Watch white women being shamed while they dine: CBC’s Deconstructing Karen reviewed

Nothing heightens the sense of the unpalatable better than a dinner scene. Think of the violence meted out at the dining table in Pasolini’s Salò (1975). Think of André Gregory lecturing Wallace Shawn on his solipsism – much to our discomfort – in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981). CBC’s documentary Deconstructing Karen accidentally borrows from the form. Eight white women are chided ceaselessly at dinner by two activists – failed Congressional candidate Saira Rao (who is Indian-American) and hitherto unknown Regina Jackson (who is African-American) – until the white women admit that they are racist. Rao and Jackson are co-founders of Race2Dinner, an events company specialising in coming to white women’s homes to shame them while they dine.

‘Karen’ (or ‘Becky’) is a pejorative term for an unreasonable, entitled white woman that entered mainstream discourse a few years ago. More recently, Karen and Becky have, unfortunately for them, simultaneously become a name for all white women and the face of American racism.