'Am I Racist?': Matt Walsh's Hysterical Journey Through the DEI Circus
“Am I Racist?” shines as a mockumentary on grifters like DiAngelo, Rao, and Slater who use America’s current obsession with race to make obscene amounts of cash.
Following on the heels of his smash hit “What Is a Woman?”, Matt Walsh delivers yet again in his new movie “Am I Racist?”
Like his previous film, “Am I Racist?” focuses on a simple premise. In a world where the left has successfully forced all aspects of public and private life to hyperfixate on race, Walsh asks whether living in the colorblind mold of MLK Jr. makes him a racist.
Walsh encounters several names in the so-called anti-racist industry on his journey to achieve racial understanding. The film features segments with Race2Dinner founders Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, and anti-racist queen bee Robin DiAngelo.
The segment with DiAngelo is easily the highlight of the film; the theater where my wife and I saw it erupted with howls of laughter watching her struggle to put her theory into practice. But I’ll get to that later.
“Am I Racist?” takes a different approach to its subject matter than “What Is a Woman?” Instead of the exposé format used to shine a light on the transgender menace infecting American society, Walsh transforms himself into a conservative version of Borat, complete with tweed jacket and manbun, to get his interviewees to spill their guts.
Comfortable they’re amongst friends, his subjects reveal the true depths of their insanity.
Near the beginning of the film, “Anti-Racist Roadmap” author Kate Slater argues that “America is racist to its’ bones.” Walsh later infiltrates a Race2Dinner event where Rao argues “Republicans are Nazis” and “this country is a piece of shit” and that “you cannot separate yourselves from the bad white people.”
The film’s denouement sees Walsh hosting his own DEI seminar culminating in a truly hysterical spectacle. Walsh wheels out his allegedly racist uncle, yells at him for making a slightly politically incorrect joke at Thanksgiving dinner years ago, and has his participants tell Uncle Frank to fuck off.
Walsh then hands out whips to his white participants and implores them to literally self-flagellate to apologize for racism. All but a few seem ready to oblige. It’s hysterical.
But more so than exposing the insanity of the anti-racist movement, Walsh excels at exposing just how craven and profit seeking the whole thing is.
Walsh sits down with Jodi Brown, the mother of two little girls who claimed they were ignored by a mascot at Sesame Place in 2022. Brown apparently was unwilling to discuss the horrifying trauma of the Sesame snub, but a cool $50k got her to share her story.
Likewise, Walsh pays Sarra Tekola, a non-binary activist with a Ph.D. in sustainability, $1,500 to be told that all white people are racist. Tekola stumbles her way through a somewhat Jungian description of why white people are racist including a “shadow self” and a need to combine white people’s non-racist halves with the racist halves in order to… not be racist? It’s all very confusing.
But by far the most incredible scene in the movie comes when Walsh sits down with DiAngelo, whose book “White Fragility” was seen as gospel following the death of our savior, Saint George Floyd, in 2020.
In our theater, the audience chuckled with anticipation as DiAngelo asks Walsh for his name before musing she “has to be careful” about who she talks to.
Following a series of hypothetical scenarios where he asks DiAngelo how she would deal with a minority coworker’s grievances over her both smiling too much or too little, Walsh summons his black producer Ben to sit down so he can apologize to him for his racism.
As a form of reparations, Walsh reaches into his wallet to give Ben a $20 bill before explaining that even this is just a fraction of the great debt owed to blacks in America. DiAngelo notes that this whole thing is kind of weird before being convinced by Walsh to give Ben money from her wallet.
Hilariously, DiAngelo responded to her portrayal in the film arguing she was “put on the spot” and lied to.
DiAngelo wrote on her website that “While some Black people have asked white people to engage in reparations by giving directly to individuals, reparations are generally understood as a systemic approach to past and current injustice. The way Matt set this up felt intended to put Ben and I on the spot.”
DiAngelo, along with the other anti-racist activists in the film, have said repeatedly both that whites need to “do the work” on an individual level to stop racism and that they should be made uncomfortable. That DiAngelo seemed almost wholly unprepared to handle Walsh’s trolling illuminated just how vapid her philosophy is.
It also calls into question the value of the exorbitant $15k they paid her to sit down, since she fell apart the second she was forced to live out her ideas.
“Am I Racist?” shines as a mockumentary on grifters like DiAngelo, Rao, and Slater who use America’s current obsession with race to make obscene amounts of cash. The film is also timely as many public and private institutions are starting to rout their DEI departments.
As one final point, “Am I Racist” is infinitely accessible to anyone: left, right, or center. It’s not a political film, preferring to give its subjects enough rope to hang themselves as opposed to arguing for one position or another.
So bring Mom and Dad along for a film that’s sure to induce some laughs, and hopefully some social change. You’ll be in tears on the way out of the theater.