AN EXPLOSIVE film that aims to get white women to acknowledge and address their own racism will be screened in London for the first time.
Deconstructing Karen is hard-hitting documentary which see’s two women – one Black and one Asian – have radically honest conversations with white women about their views on race, inequality and white supremacy – around the dinner table.
The film was created by activists Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, who want impactful and real discussions about racism to take place in Britain.
Ms Rao said: “White women actively uphold white supremacy every single day. And until and unless they are willing and ready to look at themselves in the mirror and start to dismantle the poison that’s killing them too, nothing will change.
“White supremacy kills white people too. Look at gun violence. Climate catastrophe. COVID. If white folks want humanity to survive, they are going to have to give up their worship of whiteness
and white supremacy.
Ms Rao added: “Every white person has to start at ground zero… with themselves. White folks need to
put on their oxygen mask before trying to help others do the same.”
Since its release, the Karen film has gone viral on social media and caught the attention of celebrities and top TV stars.
The London-based screening will be followed by an interactive discussions with documentary producers, authors and Ms Rao and Ms Jackson and will take place in July.
Organisers have described the event as being “direct” and “at times difficult”, but say it will help prompt important discussions and action to help eradicate racism.
Ms Jackson said: “My whole reason for existing as a human being is to help, not harm others in their ability to live a life of their choosing as long as they are not harming others. That’s it, it’s that simple.”
The women are also the co-founders of Race 2 Dinner, a platform that hosts dinners with white women to explain how they could be complicit in oppressing black communities.
The campaigners hosted the first Race 2 Dinner sit down in January 2019.
In 2022, the women told The Voice, the reactions of some of white women when questioned about their thoughts on race and systemic racism was met with hostility and denial.
Speaking to The Voice, in 2022, Ms Rao said: “We sit down with them and we help them to acknowledge their own racism and get them on the path to dismantle it.
“White people’s feelings have traditionally trumped black and brown pain, and it has to stop.”
Both Ms Jackson and Ms Rao, insist meaningful dialogue and uncompromising truth-telling is necessary to challenge racism, dismantle systemic racism and oppression against marginalised communities.
In recent years, the use of the word Karen to describe dangerous acts of white privilege displayed by some white women, has become a popular term for black communities in the United States.
Ms Jackson and Ms Rao, will discuss their powerful and thought-provoking book White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better at the event.
A copy of the book will be included at this event.
To book tickets for the screening, click here
Comments Form
6 Comments
There will be tantrums, denial, and they will accuse Black and Brown people of being racists. They’d call us all sorts of ugly racist names because that’s typical of them. I hope this movies is seen by millions and I hope it elicits the change we need to end white supremacy (I doubt it though). We also need to talk about the anti-Blackness and racism in the Brown communities (Asians, Hispanics, Brown Muslims etc). It’s not just white people who are antiBlack but many Brown people are too.
For the following reasons, I profoundly object to the Asian interlocutor of this film “Deconstructing Karen.”
In my English lived experienced, Asian men and women have been as hostile and skin-colour discriminatory towards African-heritage people, as English and Caucasian Europeans.
African, African-Caribbean, African-skinned, African-heritage men, and women, historically endured a specific and unique type of history at the hands of Western, Caucasian, Christian, Europeans, for three hundred years.
This unique three-hundred-year experience under the control and direction of Western Caucasian Christian men, cannot be equated; shared with, or likened with brown-skinned Asian people: Chinese-Asians, or middle-class Feminists, or Homosexuals, or LGBTQIAP+ men and women, or Caucasian-Jewry’s ten years of German war-time discrimination.
African-heritage men and women uniquely endured at the hands of Western Caucasian men; supported by Caucasian-Jewish Bankers, and a substantial number of Caucasian Jewish Plantation owners: according to original research presented by US historian Dr Tony Martin in the 1980s, should not be likened unto any other modern day racial group’s oppression.
The awful, and savage, and brutal, and nasty creed against African-heritage people historically, is only equalled by Western Europe’s genocidal treatment of the native people of North American, and England’s genocidal treatment of the native African-looking people of Australia; especially Tasmanian natives.
The English hunted into the extinction all the African-looking native people of Tasmania, on horseback, after Church, every Sunday, from the mid-1820s to 1832.
The English referred to the genocide of the native Tasmanians as the “Black Wars,” which occurred between the English-led Europeans and native African looking native Tasmanians from the mid-1820s to 1832.
It is for these reasons that I reject the Labour supported “black & minority ethnic” tag that lumps all ethnics to gather, as if we are one; and historically the same.
Furthermore, this “BAME” tag insults and debases the memory of the African Slaves awful suffering, during the height of Europe’s slavery horrors.
Indeed, I would argue after three hundred years of close and intimate association with Western Caucasian men, and African-heritage women, African-heritage people of the Caribbean and the Americas have a biological and cultural association with Christian-heritage western European men and women, far more than Hindu, or Sikh, Muslim Asian, Semitic Arabic, or Caucasian-Jewish heritage people.
These ethnic and sexual groups today, merely used and abuse the African-heritage people’s historical skin-colour injustice, to highlight their own grievances against capitalist patriotic western Christian-heritage institutions, statues, Church stain-glass windows, and historical western Caucasian personalities.
If you watch the movie you will see Saira Rao saying exactly that! She challenges her fellow brown people to admit their anti-Blackness as SHE DOES. She works to overcome her own racism constantly.
Without watching the film or reading the book there is no validity in commenting. So read up. Watch up or attend the screening and then have your say.
Ruth – thank you 👏🏾🙏🏾
Darn, we over here in Canada need a screening too! Come to Vancouver. This work should be done everywhere. Thank you for getting the conversation started in this way. It’s so challenging.
The book is fantastic; I wish I had read it before I watched the documentary, but either way works. They get their points across very effectively, without mincing words. The chapter on Niceness vs Kindness broke my brain in the best possible way. It helped me shift into a deeper understanding of why “white quiet” is co-signing whatever racist thing was just said and not challenged. That’s done for me now. I feel emboldened. I’m not trying to be nice anymore, but I have a lot of work to do in the speaking up consistently area. That’s what it truly means to be kind. To be brave, honest, direct. To speak up.
I think the hardest part for some of us white women might be in making the shift from “helping” as an “ally” to truly understanding that the fight for liberation (from racism, sexism, white supremacy, violence, climate catastrophe) IS everyone’s fight. We’re not “helping” when we join this fight, because it’s ours too. Intellectually that’s not hard to grasp; now I’m wanting to understand it in my bones. It’s coming. Thanks to the work of these two women. I wish every white woman would read this book; especially those in teaching and helping professions