Poppy Noor:

This is Race to Dinner. A white woman volunteers to host a dinner in her home for seven other white women – often strangers, perhaps acquaintances. (Each dinner costs $2,500, which can be covered by a generous host or divided among guests.) A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”

I assume my readers, like me, would like to be independently wealthy so that we could sit around and read books all day. Well, let’s put our heads together and make it happen. As this story makes clear, there are a lot of white progressives with more money than brains who are desperately seeking absolution from their political sins. If there are this many who are willing to pay beaucoup bucks for the, uh, privilege of being told what awful racists they are over dinner, how many more do you think there are who would pay to avoid such public displays of sadomasochism? There’s gold in them thar guilt-ridden hills, is what I’m saying.

My idea is this: we know that progressives are terribly anxious over the issue of cosmetic diversity, yes? You can hardly click a link online without finding one fretting over the unbalanced racial/gender/whatever demographics in one social setting or another. What if there were an app that could provide our people of pallor with the exotic skin colors and gender markers they need to make their next party or conference a woke success? Like Tinder, or Uber, the app would allow users to choose from a database of local contractors according to their specific needs. However you hyphenate your identity, if one of our users contacts you about appearing at a local event, you just have to be willing to stand around and appear mildly interested in the proceedings. The main thing is to provide cover against accusations of the gathering being too white and/or male; hence, we’re looking for visible markers of diversity. Whatever neuro-disabilities you’ve got going on don’t count; that stuff doesn’t show up on a photograph. Anyway, you get the idea. If any of my angel investor readers out in Silicon Valley want to get in touch, we can make this happen.