a long day of wrangling poltergeists into ecto-containment chambers. Viewers might get the feel that the information presented on the title card before the dinner footage began—namely, that both women are “available for private consultation”—is an offer no longer on the table. But despite the fatigue etched in their expressions, an unmistakable spark of unwavering commitment radiates through their spent demeanor.

“We know not to have unrealistic hopes. These women are completely oblivious to their racism. In some cases they are lying, but in most cases they sincerely believe they are not perpetuating white supremacy. I mean, let’s be realistic here. How far, really, can they be expected to grow? These women are over 40 in most cases! So we set doable goals. Sure, we would love to inspire some of them to become white traitors, who publicly stand to tell the grim truth about white supremacy, or even white abolitionists, who actively try to dismantle whiteness and to prevent it from reasserting itself. But we are reasonable. I am happy enough if I simply get someone to confess their whiteness and see the damage it does. Even if they keep all that tucked away in their private world, that is a precondition for moving on to exposing the white regime. Seeing the painful truth—that they uphold white supremacy each day of their lives—is something they can never unknow. . . . The next step? Well, we do have a resident white woman on staff. Lisa is an experienced and effective advocate for antiracist change. Her white features (bob, light skin) are more welcoming to stubborn cases like Margaret. Quite frankly we have seen Lisa attain results we never thought possible. So yes, the next step is to meet with Lisa. A one-hour post-dinner consult—that’s already part of the package. But these women need years—believe us: years!”

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