We’ve all been to uncomfortable dinners: bad blind dates, Thanksgivings with annoying family members, childhood meals at your friend’s house when their mom made that weird casserole you weren’t super into. Deconstructing Karen, however, takes uncomfortable dinners to a whole new level. But unlike the other situations, the discomfort is for an important reason.
During the 2022 Mill Valley Film Festival I was able to watch Deconstructing Karen, which highlights an organization called Race2Dinner. Founded by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, the premise is easy enough to describe: well-meaning white women attend and have an open and honest discussion with them about race. But the result is far from simple. Complicated questions are raised, hard truths are dished out, and emotions and tensions can run high.
The dinner showcased in the documentary covers a range of perspectives and dismantles an array of common harmful plays from the white privilege textbook. Several dinner attendees proudly declare they don’t see color before being educated that colorblindness is actually a form of white supremacy. Others speak passionately about their spouses or children who are people of color before having to reckon with the fact that this doesn’t exempt them from being racist. One woman is adamant that love can simply heal all, ignoring the real pain, struggle, and hate that can’t be fixed with kind, shallow words.
Jackson and Rao bravely and generously open up about their own experiences of racism to educate and help white women understand the personal impact of white supremacy. They also do a great job talking about the more macro, societal effects of institutional racism and how it benefits white women — as well as how they uphold it every day. They are difficult topics for sure, but they are ones that BIPOC have constantly been faced with for centuries. They directly impact their lives every day, but white women have had the luxury of ignoring them until now. This documentary seeks to change this.
Director Patty Ivins Specht smartly crafts the tale, allowing Jackson and Rao a platform beyond the dinner. She weaves together interviews with them about their own lives and footage of them preparing for the meals, allowing us as an audience to get to know them and their mission on a more intimate level. Interspersing these moments with footage of the dinner proves a clever combination that adds background and texture, breaking up the centerpiece conversation and having some of the key moments hit home even harder and more memorably.
The run time is a lean 1 hour and 15 minutes, and while it doesn’t waste a second, one can’t help but wish that it was a little longer so we might be able to see more of the pivotal dinner scene, uncut and unedited, if only to try and glean more knowledge from it. In fact, part of me found myself wanting a series, with each episode covering a different group of women in a different region discussing different components of this core issue. The dinner, and by extension the documentary, is so innovative and effective that there is so much more potential to be mined.
The film is no doubt a teaching tool, but it never feels like a lecture or chore to watch. Jackson and Rao are both fascinating, engaging, and inspiring women. The subject matter is serious, but there are all small moments of humor threaded throughout — particularly in the behind-the-scenes content of them preparing for the dinners, where they are roped into filming a Tik Tok or Jackson is trying to calm down a nervous Rao, who is scared to read a big article featuring the two of them. Their friendship is a compelling and beautiful thing.
The documentary is an invitation to learn, but more than that, it’s a call to action. Not only does it inform white women of the racism embedded in and upheld by them, but it challenges them to do something about it — especially within their own communities. Deconstructing Karen warns that confronting these ideas and unlearning racism is not easy, nor is it fast or pleasant, but it is the only way we can all reach liberation and true freedom. Just like the journey of anti-racism itself, the documentary is not a cozy watch, but it is a crucial one for the audience to which it’s targeted.
Jackson and Rao state that white liberal women are the most dangerous demographic due to their combination of power and proximity to it as well as the fact that they like to think themselves better than people who are bolder or more outward with their racist ideas. However, they also state that these dinners are a labor of love and that they do them because they truly believe this demographic does have the power to change.
We better prove them right.
— Taylor Gates