On May 4, 2023 The Seattle friends of Race2Dinner, the Discovery Center, the Women Connect, Women of Color Connect, and Allies for Racial Justice employee resource groups from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a documentary screening of the 2022 film “Deconstructing Karen,” followed by a conversation with Saira Rao & Regina Jackson, founders of Race2Dinner, facilitated by Rozella Kennedy of Brave Sis Project.
This event was in service of the Race2Dinner mission: Initiating radically honest conversations that enable each of us to acknowledge, understand, and take personal responsibility for stopping the harm done to ourselves — and to each other. Conversations that acknowledge how we are complicit in creating, enabling, and engaging in oppression. Conversations that can lead to liberation for all of us. In a white supremacy culture, those conversations necessarily center on the dismantling of whiteness and white supremacy.
Speakers
Regina Jackson, Co-Founder, Race2Dinner. Born in Chicago in 1950 Regina remembers an America where everything was in Black and white. Burned into her memory are; the beatings and horrific treatment of civil rights workers throughout the south, the Goodman, Chaney & Schwerner murders, the murder of Viola Liuzzo, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the murders of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert. The violence perpetrated on innocent people going about their lives, by white people. It is these memories that drive Regina to push for real change in America. Which is why she co-founded Race 2 Dinner.
Saira Rao, Co-Founder, Race2Dinner. Rao grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Indian immigrants. For forty years, she wasted her precious time aspiring to be white and accepted by dominant white society, a futile task for anyone not born with white skin. Several years ago, Saira began the painful process of dismantling her own internalized oppression. Saira is a lawyer-by-training, a former congressional candidate, a published novelist and an entrepreneur.