Am I Racist?
A Review

2,450 words

The idea of the personal journey being self-documented on film is not new. Ross McEllwe’s autobiographical 1986 documentary Sherman’s March is a great example. McEllwe initially wanted to document the impacts of William Sherman’s campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War, but ended up making a film about all the women in his life and why he cannot find romantic stability. A clever idea, and quite poignant in its execution.

As with any established film genre, however, the personal journey narrative has become fair game for parody and satire, with ordinary or even prominent people being asked to share camera space with a filmmaker whose real journey departs significantly from his stated one. Sacha Baron Cohen most famously pulled this off with his 2004 comedy Borat, wherein several ordinary people underwent severe embarrassment, lost their jobs, or suffered damaged reputations as a result of being filmed by Cohen. Less funny but infinitely more satirical and insightful is Am I Racist? the recently released film from director Justin Folk and conservative Daily Wire host Matt Walsh.

Unlike the pair’s previous documentary—the excellent What is a Woman? which features Walsh’s real-life persona—Am I Racist? chronicles the sham personal journey of “Matt Walsh” from ignorance to enlightenment as he struggles to overcome his completely fictitious racism. In What is a Woman? Walsh flirts with such pretense whenever disingenuously asking the title question and letting his gender-confused interlocuters make fools of themselves as they answer. But there were serious segments as well. Am I Racist? however takes this trick to another level. Upon his new journey, Walsh adopts a fake identity, dons a ridiculously flimsy disguise, and pretends to be a “certified DEI expert” as he trolls the innocent and guilty alike with his utterly nonsensical gospel of race wokedom. Absolutely nothing is played straight in Am I Racist?

The results are equal parts cringe-inducing, and hilarious, but always engrossing. Because there are so many moving parts with Folk and Walsh’s approach, it’s hard to assess Am I Racist? without caveats. It’s part documentary, part candid camera, part comedy, and part satire, and the film as a whole will end up fairly uneven if you consider it to be only one of these. But when you take it as an amalgam of these disparate elements, whatever flaws it has washes away and we are left with a cultural milestone as powerful and far-reaching as any documentary ever made.

But is it really a documentary? Is it really non-fiction? A better descriptor for Am I Racist? would be pseudo-fiction. The audience knows the narrative is a farce. The protagonist pretends that it isn’t. Meanwhile, everyone else in the film thinks the narrative is real.

The story, such as it is, begins when “Matt Walsh,” starts to notice race and wishes to learn more about it. After visiting a Boulder, Colorado bookstore with a large critical race theory section and then consulting an anti-racism expert named Kate Slater about the importance of Disney princesses of color, he begins to realize how racist he really is. He is a white man, after all, supposedly the top of the racial heap. In order to deal with this affliction, he infiltrates an anti-racist workshop where the black lecturer is being paid $30,000 to help white people confront their white-hooded, cross-burning demons. (It’s an ongoing, and useful trope of the film to state how much these DEI make for their time.) Walsh, however, cannot stop interrupting the proceedings with his own pious lamentations. The result is pretty funny. They eventually figure out who he is, kick him out, and call the cops.

At this point, Walsh realizes he must go undercover if he wishes to continue on his journey. This includes taking an online diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) course, getting a black power tattoo on his arm, reading the books he supposedly picked up in Boulder, and wearing a silly wig. From here we have basically two kinds of encounters: ones with ordinary people and ones with so-called DEI experts. In the former, Walsh mouths ridiculous DEI talking points about white supremacy and systemic racism which cause people to shake their heads in bemusement. All of this racial talk violates common sense, after all. (“Systemic? What the hell is that?”) These are man-on-the-street interviews as well as his unscripted dialogues with salt-of-the-earth types at a biker bar and in a black neighborhood in the American South.

But in the latter cases, he comes face to face with anti-racist authors and activists while claiming to be a filmmaker doing a documentary (which is kind of true, no?). In these instances, Walsh often leads his oblivious victim to reveal the utter vapidness of their positions. The jewel in this film’s crown is Walsh’s conversation with Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. He manages to get DiAngelo to assert the nonsensical position that white people should simultaneously be racist and non-racist while both noticing and not noticing race. He also engages with her in an inane role playing game about what to do when a white person commits the faux pas of over-smiling or under-smiling at a black person. In one deliciously awkward moment, Walsh guilts DiAngelo into giving his black film producer $30 as “reparations” for slavery. DiAngelo, who was paid $15,000 for her two-hour conversation with Walsh, does not cough up her pocket cash easily.

The coup Walsh and his team stage here is perfect. By allowing Robin DiAngelo, bestselling critical race theory scholar that she is, to speak candidly about anti-racism, not only does Walsh allow her to humiliate herself by revealing her stupidity, he proves how stupid she is by the very fact that she fell for his transparent ruse. Indeed, after “co-starring” with Matt Walsh in Am I Racist? Robin DiAngelo comes across as what she really is: the Princess of Petty, the Doyenne of Dumb.

Yet, compared to the other DEI experts appearing in the film, the sterling intellect of Robin DiAngelo positively sparkles. One guest is the stylishly ghetto Sarra Tekola, PhD, who mumbles about abolishing whiteness and pressuring whites to “embrace the pain,” whatever that means.. Dr. Tekola earned $1,500 for her time. Walsh’s production team also paid $50,000 to be lectured by the seemingly semi-literate Judi Brown, whose claim to fame is being the mother of the two little black girls who were snubbed by the Rosita Muppet at the Sesame Place theme park in 2022. Most hysterically, Walsh infiltrates an all-female Race 2 Dinner struggle session held by Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, whose racket entails charging white women thousands of dollars for the privilege of expressing their racial guilt over parmesan encrusted tomato risotto, fig and goat cheese arugula salad, and mango salsa mahi-mahi with basmati rice. The spiteful and vindictive Rao gets caught on camera saying such enlightened things as “Republicans are Nazis” and “the entire systems has to burn.” Walsh, who is a waiter at the event, bumbles hilariously through the segment, causing as many interruptions as possible. He ends up getting the ladies to raise a toast to racism.

While Am I Racist? constitutes a genuine blow for the Right in the culture wars, it’s also an excellent film on its own merits. The score and editing remain seamless throughout. Walsh’s Chevy Chase deadpan consistently delivers the laughs. And the writing is frankly inspired. Getting people to sign a petition to rename the George Washington Monument to the George Floyd Monument? I’ll bet Mark Dice wishes he had thought of that one.

There were two moments in the film, however, which I found questionable. One was the appearance of half-black writer Wilfred Reilly, the only DEI expert in the film smart enough not to make a fool of himself. Reilly basically serves as a reality check against critical race theory as he patiently explains that real crimes, and not so-called hate crimes, are what most plague black communities in the United States. Yet having once admitted on camera that the gradual extinction of white people would be a good thing, Reilly could reasonably be considered anti-white. Most likely, this is an unintentional counterpoint of the film, something Walsh’s production team should have considered before inviting a character like Reilly onboard. Also, Reilly seems a little too smart to be fooled by Walsh’s antics. This is a man who once shared a debate stage with Jared Taylor. Are we to simply believe that he fell for the same trick that DiAngelo fell for? That he had never even heard of Matt Walsh? I find that difficult, and wonder if Walsh, Folk, and Reilly had come to some understanding before the cameras started rolling. Who knows?

The other questionable moment may also be the film’s very best, and as with many moments in Borat, I feel a little guilty saying this. After the film’s release, Walsh not only discussed the predictable outrage from the Left, he also vented about criticism coming from the Right, especially the Christian Right. At issue was Walsh’s ethics and whether it was morally justified to use deception to make his film.

Walsh lays out his perspective quite well:

We were making a piece of entertainment. Yes. But that entertainment had a point, and that point was to expose an insidious agenda and the people who push it. Specifically, in this film and our first film, we were looking to expose and humiliate the so-called expert class, our self-assigned moral superiors who impose their insane, morally perverse doctrines on us from on high. If we had to use deception to do it, and again I use that term only for the sake of argument, then my question to the critics is this: how else are supposed to do it? How else can these people be exposed?

Now, yeah, you can make your arguments, you can present your opinions, you can explain why you think these people are full of it. That doesn’t expose them. Not in the way that Robin DiAngelo was exposed, the professor from What is a Woman?, or any of the other unwitting co-stars in our film. They cannot be exposed unless they are out in the open. Okay, they must come down from their perch, and make themselves vulnerable. But these people will never do that intentionally. They exercise this profound influence and control over the culture and our lives, and they do it from a distance. Insulated, protected. So what then? Either we throw up our hands and we let them hide behind all these layers of intellectual protection, which they have set up for themselves. Or we use more innovative and perhaps even ruthless techniques to lure them out from behind that wall that they’re hiding behind.

So Walsh has a fighting spirit. Fantastic. He further states that,

. . . we’re actually punching up. With this film and the last we’re going after academics, so-called experts, DEI grifters, con artists, and in general, upper class liberals. Okay. There are a few scenes in our film, in the latest film Am I Racist? featuring normal working-class people. We do go into some low-income areas to talk to people who are working class or even lower than that on the income ladder. But in those scenes, as you’ll see when you watch the movie, I’m the butt of the joke. And we were very intentional about that. I said this many times all throughout shooting. This was like a mantra as we were shooting it. . . . I said that if we do any scenes with normal, good, nice people, I need to be the butt of the joke in those scenes. I’m not trying to embarrass normal people who are just trying to live their lives. I don’t want to trap them into saying anything that’s going to make them look bad. I don’t want to do that.

This sounds great, but unfortunately it is not strictly true. The second questionable moment in the film occurs toward the end when Walsh initiates his own DEI seminar and invites ordinary white people to pay good money to be hectored—rather unconvincingly, it is true—about their race. The scene unfolds as do many others which feature ordinary people: with Matt Walsh making “Matt Walsh” the butt of the joke as he spouts his highly theoretical race nonsense at people who know better. And it’s funny. A few people get up and leave, while others look on skeptically. Walsh then makes a brilliant move. He wheels in his elderly, disabled, and perhaps even demented uncle Frank, and then berates him for telling a racist joke years ago at the dinner table.

(The joke was pretty good, by the way. What’s the difference between a Mexican and a picnic table? The picnic table can support a family of four. Womp. Womp.)

Anyway, Walsh ultimately gives his audience a chance to have their say with Uncle Frank. One woman gives him a heartfelt “fuck you.” Another lays into him and says a few things she will never be able to take back. If this scene had been scripted, that would have been one thing, but if not, Walsh may have injured the reputations of “normal people who are just trying to live their lives,” as he put it. I am not going to knock him for this because these two women were being jarringly cruel in their own right and thus hardly qualify as innocent (as opposed to the vast majority of the people duped by Sacha Baron Cohen). Still, I found this a bit hard to swallow. Also, this film states that Walsh had earned over $3,000 in tuition for this bogus seminar. Did he give the money back? That’s something else I would like to know.

Yet this scene packs a punch I did not see coming, which is why I said it was the film’s very best. While this review contains quite a few spoilers, I am not going to spoil the end of this amazing sequence. It is like nothing I have ever seen before, and will likely appear in psychology textbooks of the future when analyzing the perverse extremes of white guilt in the early twenty-first century.

As good and as righteous as it is, Am I Racist? is, does have its limitations. It avoids race realism, ethnocentrism, white identity, or many other issues near and dear to the dissident Right. It’s not really a game changer, and offers little information about DEI and critical race theory we don’t already know. But it is an instance of a conservative pundit picking all the right enemies, taking off the gloves, and giving back as good as he’s getting—all for a good cause. For that, it’s truly a wonderful thing.