Rao and Jackson invite you, presumably a white women, to sit with your discomfort around racism and your direct role in upholding white supremacy. Regina Jackson and Saira Rao run an organization called Race2Dinner where they are guests at a dinner party with white women to discuss their own racism. The casual conversational style of writing is engaging, fits well with the content around dinner parties, and flows well with the interspersed anecdotes that otherwise may have felt clunky. It’s very accessible, direct, and at times a even a little cheeky.

The retellings of the dinner parties explore the dynamics of groups of white women and their individually harmful behavior. The description of nice, but not kind hits the nail on the head. White women are conditioned to stay silent and keep the peace, rather than stand up for anything, let alone injustice. As well, white women’s tendency to speak nastily behind each other’s back is an example of upholding the patriarchy and white supremacy by expecting perfection. White supremacy is so ingrained into our lives as white women in our silence, search for perfection, defensiveness, and denial of reality.

The book also shared stories from both Jackson, Rao, and others to illustrate the detrimental impacts racism from white women in their lives. Whether it’s the grocery store, school, work, or their own community. To not be white is to be assumed to not be good enough, smart enough, capable enough, or safe enough. Even if you are tokenized. Jackson and Rao force you to check your ego and defensiveness at the door in order to start making real steps in anti-racism.

The title of this book sums up its thesis incredibly concisely: white women already know everything contained within this book's pages. We know our niceness and our avoidance of difficult conversations props up white supremacist oppression at an individual and societal level. We know that tweeting isn't activism. We know that silence in the face of racism is racism. We know all this, and we still struggle so much to own our responsibility to fight the white supremacist structures that we support in ways we can't even see. It's a gift to be given something that embraces what the authors term "radical honesty," which exists in direct opposition to "niceness," and to be given the opportunity to sit with discomfort and move through it rather than around it. It is a gift to no longer be allowed to outrun your own bullshit. I'll return to this one a lot.

Regina Jackson and Saira Rao founded the group Race2Dinner, providing a dinner experience to facilitate radically honest conversations about racism and xenophobia and white supremacy, and they bring those experiences to the page in this new book. While white men might be the ones most publicly pegged as racists, the authors point out, white women uphold white supremacy in ways that may not seem as overt but are just as harmful: demanding perfection, maintaining a veneer of niceness, gaslighting, weaponizing their tears, and practicing toxic positivity and performative allyship, to name just a few.

The book offers refreshing bluntness in demonstrating that white women already know many subtle ways to reinforce white supremacy -- and in stressing that white women need to UNLEARN those ways in order to dismantle racism at the personal and the community level. The authors do not shy away from making the reader uncomfortable, and that's the point: without sitting with that discomfort, that defensiveness, the reader cannot take the steps needed to make changes. Jackson and Rao repeatedly point out that white women need to stop exceptionalizing themselves and excusing themselves from the more overt racism expressed by other white women -- all white women need to do this work. And as a white woman, I agree and commit to doing better myself.

Absolutely a necessary and powerful addition to the ongoing discussions of anti-racism and finding ways to dismantle white supremacy -- highly recommended to all white women, no matter at what stage of "not racist" we might think we are, and an essential addition to library collections everywhere.

Thank you, Penguin Books and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.

“White women: everything you already know about your own racism and how to do better” by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao.

The description of this book, let alone the title, immediately intrigued me. The book itself came out of dinner conversations that the authors call “Race2dinner.”

There are some hard truths in the beginning, not only about white women but about the authors themselves. As a white woman myself I wanted to deny some of the generalizations the authors make at the beginning. I continued to remind myself to hear what is being said - white women put Trump in the White House. We are guilty of that. That is just one example of what we have done, putting race over gender.

As badly as the phrase can be taken, “white supremacy” at its most basic means white people are superior to all other races. It is the norm. White privilege is the unearned benefit of having white skin. Even the phrases that are used like “people of color” is part of the system of racism - white is a color, but white is what is expected.

The dinner conversations sound very difficult and draining for the authors. But this is their work. A Black woman and a brown woman trying to open the eyes of white women. We need to do better.

You are probably going to feel many emotions while reading this book: uncomfortable, mad, confused, resistant and more. The ultimate takeaways for me from this book is I need, and we all need, to do so much more. White supremacy hurts everyone - even white people. The authors write: “Don’t be an “ally” - be an accomplice, a partner, a collaborator, a co-conspirator.” There are immediate things I can put into place and act. But it will also take me more time to think about what else can be done. After finishing this book I immediately texted a white woman friend of mine and asked her to read this book so we can then discuss it.

This book is very powerful in the end and in your face. Go with it and hopefully together more change can occur.