white guilt dinner
© Race 2 Dinner
Redefining racism as the Original Sin tainting all white people has spawned a parade of grifters. If 'anti-racist' literature isn't your thing, you can pay a pair of white-hating women to abuse you and your friends over dinner.

Former Democratic congressional candidate Saira Rao and her 2018 campaign staffer Regina DiAngelo have found their niche extorting thousands of dollars from guilty white women in return for harassing them about their inborn racism over food and drinks in what sounds like a spinoff of the race-horror flick Get Out but is actually a much-hyped "anti-racist" consciousness-raising event called "Race 2 Dinner." Buoyed by universally positive coverage from a media establishment that can't get enough of sliming white women as malevolent Karens, R2D has blossomed over the past year from its initial word-of-mouth spread to taking corporate bookings.

Rao and DiAngelo make no secret of why they've chosen the dinner format as the ideal setting to lambaste their paler sisters. Because white women are "nice" and "polite," they wouldn't think of leaving the dinner table, no matter how uncomfortable they get, Rao explained in a recent podcast, pointing out that the kind of confrontational conversation that characterizes a typical R2D session might otherwise send these avatars of white fragility running out of a conference or a lecture hall.

The pair neatly conflate class and race by charging that high entry fee, which lends an unmistakable aura of "fin-dom" (financial domination) to the proceedings. Wealthy women who can afford to drop thousands of dollars to be harangued by a pair of ultra-woke harpies spitting the kind of negative racial generalizations that would be cause for cancellation if directed at any race other than whites are hardly representative of white people as a whole - working-class whites have more in common with their black counterparts than with the financiers who've bled the US economy dry. Pinning the sins of the .01 percent on "white people," popular as it is in 2020, remains fundamentally inaccurate and will not lead to the kind of societal change that many people (of all races) agree is needed.
race 2 dinner white guilt racism
© Race2Dinner
The grifter gallery of Race2Dinner
That seems to be the point - Rao and DiAngelo want to reinforce the power structure, not dismantle it, and they're experts at the divide-and-conquer politics used so effectively by the ruling class throughout history to keep the poor in their place. Just as the Anti-Defamation League must convince its donors that there are neo-Nazis hiding around every corner to get them to cough up those big checks, to the point of massaging statistics to make it seem that hate crimes are through the roof when this is not the case, the R2D crew and others like them must conjure the specter of race-based hatred in order to get people to buy their dinnertime dom sessions.

It helps that their version of "anti-racism" is in fact quite racist, requiring white people to evaluate every situation based on the skin colors of the players rather than on the personalities, character traits, class dynamics, or other more relevant aspects of the situation. And their business model is bolstered by the fact that wealthy white women may find a certain novelty, even titillation, in being verbally assaulted by the vengeful pair, especially Rao, who - DiAngelo repeatedly joked on a podcast back in April - "hates white people."

It's the same kind of role-reversal thrill their Wall Street husbands might seek in a dominatrix's dungeon where they're ordered to get on all fours and bark like a dog. After a long, stressful day oppressing the working class, there's nothing like a nice professional humiliation session to wash those cares away.

The women of Race 2 Dinner are far from the first to see the potential in expanding fin-dom (whose "wallet-slaves" are typically male) into an equal-opportunity wealth extraction scheme within the racial framework. They're merely taking the baton passed by White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo (no relation, apparently) and running with it. Despite being white herself, DiAngelo has made a profitable career out of haranguing white people for their inborn racism, convincing them every fiber of their being resonates with prejudice against black people and the only solution is to become "less white." As with R2D, this means sitting down, shutting up, and (the important part) paying up - DiAngelo will come consult on your corporate culture, but her disgust will be palpable. The parallels with fin-dom, which often includes emotional or literal blackmail, psychological drama, and a liberal helping of shame, are obvious.

But some specters, once conjured, are difficult to lay to rest. The latest wave of outrage grifters may think they know what they're doing (and indeed, they're experts at lining their own pockets) but the racism they conjure may outlast them. Many whites believe it's unfair that they should be blamed for the crimes of those long dead, especially those whose ancestors arrived in the US when slavery was already outlawed, and many blacks see the DiAngelos and Raos of the world as hampering rather than helping the cause of black liberation.

As books like White Fragility dominate the best-seller list and white women eager for social cachet add their names to the no doubt prodigious waiting list on the Race 2 Dinner website, Americans should stop to ask who (beyond these low-level grifters) benefits from white and black people being pitted against one another, and who is running a fin-dom scam on the entire nation on a much grander scale.