Anti-Racists Dropped by CAA Over Anti-Semitic Comments

AP Photo/Armin Durgut

On November 13, Saira Rao announced that she and her business partner Regina Jackson had been dropped by their agency for “denouncing genocide.”

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In case you’re not familiar with Rao and Jackson, they are the duo who started Race2Dinner, a private dinner party for white women who wanted to be called racist by two genuine BIPOCs for $5,000. I wrote about them back in 2021 and here’s how their grift was described at the time.

Jackson and Rao ask guests to describe racist things they’ve recently done and press them on any evasions. Often the examples that emerge involve silence: failing to speak up or intervene. Sometimes they consist of thoughts or feelings: assuming that the Black teens pulled over in a white neighborhood must have been doing something wrong. Sometimes the guests struggle to think of what to say. “Not knowing is classic white behavior,” Rao told me. “You don’t know, because it would ruin your entire image of being the perfect, nice white lady. I’m sure you’re intimately familiar with this, being a white woman.”

Race2Dinner participants sign up for something that promises to be painful, unsightly, and yet transformative, like a chemical peel for the soul. “Interested in hosting a dinner?” asks the Race2Dinner website in red text superimposed on a shattered china plate. “Click here to smash your white fragility.” Guests used to be asked to read White Fragility, but no more. For one thing, Rao said, “we definitely don’t want to put another dollar in Robin DiAngelo’s pocket.” For another, among prospective customers, pretty much everyone has already read it.

The pair have gone from low-rent Robin DiAngelo imitators to having a book deal and a documentary of their own. They were in the process of turning the idea into an off-Broadway play when they got dropped:

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Ally Shuster, who works for CAA, was the pair’s dramatic agent. Rao says they’ve been working with a theater producer to transform the concept of Race2Dinner into a scripted, off-Broadway production, but they didn’t hear from Shuster when they expected to last week — a sign that something was up.

“A couple of days ago, I get a call from our literary agent, who was like, ‘[Shuster] no longer is going to represent you both,’” Rao recalls. “She is offended by your posts.”

For its part, CAA claimed the decision was mutual and said the agency didn’t have a problem with Rao’s pro-Palestinian posts, it had a problem with her anti-Semitic posts.

Speaking through a spokesperson, the agency says many people it works with support Palestine, but Rao’s words went too far. The CAA cites four specific posts that it says crossed the line into “anti-Semitism and hate speech.”

“Zionists are starting to panic that more and more of the world sees them for the bloodthirsty genocidal ghouls that they are,” Rao wrote on Threads in one instance. Another example the CAA cites: “Can you imagine being so obsessed with land and power and money that you murder newborns to obtain this STUFF,” which Rao posted on X.

“Whiteness is a death cult and am so grateful to not be a part of it,” she added.

Now they’ve been dropped and naturally Rao sees that as “ethnic cleansing” (see her tweet above). So the company that helped her make money and spread her message is suddenly racist? I guess when you’re a one trick pony, all we can really expect is the same one trick. Rao seems incapable of performing the kind of self-reflection she demands of others. The idea that maybe she sounds like a racist just does not compute with her.

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What I find most interesting is that Rao’s obvious hatred of white people and America in general was never a bar to her having an agent at CAA. And even the things she’s saying about Israel now she was saying several years ago. There’s nothing new here.

Here she is accusing a pro-Israel politician of being “fully owned.” Owned by who? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Her thoughts on America.

Why wouldn’t a talent agent want to work with her? I can’t imagine.

She really seems to be drifting into Alex Jones territory. Yesterday she was ranting that white people wanted live-streamed executions of “all black and brown” people.

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I posted this CBS News report earlier today warning of an increased terror threat toward New York. Rao retweeted this claim that this was setting the stage for “martial law.”

All that’s missing here is a rant about turning the frogs gay. But there’s no denying Alex Jones has made a good living off his garbage and I’m sure Saira Rao will continue to as well.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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