‘Am I a Racist?’ Packs a Potent Political Punch: Ridicule

In his popular 1971 book Rules for Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky identified ridicule as the most potent of all political weapons. 

“There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule,” said Alinsky, a Chicago-based community organizer and activist.  

Ridicule is the recipe for Matt Walsh’s new documentary Am I a Racist?, a film that pulled in $4.7 million in its opening weekend, the third most for a documentary in the last decade, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 

I attended Am I a Racist? on Saturday with a friend, and with the possible exception of Deadpool & Wolverine, no movie in years had me laughing so hard.

Walsh does a wonderful job of exposing the DEI industry and the bankrupt philosophy of the New Racists, who much like the Old Racists, refuse to see people as individuals. 

“You cannot separate yourself from the bad white people,” author Saira Rao tells a group of women (including Walsh in costume and wig) who ponied up thousands of dollars to learn how to shed their white identity. 

Rao, Robin DiAngelo and the other “antiracists” depicted in Walsh’s film fall into the racist trap of seeing others only as their group identity. And Walsh goes to great lengths to expose the radical intellectual foundation of the ideology of the New Racists, but that work has been well done before. What makes Am I a Racist? so delicious — and a true work of art — is Walsh’s brilliant use of narrative and humor to reveal that his targets are not just third-rate scholars but outright charlatans.

The movie begins with Walsh attending an antiracist struggle session under false pretenses. He introduces himself as Stephen and behaves obnoxiously, interrupting others constantly and yammering on about himself. Eventually he retreats to the crying room (a real thing), and upon returning he has been outed as Matt Walsh, conservative commentator for the despised Daily Wire. People feel unsafe and Walsh is ordered to leave. The police are called. 

All of this is according to plan, of course. And it gives Walsh his “Inciting Incident” — a filmmaking term for a disruptive event that sets a protagonist’s story into motion. Walsh decides to “disguise” himself and sets out on a quest of racial discovery. He dons a jacket and man-bun, and files the paperwork (and pays the necessary fees) to become a certified DEI expert.

Equipped with his DEI card, which he flashes everywhere he goes, Walsh can begin his quest of coming to grips with his whiteness, paying lavish fees to sit down and talk with the best minds in the DEI business.

Using droll humor, pregnant pauses, and the power of the question, Walsh allows his subjects to do the work on his behalf, telling the audience everything about DEI and the ideology of the New Racists. Kate Slater, an “anti-racist scholar-practitioner,” tells Walsh we should be talking to six-month old babies about racism. (She’s angry her own daughter still likes white princesses.) 

Some antiracists appear to be misguided true believers, duped to believe that the the answer to racism is a different kind of racism, but the majority of Walsh’s subjects appear like grasping grifters turning a buck by exploiting the racial shame white Americans still feel over slavery and Jim Crow.

The climax of the movie comes when Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling book White Fragility, shells out $30 to Walsh’s assistant Benyam Capel, one of his “seventeen black friends,” as reparations. DiAngelo seems to doubt individual action can atone for the collective sin of slavery, yet after a little prompting, which includes Walsh’s own reparations payment to Capel, she retrieves the money from her purse.

“That’s all the cash I have,” DiAngelo tells Capel.

Unlike Rao, DiAngelo doesn’t seem mean. She doesn’t seem bitter. But she does seem very much like a fool — albeit a fool who has written a book that has sold five million copies and who was paid $15,000 for a brief interview with Matt Walsh. 

All of this is designed to drive home the point of Walsh’s mockumentary. 

“There’s a group of people that get paid money — and derive power and influence — in creating racial division,” Walsh tells The Free Press. “They profit off of guilt and resentment and suspicion.”

Saying this is one thing. Showing it is something else, and that’s exactly what Walsh does on his Borat-like journey of racial discovery.

I made the Borat comparison when leaving the theater, and  was a bit disappointed to see that numerous other writers had already drawn the connection. But there’s an important difference between Walsh’s comedy and that of Sacha Baron Cohen, whose mockumentary Borat in 2006 became an international smash by (hilariously) deceiving and mocking Americans. 

Whereas Cohen’s comedy punched down, Walsh’s humor punches up. His targets are primarily university faculty and best-selling authors who are making astonishing amounts of money by creating racial disharmony and exploiting racial shame. Secondary targets (we might call them friendly fire) are the rich white women who pay Rao unseemly sums to be told how awful their whiteness is, and the suckers who pay card-carrying DEI instructors to provide them tools to flagellate themselves over their racist sins.

The religious parallels here are not lost on Walsh, who at one point has attendees of his DEI session select the tool with which they’ll flagellate themselves. Though some of the attendees walked out of the room when the whips and paddles were presented, many reached into the box and took one. 

In the end, Am I a Racist? shows that the two things Marxists claim to hate most — profit and religion — are deeply entwined with the DEI commercial apparatus. 

Importantly, however, Walsh’s movie doesn’t just lambaste antiracists. He shows us good examples, too. Along his journey, we meet other people — black and white. Young and Old. Immigrant and native — who see people as they should: as individuals. 

The decision to incorporate these voices and experiences into the film was artistically important; the comedic scenes during this part of Walsh’s journey are warmer and less stressful than when Walsh is, say, serving antiracists food at a dinner party behind a mask and dropping a stack of dishes, or filling a glass with water until it spills over. Even more importantly, these trips and experiences show us there is an alternative to the racism that is infecting our institutions and human souls.

It’s unclear what the legacy of Walsh’s movie will be. While I don’t expect to see Walsh at the Academy Awards in March, I suspect his film will hasten the withdrawal of DEI programs in America, which were already in retreat.

Whether Am I a Racist? can drive a stake through DEI’s heart is unclear, but Walsh has already achieved something no white paper or logical argument has done to DEI evangelists: he embarrassed them. 

And as Saul Alinsky would say, nothing is more effective politically than that.