‘Race to Dinner’: Reeducation on Racism for $2,500 a Night

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said: “Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.” A portrait of American neurosis: Groups of white women are spending $2,500 on a one-night, in-home struggle session to probe their participation in systems of American racism. Seated around a table at a patron’s suburban Camelot over plates of bruschetta and glasses of wine — guilt for the demimonde — groups of seven or eight white women pay Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, two activists of color, thousands of dollars to expose the group’s “complicity in upholding white supremacy and keeping Black and brown women down.”

In a society that has lost its sense of sin, Rao and Jackson offer attendees a coherent, almost biblical story of their depravity: White people are necessarily “privileged,” inexorably stained by their “whiteness” like the blot of original sin. The dinners offer an opportunity for baptismal rebirth and conversion, to shed their attachments to white hegemony and achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in a nihilistic age. Frankl said that the “mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism.” For Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, mass neurosis is a business model.

About the Author

John Hirschauer

John Hirschauer is a former William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute.

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The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said: “Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.” A portrait of American neurosis: Groups of white women are spending $2,500 on a one-night, in-home struggle session to probe their participation in systems of American racism. Seated around a table at a patron’s suburban Camelot over plates of bruschetta and glasses of wine — guilt for the demimonde — groups of seven or eight white women pay Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, two activists of color, thousands of dollars to expose the group’s “complicity in upholding white supremacy and keeping Black and brown women down.”

In a society that has lost its sense of sin, Rao and Jackson offer attendees a coherent, almost biblical story of their depravity: White people are necessarily “privileged,” inexorably stained by their “whiteness” like the blot of original sin. The dinners offer an opportunity for baptismal rebirth and conversion, to shed their attachments to white hegemony and achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in a nihilistic age. Frankl said that the “mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism.” For Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, mass neurosis is a business model.