‘I want a show of hands of everyone at this table who is racist.”
So begins a scene in the newly released Deconstructing Karen from Apple, marketed as “a radically honest conversation on racism.” It’s called the Race2Dinner model: Seated around a dinner table, eight white women are guided by authors Saira Rao and Regina Jackson through a two-hour-long series of talking points on concepts such as complicity and self-centeredness. It’s all part of a quest to bring them to the promised land of anti-racist enlightenment — in the documentary’s words, the realization that “they uphold white supremacy every single day.” The conversations in the documentary are confrontational, even bordering on aggressive, a tactic Rao admits is intentional. “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,” she says.





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