Eight upper-middle-class, suburban white women arrive at a dinner party in the opening moments of Patty Ivins Specht’s “Deconstructing Karen.” Hosted by activist Regina Jackson and former Colorado congressional candidate Saira Rao, through their start-up Race2Dinner, the women are immediately told “if you’re going to cry, leave the table and go into the living room,” setting a confrontational tone for the rest of the evening.
If you’ve heard about Rao and Jackson’s Race2Dinner, it’s probably been through mocking news segments. The company organizes two-hour dinners for a small group of white women, where Rao and Jackson lead a difficult discussion about white supremacy and racism.
Often, the tone that Rao and Jackson adopt has been interpreted as antagonistic. Fox News’ Jesse Watters oddly, and incredibly convolutedly, compared these dinners to Pearl Harbor (seriously, it’s a wild segment) and Caitlin Flanagan almost gleefully went on Bill Maher to call out the “almost sexual desire of white liberals to roll around in their white liberal guilt” in response to a clip from the film.
Obviously, neither of those people had actually seen Specht’s film, considering “Deconstructing Karen” is much more benign than its media coverage would suggest. Essentially acting as a corporatized advertisement for Race2Dinner, “Deconstructing Karen” doesn’t know if it wants to sell the start-up, serve as a primer for anti-racist conversations, or just merely act as a provocation.
Over the course of a scattered 75 minutes, Specht’s film moves rapidly between subjects and interests, condensing an entire dinner, the etymology of the term ‘Karen,’ Rao and Jackson’s biographies, and a compact history of white liberal feminism into a package that never finds a way to sufficiently scaffold these interests into a compelling, or even coherent, narrative.
Despite spinning out in multiple, divergent directions, the sections focused on the dinner are, of course, the most interesting. While there are a number of aggrieved statements from Rao and Jackson that almost seem patently designed for the type of viral moment that Watters and Maher gave them (at one point, Jackson claims white Democrat and Republican women are “all the same,” etc.), the conversation isn’t as hostile as its marketing would suggest. Instead, these women often rehash talking points about how they don’t ‘see’ color, or wouldn’t consider themselves racist. Jackson and Rao push back against these statements, often providing some personal anecdotes about their own experiences for context.
However, when we move away from the dinner, the film loses any sense of momentum. While Jackson and Rao’s biographies are compelling, we are only given cliff-notes versions of their previous careers and lives. Rao’s congressional campaign is inserted only briefly to contextualize her work with Race2Dinner, when it really could’ve been an entire section of the film itself.
The same goes for Jackson’s discussion of the intersections of white liberal feminism and white supremacy, moving from the first woman congressman (and noted racist) Rebecca Latimer Felton to Amy Cooper (who infamously called the cops on birder Christian Cooper in Central Park in 2020), within the span of a few minutes, sacrificing nuance and context in the process.
This isn’t to say that these sections aren’t important or interesting. But, they are underdeveloped, as Specht tries to cram too much into a film with such a short runtime. Because of this, everything we are given is surface-level. Instead of diving into Rao and Jackson’s methodology, we are only given snippets of their dinner conversations, business model, family lives, histories, and socio-historical context.
There’s a much better documentary hiding somewhere within “Deconstructing Karen,” one that perhaps only focuses on the dinner party and isn’t so completely aligned with Rao and Jackson’s point of view. This isn’t to say that documentaries need, or should, be objective. But here the relationship between subject and storyteller seems to be so infinitesimal that one wonders who exactly the film is made for. As a feature-length advertisement for Race2Dinner, it doesn’t do enough to sell the product, and as an introduction to anti-racist discussions and pedagogies, it never dives deep enough. [C]
