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News: Just because I do not
want Critical Race Theory taught to my children
in school, does not mean that I am a racist, damn it!
We know he's not a racist or all the other things
the liberal media is trying to label him with.
When you look at what happened in the last refugee
crisis in Europe, what has changed?
These are not refugees from Syria.
These are refugees from Ukraine.
These are Christians, they are white...
Saira: I cannot remember a time that I have not woken up
in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
People are so unwilling
to have the conversation.
Regina: White women,
you have got to get on board for humanity
to have any hope.
The only thing that's going to change this,
is if we change the cultural DNA.
And the only way you can change the cultural
DNA is through personal human interactions.
And we know that breaking bread with people
is the best way to do that.
[glass clinking]
So I want a show of hands
of everyone at this table who is racist.
I must confess
that over the past few years, I have been gravely
disappointed with the white moderate
who is more devoted to order than to justice.
I have been in this work for a very long time.
I marched in the sixties.
I have worked on presidential campaigns.
And what I know is that Race2Dinner
allows us to have radically honest conversations.
[laughing] 'You hurt my feelings.'
The market we have identified is white women
who call themselves liberal or progressive or Democrat
to not only change themselves but begin to change
their children.
Their families, their coworkers, their friends.
The foot of white supremacy and patriarchy
is firmly on their necks just like it's on ours.
Should text it to you? Yeah, you can text it to me.
I know it sounds bizarre, but I used to be a white feminist
a white woman trapped in a brown body.
And then I woke up
and I started doing anti-racism work.
So when I first started talking about racism,
I think the thing that I was totally unprepared for
was when, you know,
you just talk about white people,
you say the words white people,
and those white people want to come and kill you.
Even if it means one white woman at a time.
I'm going to keep going.
We're going to face time her.
Good thing I put on my face.
She put on her face for you.
Nothing like a face.
Okay, let's do this.
That's all right.
Can I just say one thing that we were laughing about,
which you know...white women being late is classic
and 'kisses'.
Got a lot of people
coming in...
Okay, okay.
Every white woman that we can get down
this road actually has tremendous ability
to start turning their own networks, which are huge.
Okay, so here's-- Okay. Okay.
Are you ready?
Regina: Potential deals?
She's so dramatic she's worse than me!
Saira: Holy shit. Look at this.
Oh my God... [laughter]
Genevieve: Like how many dinners...?
Regina: Well, what we're looking at
let me tell you, Genevieve, is licensing the business,
as in franchising.
Well, that's what women are asking for.
So that's what... women of color are asking.
And so that's what we will be working on tomorrow.
And then we'll be meeting with Christal
So on that, I'll add that.
Genevieve, you would fit so good into my family.
We all are so loud.
And there's nine of us
and my daughter will go, 'Mom, you guys scare me.
Everybody's talking and nobody's listening!'
I've never heard that before.
I've been following Saira on social media for a long time.
I wanted to be Saira's friend.
She's so triggering, and it's so good.
It's so needed.
We had the dinner at my house.
I wanted to, like, graduate and be like,
I have my certificate, and I, like, survived a dinner
with Race2Dinner, and, like, here's my certificate.
And now I'm like, super woke,
which is all white supremacy.
Like, every single bit of that,
every single bit of that is all totally white supremacy.
I want to do a Boomerang with the three of us.
Okay.
What is a boomerang?
you're gonna love it.
Let's do it right now.
There's no noise it's just movement.
Hilarious! the Energizer bunny.
I'm one of the Beckys.
I'm somewhere. And here's the thing.
I don't know what kind of Becky I am,
but I'm pretty sure that my black and brown friends
know exactly what kind of Becky I am.
Before we go any further,
what is a Becky or a Karen?
In general
It's a pejorative term,
mostly used for describing an entitled white woman.
The worst of the Karens
use their societal privilege
to oppress people of color, most commonly
calling a manager or worse, calling the cops.
There is an African-American man
I am in Central Park. He is recording me,
and threatening myself and my dog.
Please send the cops!
Illegally selling water without a permit
On my property. It's not your property.
I'm asking you if this is your property.
You're accusing me of a crime, correct?
I am not a racist person.
But you know what? You need to go home.
You don't know what a signal is? Guess what, even in China
they have signal lights!
I hear you have a problem with these gentlemen
having a barbecue here at the lake.
Why are you taking the posters down?
Because of all lives matter.
She is crazy.
You're crazy.
Where is their safety?
There is no safety.
I would kill a ...
but the law says I can't kill the ...
La la la, I love you too.
You fucking bitch.
Get out of here, man. I'm going to call 911.
I'm sorry I can't hear you,
I am being threatened by a man in the ramble!
please send the cops immediately!
Go on your reservation!
Nasty Mexican dog! Nasty Mexican dog!
I don't care about your Facebook or your video.
I play games where you get fucked to death.
The term has been criticized for being sexist,
but what is more Karen-like behavior than being furious
for being called a Karen?
Either way,
there is one good thing that the term has produced
for white women it has raised awareness
about the intersection of race and gender
and how that plays out in this society.
Every single day.
Race, it's an urgent issue, although it's
one of those issues, that,
is anybody ever going to come to the same place?
I feel like I get discriminated against
on a lot of different fronts.
Maybe because I'm a female,
maybe because I'm a blonde female.
maybe because I drive a truck.
Being white in Denver is almost harder sometimes, because
it's the white picket fence that we're all from
and we have everything given to us.
And so sometimes I feel like it's opposite.
Hello!
Hi how are you!
I'm Saira. I'm Michele.
Regina. Nice to meet you
Nice to meet you.
Thank you all.
Thank you for being here this evening.
We want to have a conversation that we believe is
very important
and one of the reasons why the United States
can't really move forward
is because we can never have the conversation about race.
My name is Saira Rao.
thank you all so much for coming.
Like Regina said, we have this elephant in
the room that's killing us all.
White supremacy and racism
is bad for everyone, including white people.
I think we have a window right now, and you all are the key.
White women are the key.
You have more power than you'll ever know.
In this time and place
If you all can join us and join our sisterhood,
the world changes.
That's why I'm here, because
it all starts with conversation.
So thank you
sincerely for being here, because
it's not an easy conversation.
And you didn't have to be here. You chose to be here.
I'd love if everyone could just go around the table
and briefly introduce yourselves, say
a little bit about yourselves and why you're here.
I have two young children,
and it's important for me that they grow up
colorblind, right?
I'm an artist, and a barista
and I learned about this through Saira's Facebook
the reason I'm here is because
I always thought of myself as being kind of woke.
I mean, you know, my best friend is Mexican.
My partner is Bi-Racial.
We have these conversations all the time.
But then following your posts and interacting on your
posts, I realize
I'm not doing that great.
I feel like there's a racist
white man living in my brain and it's my dad's voice.
I'm a descendant of slave traders
who believes very strongly in telling ugly history.
It's an honor to be here, and I'm willing and wanting
to get uncomfortable
because I think that's what we need to do.
Thanks Holly. Absolutely right.
I am half-Mexican, half-white,
and my family is every shade under the sun in it.
And so for me, race has never really been a thing?
Hi, Hazel.
I do believe that this is such an important conversation,
especially because I do have two children
that are young that it's on us to do better, to do more.
My kids are biracial, so my husband is Hispanic
and white. And I don't see color.
I don't see so how she said I'm blinded to color.
Like it doesn't faze me at all.
We all when we bleed, we bleed red.
I'm here tonight because I'm confused.
I watched my son
feel victimized.
He felt that because he was a white male,
that he was a victim of reverse racism.
We're all human
We all have a light
a heart shining within us that needs to be seen.
We all need to be a little bit better
and just recognize the love in each and every one of us.
Every single dinner without fail.
We've got like the woke wars.
And so it really is this like being wedded
to how not racist you are, but it's a start.
It's a start.
And you've got to start somewhere.
One of the things we know
is that you cannot change what you don't acknowledge.
So we're here to help you acknowledge some things
and to try and work on changing some things.
So I've heard this a couple of times already
colorblind and you don't see color,
and I'm just going to drop the bomb here.
That's white supremacy.
Colorblindness is white supremacy.
You even said, I don't see the color of anyone's skin
because when we cut ourselves open, we all bleed red.
So you acknowledge that you see the red.
How can you not see the color of our skin?
Because to me, I mean, I have my husband's Hispanic.
I've dated every race. It doesn't...
I see inside.
I see your love, your morals, your values.
I see what we have in common.
Like my husband, we enjoy doing things together.
Like the different things I don't see...
Maybe like your experience
in the world is different than theirs?
You walk through the world
with a different experience because you are a white woman.
What is the number one
thing that white women feel
the desperate need to be, over and above everything else?
Nice.
White women feel the desperate need to be nice.
It's white women's niceness that is killing us all.
And so what does nice mean for white women?
It means smiling.
It means being polite.
It means not calling out
oppression when it happens.
When you say you're colorblind, you erase us.
Marni: You're not being defensive as well?
I don't understand.
We're all women, I mean...
We are sharing our truth!
And I'm sharing my truth too!
I mean, that to me is I mean, to me is...
We need to educate ourselves so much
because we have no idea.
Is that what this conversation is about, some education?
You know, change requires pain.
Most people will not change until they have
what I call a significant emotional event.
And I also want to lay a couple of other things down.
You mentioned it
and you've mentioned it being married
to a black person or brown person, having brown or black
children does not make you impervious to racism.
You cannot,
frankly,
fuck your way out of racism.
Let me ask you a question.
How many of you would trade
places with a black person in this society?
Raise your hand.
I don't know the answer to that.
Well, it's yes or no.
How many of you would do it?
I mean, I dated a Hispanic, very dark-skinned...
No, no, I'm not talking about Hispanic.
The question is -
But I was gonna have children, so I spent many years thinking
of myself as having very dark-skinned children.
Question is,
how many of you would be willing to trade places
in this society with a black person?
I think I would. Absolutely.
Okay.
I'm not saying there's not racism.
Absolutely not.
It's to say I don't see it.
Yeah, but you know, how racist this country is -
Not to the degree that you do.
Oh, no. You will never know.
You know, in this country,
we created the criminalization of black people.
And when your skin
is seen as a weapon, you're never unarmed.
And that's why black boys and men and women are dying
in the street with their hands up
I was born in 1950, and everything was
in black and white.
I am myself now almost 70, four generations out of slavery.
And that should tell you something.
I am a mother.
I have two adult children.
I have four grandchildren.
Eleven siblings.
And each of them has children.
So this work is so important to me.
The more you think about white privilege and racism,
the more you get
why white people don't want to talk about it.
They just want to be in denial, denial, denial.
I don't think as a black person,
I have the luxury
of sitting around and doing nothing
because the lives of my grandchildren
and my children depend on me being active in this space.
We have to be in this because our life depends on it.
We have one rule, and that is if you're going to cry,
leave the table and go into the living room.
It's right there.
And there's some Kleenex and whatever you need.
Does anybody know why we would have that rule?
Because this is about white supremacy.
And not our personal feelings, right?
Mm hmm.
And when a white woman starts crying, what happens.
All the attention goes to her?
Yeah, all the attention.
So that's the only rule that we have.
Does anyone want to cry right now?
No? Okay. All right.
So I want to show of hands of everyone at this table
who is racist.
No, you gotta go. Sorry, sis.
So I saw a couple of people surprised
that I raised my hand. When I said that I was racist,
I'm racist against black people.
So it's institutional.
Indians are institutionally racist against black people.
The only person at this table that cannot be
institutionally racist against anybody is who?
Regina.
White supremacy is
what keeps Americans from having these conversations
about race.
And I think it was the great
Frederick Douglass who said,
'Power cedes nothing.
It never has and it never will.'
So what that means for us is white
men are not going to give up their power.
So that means we have to take it.
Deconstructing Karen is dismantling
your own white supremacy.
And deconstructing that for me was actually like
removing the toxin from my body
where I could start acknowledging
all of the poison that I've been swallowing
and believing. It's deprogramming yourself.
The only way I can
say this, is I feel like I had to
break myself and shatter into so many pieces,
and I'm slowly putting myself together.
It has made me have to unlearn
everything
It is deconstructing
all of the harm that has been caused to me
and all the harm that I have caused.
And it is painful as fuck.
My parents were Indian immigrants.
They'd come over after
the Immigration Act of 1965 and at that time in Richmond
there were black people and there were white people.
But there was really nobody who looked like me.
Growing up in Richmond, Virginia
we were always taught as Indian kids to assimilate
and it was made very clear we were assimilating
to white culture, not black culture.
The first time I felt 'other' was in the fourth grade
and we'll call this boy, Evan.
Evan asked me to go with him
I'm not really sure where we're supposed to go,
but people used to go together at that time,
and I was super psyched
you know, I was the only nonwhite kid in my class.
I couldn't believe that this was happening.
He was very popular.
The next day, he said, Meet me in the library.
And I was like, My God,
Evan's bringing me a Rubik's Cube
or Skittles or something.
And we go into the library, and he says to me, Saira,
I'm really sorry. I can't go with you.
My mom says that I can't go with black girls.
I remember going home,
going outside to the front yard, and I found a big rock,
and I just started rubbing my skin,
trying to take the brown off of my skin
until I bled.
My mother came home from work that day, and I was sitting
on the front stoop, and I just looked at her
and I said, You you did this to me.
You made me look like this.
My mother
was a doctor at the Veteran's Administration,
and she wore her sari to work every day in the seventies
and the eighties and the nineties in Richmond, Virginia.
And sometimes she'd come home from work
and talk about how some of the patients
would call her the N-word or Paki
or she smells bad, and they're not going to let
someone like her check them.
And she would say, Okay, well, the next time
you can see a white guy, you're gonna be dead.
So you know, bend over and I'll give you a rectal exam
and then she had to actually give these people rectal exams.
Think about how humiliating that was for her.
I loved my mother more than I could
possibly love anyone on the planet.
And I said to her, please stop wearing the sari,
wear normal clothes.
And she just smiled and shrugged
and the next day
she put the sari right back on and went back to work.
People are complicated.
As much as my mom
wanted us to be white, frankly,
she was totally unwilling to give up herself in many
respects for white culture.
Once it became very clear to me
that we were not supposed to bring this up to her
I remained silent. In order to survive, be successful
I decided I was going to do everything in my power
to A, fit in and as a result, make her proud
and make her believe that the choices that
she made to leave her entire family
in India behind had to be worthwhile.
A hundred percent.
Racism is the elephant in every room
in America, in white America.
And frankly, in my experience,
and in the Indian-American community as well,
nobody wants to talk about it.
My sister and I didn't talk about it.
No one in my family talked about it.
If you don't talk about it, maybe it'll just go away.
I think news we could all agree makes things worse
than when we were younger and our age, right?
No that's not true, how does news make things worse?
Because like when I was younger and the things that were
that were shown were not shown when I was younger.
I feel like it's more rampant now.
People have a free pass to just go
and be their white supremacist self on display
because there's a free pass for it in my opinion.
I mean, given our current political climate
and the leader of our country...
When I was in Charleston, South Carolina
last summer and I get into my Lyft,
and the guy turned around
and looked at me and he said, lady,
he goes, I hate to have to say this to you,
but if I get pulled over,
you're just another black woman
he's black, and he said, put your hands up.
Do as they say.
Do not make any trouble.
Michele: He actually told you that?
Yeah, of course.
Of course.
To protect him? And to protect me.
That's the life he lives. That's his reality.
But that's insane.
That's his reality
whether it's insane or not!
No I'm not saying he's insane. I'm saying -
I get it.
But what we're saying is, this is America.
I want to ask also to stop acting shocked.
So part of white feminism is acting so surprised
when we tell you - Marni: But it is!
Why are you telling us not to act the way that we act?
It is surprising.
Because that upholds white supremacy.
So what I'm saying, I'm asking all of you,
that when we express to you and I'm not just
talking about Regina and I, because
when this dinner is over, like this is a blip, right?
You go back into the world,
and when people of color trust you enough to tell you
their story, believe us without expressing shock.
Because when you express shock
it pushes you away from the blame.
That makes me very angry because I don't look at that.
I was born in 1950, you know what I expect of white women?
Not a damn thing. Nothing.
I expect nothing of you because you have never
given me anything.
I can't trust you.
Okay?
But how can we come together when you say something like,
I will never trust a white woman?
If we had a really heart-to-heart talk,
you said you would never trust me?
Well, I would have to see.
Out of all your years in life,
you've never trusted a white woman.
Well, let me put it this way.
The ones I have trusted have come back
to disappoint me.
That's sad.
It's interesting to me that Marni, that you're
when Regina is talking about her feelings
and how she doesn't trust
white women, instead of saying, my God.
Well like, why? Like, what about me?
That's what you said, would you trust me?
What if we had a heart-to-heart conversation?
Why are your feelings so hurt?
From both of you, though
has been, about
like a hate against us.
It's been very aggressive.
That really hurts me that somebody would not
But why are your feelings more important than the reality
of the violence of our lives?
Imagine if your husband beat you and you confront him.
Would you go and massage his back
while you're confronting him?
Or would you actually
be really angry and hurt that he's been beating you?
But that's where we come to
when you've been a victim of abuse.
And white women have abused us our whole lives.
Why do we have to hold your hand?
Can't we just tell you, hey, you guys have hurt us!
This is what you've done.
Now make it right!
I know, Saira.
And when she says she doesn't trust white women,
and I consider her
a friend of mine,
I also understand why she doesn't trust me.
I don't take that personally.
Marni: I'm asking a question on what could you do?
Because as a white woman, I mean -
We have a lot of work to do.
We have so much work to do. And so I don't
I don't take it personally because I understand that like
That is her life.
But to say, you're her friend, but she doesn't trust you.
It's also a hard thing for me to accept, to say
this is my friend but she -
But also, why on earth is it about you?!
The fact and also I want to come back to
why would you say that we're spewing hate?
We're telling you what it's like to be us.
But you know everybody, you don't have to look
at my color of my skin saying I'm white, to not trust me.
Why don't you look past that I'm white
and say she's a good person?
Her entire life, we've never given her a reason to trust us.
Everything is not...
[crosstalk]
Not every white person is bad!
I think that part of what...
Regina: I have this discussion with people
that I know, friends
lawyers, everybody, and they'll say, well, Regina,
you know, there are some good white people.
And I go, well,
what have the good white
people been doing for the last 450 years?
What have you been doing?
Obviously, it's not enough because nothing has changed.
When you're in discussions with white people
about racism, they like to say, well, MLK
changed the world.
And he did it with nonviolence.
And my question to them is, well,
if he changed the world, why are we still here?
50 plus years after his death?
I just want you to get clear.
We're trying to tell you what it's like.
People's feelings are hurt.
We're spewing hate.
So we are trying to to tell you.
And the first thing that a lot of you
at this table have done has been this.
And I want you to sit with that.
I just want you to sit with that.
That's all.
Thank you.
Have a great day.
Bye.
I have a phone call coming up with my Westchester people.
We have two hosts in Westchester
and again,
you know, if it's if it's out of town,
they're they're doing a lot more fundraising.
So it's it's that much more.
Now they have to go and they have to
not only tell friends and family
and people in their network like...sweetheart...
Yeah. Yeah, we do. Okay.
Can I have some space right now? Thanks bud.
For me?
Yeah. Oh, thank you.
That's so nice.
Sharing is caring.
We have a host that was like,
you know, Genevieve,
this is really important to me, and -
Hey! that's one of Desmond's paper people.
Drop it.
Sorry, buddy. Here ya go. This is...
This is like, all day long, losing my train of thought.
Here they are.
Hey, is this Shannon and Diana?
Yay!
So I love hearing all the work that you're doing.
And I mean, you said 100 people showed up to that
first meeting. How many are, like, still...
Saira: I like Genevieve a lot.
I think that she's extremely endearing
and kind and really wants to do good.
We need a white woman in that position
because white women
have to hear this from other white women.
And I'm from New York, and I can tell you
from personal experience that we need it in New York.
Saira: We're not credible in some ways
until, frankly, we get in the room
and we have some time to work with these women
but before the dinners
white women respond much better
to other white women than they would with us.
And that, in a nutshell, is white supremacy.
All right well thank you both so much.
I really appreciate it. And we will...
You're going to hear from me very soon.
What else happened today baby?
We had tech class.
Oh!
Is that where you emailed me from?
Yeah. We were using
they taught us how to delete all the spam emails.
Have you also figured out how to delete all the other
20 email addresses you've created?
Yep. Really?
Yep. Have you done that?
Not yet. I figured...
Let's do that next.
Okay, so we're having a vegetarian meal.
Why don't you put him to work.
Can you
have you used a bigger knife before? Yep. No.
He looks like he's in control.
Saira: And then the next thing you have is a finger that...
Well, we'll work through it.
We'll work with a cut off finger.
Cheers!
Cheers.
You know, when we were at some dinner
and my dad asked,
you know, who is an inspiration in your life?
And Eliana said, You!
Did you!
That really makes me feel good.
Thank you.
It's because you're super brave and you like
speak out against what's wrong.
So that's cool.
That's, oh, my God.
Thank you.
That's why we do what we do.
Yeah.
Thank you, Eliana.
Yeah you just tell the truth, right?
That's a good lesson in life.
Always tell the truth. And be brave.
This just became the best thing that happened to me in 2020.
How many times have you
guys had a conversation
directly about race in school or with your friends?
Never. Not really.
Once on Martin Luther King Day
but all we talked about the I Have a Dream speech.
My friend's little sister
is being bullied for being Jewish, and she
got a note saying to kill herself.
And, like, the school is not really doing anything about it.
She said that she didn't believe in
Santa Claus because she was Jewish.
And then a bunch of people, held her down and
Saira: Oh, my God
And beat her up, and there was one or two kids who
tried to help her but there wasn't much they could do.
And that's the thing.
It's the silence of the the masses that...you know.
Yeah.
In Spanish class, an anonymous person
said that I should leave the school for being brown.
And every single person
at the table and the table behind us heard.
And they just went back to writing.
We all get lumped together, right?
Yeah.
Growing up, this happened all the time.
And I told my parents one time, my mom,
and basically she was like, just
stop.
Like, this is the way it is.
And so I never said anything again.
And that's what part of the
I felt like I deserved it.
This is this is just part and parcel.
And so it felt like a little bit
of a victory to me that he at least told me.
He felt unsafe.
He felt unsafe at the school.
It's a lot for kids to deal with.
I'm very sorry, baby.
I am too.
It's OK.
Do we have a white person ban in this country right now?
Do we have a white woman ban in this country right now?
Do we have a Christian ban in this country right now?
Do we have a Jewish ban in this country?
What ban do we have in this country right now?
Muslim.
We have a Muslim ban in this country.
And it makes sense with what happened with my son
because the day before he got in the fight with a friend
who was not a friend but was Muslim,
the day before,
I guess on the Internet, it was Kill the Muslims Day.
Oh, my God. That's a thing?
He didn't know about it.
I didn't know about, but the school knew about.
So then when he got into a fight with a
with a boy in his class who's Muslim, that apparently
had been going on for years.
Of course, then my son, it makes sense.
The school would be hypersensitive
but as a mother, how do I explain that to my son?
Like, I don't know what is the right thing to say.
So I'll tell you what, that's your privilege.
And you're acknowledging it.
To say I don't know how to
talk to my son.
He experienced in his mind and in my mind,
he absolutely didn't.
He experienced a tiny little fraction,
my little eight year old boy,
who's the sweetest little boy on the planet.
His first week of school in the second grade,
a little white girl told him, Your skin is disgusting.
You don't belong in this school.
How can we help our kids?
How can we change it like we have young children.
What would you say?
What do we do as parents with young children?
How do we change this to not...
Acknowledging your racism and your white privilege
and having a conversation with your kids
from the time that they were little, and in step one,
truly, and it seems easy, but right now
we're seeing that it's not, is not getting fragile.
And by fragile, not getting angry, not getting defensive,
not getting upset and believing us.
Like, please,
whatever you do when you leave here,
do not teach your kids to be colorblind.
Do not talk about colorblindness.
Don't say that,
that I don't see the color of your skin.
And we cut ourselves open, it's bleeding red.
The thing that really needs to happen,
frankly, is white women need to come together.
You guys need to come together because until
and unless you come together, there's no hope for us.
And right now, what's happening is
white Democratic women are attacking
white Republican women and vice versa.
And you both are taking
the moral high ground, and you're all the same.
I knew! I knew that Donald Trump was going to win.
The minute he started talking about Mexican rapists,
I knew that was going to be a benefit, not a detriment.
They're bringing drugs.
They're bringing crime.
They're rapists.
They want to change your religion. I don't think so.
Not going to happen.
I am the least racist person in this room.
Are you racist?
I am the least racist person that you have ever met!
President Trump is not backing away
from his stunningly racist attack
on a group of minority members of Congress.
Instead, he's trying to defend it.
They're not happy here. They can leave.
Why do we want these people from, quote,
all these shithole countries here?
What the hell is going on?
But what Donald Trump's presidency has done for me
has completely
taken the veil off of white liberals and white Democrats.
And your complicity in Donald Trump.
Over the next few months
you know, I started paying a lot more attention.
I typed out an essay.
I'm a brown woman who's breaking up
with the Democratic Party.
And I just laid out like I'm done with the party.
Like they don't care.
They don't care about black people.
They don't care about marginalized people.
They care about themselves and being white saviors.
And I put that into words.
The Huffington Post ran it and it went fully viral.
Dear Democratic Party, you were the love of my life.
I fell in love early and hard.
I've been the kind of party loyalist,
the kind of sappy soapbox-y, cliched devotee
that makes Fox News moonwalk with glee.
The first vote I ever cast at 18 was for Bill Clinton.
The last vote I cast was for his wife, Hillary.
My adoration for Hillary bordered on mania
In college, I named my ficus plant after her.
20 years later, I canvassed, held fundraisers,
even dragged my eight year old daughter door-to-door.
I loved you so much
I cried each time I voted.
You've been that kind of mad love to me.
And now I want to break up.
I realize now that the love has been one sided unrequited.
You've never recognized me as a brown woman.
You've taken my love,
my money, my tokenism with nary anything in return.
You married the white woman
and hooked up with me on the side.
Black Lives Matter is a second or third thought.
Where's your outrage
over the national epidemic of police brutality
against Black people?
And for all you're talking about
dreamers, there's been little action.
You don't seem to give a crap about kids of color
who will be kicked out of this country.
The only country they know.
What if all those dreamers were white?
I suspect a very different outcome.
My fellow brown and black sisters started to notice too.
And then the chatter began, first in whispered hushes
and then loud and clear,
you are a party of white feminists,
of white feminism, the kind of feminism
that focuses on the struggles of white women.
It was the first time I'd heard the term most likely
because self awareness is hard. And I was a brown woman
trapped in a white feminist world.
But then I woke up and I saw you
with clear eyes for the very first time.
I know there are some good ones among you.
But for every Kamala Harris,
Maxine Waters, or Pramila Jayapal
who are sticking their brown and black necks out for me,
there are dozens of white women Democrats
who want me to shut my trap
and just say please and thank you.
I should be grateful for scraps
while white women enjoy a proper marriage with you.
I'm done with all that.
In the meantime, I'll be on the sidelines,
waiting, watching, hoping, praying.
You broke my heart
The response was, Why don't you run for office?
Which is so funny because it's so privileged.
Like the amount of privilege it takes to run for office.
But most people can't do that.
If I don't challenge
the status quo, then I need to shut up.
If I have the privilege to challenge the status quo
and I don't, then I need to shut up.
And I said, I'm running for Congress.
And I just did it.
People call me an angry brown woman.
Too ambitious, bitchy, bossy, pushy, shrill, emotional,
abrasive. impatient, nasty.
Why are you running as a Democrat?
I'm running as a Democrat,
because I think we can take the party back.
I thought, You know what?
the chances of me winning are less than slim to none.
But I'm going to mainstream
the topic of white supremacy within the Democratic Party.
Come hell or high water.
Regina: Saira's campaign was very unusual
in that the people who worked on her
campaign were largely people of color.
The commitment was huge, and it was very different
from most campaigns.
Those kids in cages could be your kids.
Those parents could be me.
Those parents could be you.
Let's be clear about this.
Removing kids from their parents
is dictionary definition of fascism!
And then I started picking up a lot of steam.
A lot of steam by the progressives,
by brown people, by black people, by white millennials.
By people in tech...
So how many people in this room voted for Donald Trump?
Okay, How many people did not vote
for Donald Trump?
The ones of us who did not vote for Donald Trump.
Do you think you're less racist than these two?
That's a weird judgment.
At least I'm more aware of my racism than those two.
That's pretty ignorant.
The reason these conversations are hard
is we've never had truth and reconciliation
in this country.
Let's take a step back.
Based on the genocide of indigenous people,
the enslavement of Africans, so brown and black
and the Chinese were brought in to build a railroad.
And then like Asians, like me, my family was brought in
to deal with science and by the way,
the Indians left India because the British committed
genocide in India.
It's literally
whiteness has killed the brown and black world.
Donald Trump has not created racism.
Donald Trump has shown us what it is.
One of the questions I have is, why is it
that white people think they're the only Americans,
that they think they're real Americans,
and the rest of us are like pretend Americans.
What is that about?
I think I have a little bit of a problem with the 'We vs I'
I think that there is the big perpetual
We, right? We white women for sure.
But I think there's also we African-Americans
and the 'We were slaves!' Right?
And 'We, these things happened to us!'
Doesn't happen to everybody, right?
I mean and you I understand.
And I am I am here -
It happened to all African-Americans.
It didn't happen to you.
Listen, one of the things that we know
one of the things - let me just say,
I have a lot of Native American
history, and I don't -
Science, science -
Time out. Are you saying that black people,
African-Americans, descendants
of slaves, are taking advantage of that?
That's not what I am saying.
You just said that you have a lot of Native American -
- and you don't take advantage of the government...
You actually know that more
white people are on welfare than black people right?
You know that don't you?
Well, I don't know if I...
Well what are you saying?! I don't understand.
It's a racist statement, when people are, I feel like
there's a lot of conversation where I constantly do
feel like it is a 'We African-American' culture
bad things are happening to us. Big picture 'We'.
And I do agree that there is a lot of big picture
We bad things happening -
All the time!
[crosstalk]
At these dinners
we see, white women behaving badly.
And that bad behavior
looks like denial of white supremacy.
Denial of racism and even denial of slavery.
This is nothing new.
This has been going on for centuries.
Let's go back to 1876
when a former slave owner named Lucy Forman
Harley said she was assaulted by two black men
leading to a white paramilitary mob,
killing as many as 100 black men
which witnesses later said was just an excuse
to suppress black voters.
In 1898
Rebecca Latimer Felton who by the way was a suffragette
and the first female United States senator,
called for the lynching of thousands of black men
if it meant protecting white women.
Her claim sparked a riot that killed 25 black men.
But of course she's remembered as a hero,
a progressive icon for women's rights.
Fast forward to 1908.
Mabel Hallam claimed a black man raped her.
Black neighborhoods were burned,
black civilians were shot and elderly black men
were lynched. And just two weeks later she admitted she lied.
In 1921 all that Sarah Paige had to do was scream
and the whole black community was burnt to the ground,
killing over 300 black people.
This event is known as the Tulsa Massacre.
In 1931
Victoria Price and Ruby Bates accused
nine black teenagers of rape.
The Scottsboro Boys went through years of trials
and jail time only for one of the girls to admit
she made up the whole thing.
In 1955
Carolyn Bryant said
14 year old Emmett Till was flirting with her.
We all know the story of Emmett Till, his brave mother
decided to have an open casket so that people could see
how he was tortured and murdered.
Out of nowhere, this black guy came up
and just opened the door and jumped in the car.
In 1994 Susan Smith
claimed a black man kidnaped her kids,
sparking a manhunt that labeled every black man
in South Carolina a potential child killer.
It just seems so unfair somebody could take such,
two beautiful children.
The true story?
Susan Smith killed her children herself.
In 2009
Bonnie Sweeten claims she and her daughter
were kidnapped by a black man so that she could
swindle her boss and go to Disney World.
A few years later, in 2016, rookie cop Sherry Hall
claimed she was attacked by a black gunman
starting a massive manhunt.
But the attack had never happened.
She staged it all for attention.
Which brings us back to 2020.
I'm going to tell them there's
an African-American man threatening my life.
There is an African-American man
I am in Central Park
I am being threatened by a man in the Ramble!
Please send the cops immediately!
Christian Cooper was birdwatching.
More white women nonsense.
I guess what we should do is come up with a date.
Are we waiting on?
We're waiting on a trademark, right?
That, and money!
Because we need money to do the software and...
Right. Okay.
You know, I don't think that we even understand what...
I think it would have to be an app, right? I think so, too.
That's the only way we're going to manage.
Yeah. Do you have you don't have your computer, do you?
I do.
Could you pull it up?
Yes. So.
Oh, my gosh.
So this computer
is fantastic except that
It needs to be plugged in.
What I just want to know is,
are we moving along with getting dinners set up?
Look, look, let's take a real step back here.
We have all these black and brown women
who want to do this work around the country,
and we don't have money from white women
to fund software for them to be able to do it.
So part of our business
model is to actually get white women
to think about how they're spending money. Right?
So if you're unwilling to drop $200 or $100 or $500,
but you're willing to buy a $5,000 purse
or you're willing to take a $10,000 trip to Europe,
you know, once a year, every two years,
three times a year, whatever it is,
how you spend your money
shows you how you value things
because we live in a capitalistic society.
And so
when you have white women patting themselves on the back
and showing you like,
'Me me me pick me, I'm like the most woke!'
And then you're like, Okay, it's going to be $250.
And they're like, Woah!
I mean, maybe that's it.
Maybe this, maybe this isn't a thing.
But we have to keep trying.
And because
ultimately, that could be the answer.
It could be a social experiment where it's like -
It failed.
I constantly toy with shutting it all down.
It's thankless
and you know, where's the change?
It's thankless and where is the change?
Why is it that being called a racist
makes you so upset?
It doesn't make me upset anymore, but it would have
a while ago. I needed to understand
what the term means and look at myself.
And I just I believe that every white person is racist
because of the system.
And I had to learn about the system to get that.
But why would it have bothered you before?
Because it's such a horrible word,
and I don't want to be so horrible.
Okay.
In a nutshell,
I don't want to see myself as being so bad.
I have had to work so hard on my shitty
self-image to begin with.
Do I wanna add that one to it? Racist? Oh God.
You know, I'll be blunt.
I've struggled with liking myself
for most of my adult life so...
But I don't have a problem with it now
because I've been practicing and working on it for a while,
but, a while ago...
And it is work isn't it. Yeah, it's work.
Sarah, I'm curious how you feel about,
as I've said more than once and they've mentioned it too,
is just this idea or this theory
that every single white person in this country is racist.
You know, I would say, like, at the beginning
of the conversation, it was a little offensive
I think throughout the conversation
and understanding a little bit
more of my ignorance and the definition of it.
I feel like I've shifted a little bit.
I will say that.
I, um...
I don't want to be thought of
of somebody that doesn't like somebody
because of the color of their skin.
And to me, that's where
where racism, the term racism, falls.
And so
I guess learning a little bit about that, that's
not necessarily what that definition of racism means
changes it for me a little bit.
The fear that I have
is that my son goes through the experience that he did.
I'm not worried about
him...I'm worried about him
becoming the white supremacist and pushing it
down into the shadows -
You have the conversation.
So, yes, I have the conversation -
Over and over and over and over and over again.
It's the first step, just like you can't
just like Regina always says, like,
you can't change what you don't acknowledge.
And the fact that you're
able to acknowledge this, is a big deal.
It's not a small deal.
It's a huge deal
because it means you're open and instead of this.
And if you're open, then you can actually start
like engaging and pass it along to your kids.
Hey, Saira come in!
Are you looking forward to this?
I feel like I'm gonna throw up.
I honestly think I'm going to throw up.
I have not really been able to eat anything.
I'm not even kidding you.
It's not even that bad.
It's gonna be OK. It's not.
It's going to be okay.
I want to be in fetal position, but I can't do that
from the dining table.
The last time I was thrown
under the bus by the super liberal news media,
was when I ran for office and shortly thereafter.
And I don't know that anything can compare with that.
That was just awful.
After an incredibly challenging campaign,
I lost.
A couple weeks after I lost, I was in the mountains
with my family,
and there is a professor by the name of George
Yancey, black guy out of Emory in Atlanta,
and he had written an essay for The New York Times called
Should I Give Up on White People?
Yes or no.
Brown and black people cannot dismantle
white supremacy. White people do.
That was the gist of his of his essay.
And so I tweeted it and I said long and short answer, Yes.
And then Breitbart picks it up,
and then The Daily Stormer picks it up
and then the next thing you know, I'm
getting DM's that I'm a Muslim cunt.
Pictures of my daughter, your Muslim cunt daughter
should be drowned in the Ganges.
And we're going to use
your entire family as target practice.
over and over
And then they don't stop.
More and more news outlets pick it up.
The only thing I did was say that white people
were responsible for dismantling white supremacy.
And as a result, I deserved to get death threats.
And if you believe someone deserves to get death threats,
you think that they deserve to die.
The moral of the story is:
Shut the fuck up about racism.
And if you don't, we will come for you.
We will come for your children.
We will come for your life.
It is a terrible?
No!
How long is it?
It looks like it's a couple of pages.
Would you like me to read it out loud?
How are the pictures? The pictures are great.
Do you want to see them?
Or do you want to just sit there and be sick.
Okay.
Now see isn't that a good picture?
Yeah, White women are uniquely placed to challenge racism
because of their proximity to power and wealth,
Jackson says. It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily
go to a dinner party
in which they'd be asked one by one
what was a racist thing you did recently
by two women of color before appetizers are served.
A lot of people hate Saira Rao!
Jackson recalls her initial impressions of Rao as
honest and willing to call a thing a thing.
But even for those who complain,
something has changed.
Isn't that the good part?
It's good!!
I think my mom would be extremely
proud of what I'm doing.
Though I think there would be this tremendous fear
I know that I wouldn't be doing this,
and I know that I wouldn't have even woken up brown
if my mom was still alive.
And I think about that all the time.
I would not be alive right now in this incarnation
if my mom was still here.
It's a very strange thing.
What we're saying is
you guys need
to pull your heads out of your asses, acknowledge
your own racism, make it right.
Stop caping for white dudes.
Join us and let's overthrow the patriarchy.
But none of that happens until you acknowledge
your own racism.
But, you know, we so many of us grow up
learning this wonderful history
and to be proud of the founding fathers
and this democratic system and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's important that we
learn how we've been programed.
The trance that we're in.
It's a it's a trance. It really is.
It's it's a programing that needs to be overcome.
Indeed.
Well who do we want to be?!
Why does it all have to have labels anyway, though?
And indeed, you know,
I understand you have issues with a skin color, okay.
But I don't believe that's our future.
I really don't. I see it much different.
I understand it's a struggle for you now.
I get that and I empathize with that.
But do I love you less because you're a different color?
Absolutely not.
Do you realize that everything you're saying
is taking away everything they just said.
Everything you just said is such bullshit.
But it is.
It is but it is. You literally erased
everything this woman just said.
Like everything.
You want me to apologize for that?
No. Well, I mean, honestly, if you're not sorry,
don't apologize. But at the same time.
Yeah, but it's not.
But you talk about love and about the future.
She's worried that her kids are going to die.
So who gives a shit about feeling love?
We kind of had this conversation before the dinner
a little bit.
And I got a sense of this
is that you've read the book, The Secret,
and you think that we can all
get better lives based on good intentions.
We just gotta be positive and like, want good
for our lives.
What do you want -
We are telling you, and you can Google
'police brutality', Google 'ICE; Mexicans',
you know, Google 'Muslim ban'. Those are like real things.
We're also anecdotally telling you things,
and you keep coming back with this frankly, B.S.
about love being love
and love trumps - like, what do you mean by that?
What I mean is that beyond the anger
and the problems that we are feeling
at the moment, each and every one of us,
perhaps you two more at the moment,
that there is something more to our, our beingness.
And it isn't the flesh. It isn't.
And beyond that, this is the evolution of all of us.
I know this.
And I know it sounds weird
for those who aren't in that world,
but we are transcending this.
We are. Sarai, I -
It's Saira. Saira. Saira.
I really appreciate everything you're offering.
What I want to hear from you is what you think
is a solution.
You've talked a lot, but I haven't heard,
Hey, this is what I want you ladies to do.
But haven't we said repeatedly....?
I do want to say. I do want to say.
I acknowledge.
Yeah, but but wait. But but what?
But yeah, like,
I just see beyond it - Can I, can I say one thing?
Sure I'm sorry. No, no.
I am a liberal white woman.
We are absolutely the most dangerous women out there.
We are the most dangerous women that exist
because we want to think that we are better,
that we are good
and that we're doing is about love
and that we're going to solve all the world's issues
because we're going to love a little more
because we're good frickin people.
No, we are erasing their experiences.
We are erasing their lives,
we are erasing the danger that they're in
because we're trying to color it, make it frickin pretty.
By calling it love
and I'm sorry, but that is dangerous.
Like, that is dangerous!
But you have done it repeatedly.
Does love
save the Mexicans who are in ICE facilities?
Does love save Trayvon Martin?
Does love save Sandra Bland, does love save Mustafa
Ayoubi, who was assassinated in February for doing nothing?
But what does, you know, you ask us,
What can we do? Seriously?
And we told you at least ten times -
listen. What what can we do
to achieve this love of which you speak?
Hmmm
Well, I think dropping the resistance is part of it.
And there is resistance.
The resistance to what?
The resistance is holding you back...
The resistance to what?
What are we resisting?
It feels like a lot. It feels like a lot.
And so I don't pretend to have all the answers at all.
You haven't named one thing, you said it feels like a lot.
She's asked you three times, what are we resisting?
Name one thing that we're resisting.
An answer, a solution that's different
than what you think it should be?
You literally employ
the spiritual bypassing to get around
any of the pain associated with oppression.
I would love to say love is love.
The next time someone sends me
a note telling me that they're going
to drown my daughter, I'm going to be like,
You know what? Downward Dog it right now,
Love is love.
Love is fucking love.
Seriously.
So we can acknowledge, I'm going to acknowledge,
that yes, after you said that, I can acknowledge.
Yes, I see racism in me, after I've said no,
because of what you women have said.
We have to understand where it hurts, where hurts, hurts.
And we can't take away hurt from other people.
I mean, and that's where I think
we have to be sympathetic at one point too.
To add to that a little bit,
we're not dying because we're white.
I'm not not allowed to go somewhere because I'm white.
So I can say love is love because nobody says,
no you can't!
I think that's the purpose
people are saying you can't come here.
Even though we were all taught right in history,
that this was fixed years ago, it was fixed.
And my
my kids, I will never know
what my kids even feel like because they are part Hispanic
and with Hispanic, I will never know their fear
because I'm not there.
I'll never know that what they fear.
Do you realize that in this room,
the Republicans that voted for Trump
have listened in and and she changed what she said.
She said, actually, I get it.
And yet you keep saying love is love.
And that's why I'm saying
white liberal women are the most dangerous
because we think we're so good that we can't
be part of the problem.
So I do want to leave you with this.
There is no, and I mean this sincerely,
my two little kids are at home.
My husband's at home. I'm not doing this for my health.
The reason I am here is because of love.
So to answer your question repeatedly,
it is because of love.
The work that I do is because of love.
Everything I do is because of love.
And by showing you
my pain, I have opened myself up
so greatly to take more and more and more abuse.
And why?
Because I actually believe in you.
Sincerely, at the bottom of my heart,
I believe that you all can wake up just like I did.
You can deprogram yourself just like you did.
And over the course of one dinner,
Marni, you are able to even slightly open the window.
I am more hopeful than you will ever know.
This should be an indication of the amount of love
that I have and the amount of hope that I have.
And I have expectations still,
Regina doesn't. And you're still here. So...
Do not expect it to be easy.
Because it's not going to be easy.
You're going to question everything you ever learned.
You know, it's hard.
It's hard work, and everything worth having is hard.
So who in this room...
Raise your hand if you're a racist.
We did it!
Thank you. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
I feel hopeful that there's
going to be one or two people that gets it.
I can guarantee you
I know this for a fact, they haven't forgotten,
and they're thinking about this every single day.
And even if one of them comes out of this in however
amount of time and starts down the path, that's a win too.
What our job is
I think a huge part of our job, white people,
is to help other white people wake up with us.
I think the triggering process
for many white women in a Race2Dinner setting
can override the ability
to just take a moment and go, wait a minute,
I need to sit with this. Because we're so trained to
'My reaction is right!' as white
people, it's like it's our white world.
What I took away was just being able to recognize
how white women react to being confronted on their racism,
the defensiveness,
the crying, the 'I don't see color'...
'We all bleed red' or just like using people of color
in their lives to justify that they're not a racist.
So those tools, I think I learned from Race2Dinner.
When we were leaving that night,
I was feeling sad because I realized how much more work
we have to do to undo systemic racism
and misogyny is not, I don't even know
if it's something I'm going to see in my lifetime
quite frankly.
The first thing that I did when I
came home is I made a post on my Facebook
and I acknowledged where I see the racism in my own life
and thought beliefs.
I thought I was already aware of my racism.
But what I didn't see was how unconsciously white
supremacy lives within me and the true impact of it.
What I saw as a result
of that conversation was that as a white woman,
I am the worst kind of dangerous
if I don't wake up to see what's true here
and use my power and privilege to take action.
I saw that white supremacy
is not just a construct of the alt right,
but something that lives within all of us
and mostly unconscious to those who want to believe
it's all love and light.
I saw that racism is not something to hide from
or pretend does not exist within me.
As to do so keeps the power structures hidden
and embedded.
I'm exceedingly grateful to Saira Rao
and Regina Jackson for their willingness
to show up, educate, and put their lives at risk to do it.
I'm here to show up for what's uncomfortable
so we can heal this pain and stop the violence.
Are you?
Trump: Kung flu...
the Chinese virus. [roaring applause]
Crowds chanting: Peaceful Protest! Peaceful Protest!
News: protesters have taken to the streets around the world.
So is this the moment when the United States and others
recognize the pain of the past, that Black Lives Matter,
and reimagine their countries on new values?
Biden: White supremacy is the most lethal terrorist
threat to the homeland today.
Now's our opportunity to make some real progress.
[applause]
I have my liquor bar right behind me
in case I need to take a drink.
We got lots of people coming on.
We have everyone?
Yes? OK cool!