"Am I Racist?" Is Part Of The Problem, Not The Solution

Matt Walsh’s controversial film makes its points but fuels polarization.

Matt Walsh at the Am I A Racist? premiere, September 9, 2024. (Jason Davis/Stringer.)

What starts in deadly sincerity ends in camp. If the “woke era” has been characterized by an at-times painful self-seriousness, it is maybe a kind of cosmic justice to see it skewered by some cheap gags and a very bad wig.

In Am I Racist?, the Daily Wire star Matt Walsh disguises himself as a twerpy, overly-earnest “certified DEI instructor.” He travels the country attending antiracism workshops and interviewing diversity professionals, whom he exposes as cloying, one-note grifters. This isn’t exactly a mission impossible, but Walsh—a popular blogger and podcaster—is comedically talented. The degree to which you appreciate Am I Racist? may hinge, however, upon whether you accept Walsh’s conceit that, in these wrenching times of rampant polarization, what we need are more right-wing provocations.  

In a sideways way of promoting the movie, Walsh argues that the thrust and tenor of Am I Racist? is so at odds with the sentiments of cultural elites, and so genuinely subversive, that he is being effectively blackballed by mainstream publications. “Critics are literally speechless,” he joked. He has a point here. The film premiered in 1,517 theaters on September 13 and has grossed $12 million since then. That means it had the most successful opening of any political documentary film since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which was so rapturously received in 2004 that some thought it might swing that year’s presidential election. The idea that a movie can do that well at the box office while being ignored by critics underscores the extent to which the culture has bifurcated—with some books and movies ineligible for polite consideration irrespective of their merits or popularity. 

Am I Racist? did start garnering media attention after it was released, although, oddly, the coverage surfaced in the opinion sections of newspapers, as opposed to in the film reviews. Megan McArdle, in the Washington Post, judged it “simplistic and unfair” but “effective,” insofar as it reveals how the far-left fringe keeps providing right-wing cultural warriors “such a rich trove of targets.” Vinson Cunningham, in the New Yorker, panned the film but conceded one of its points—that, in recent years, various elements in the DEI industry have preyed on gullible whites. “To hear some of these so-called DEI consultants speak,” Cunningham writes, “is to want to rip your ears off.”

For example: Early in the film, Walsh encounters Kate Slater, a DEI expert who solemnly proclaims that “America is racist to its bones.” This is just one of countless thought-terminating clichés that pepper the film, although Saira Rao, who, starting in 2019, infamously co-hosted a series of $5,000-a-plate antiracist dinner parties, goes next-level. “This country is not worth saving,” she says emphatically. “This country is a piece of shit.”

Parts of the film are upsetting to watch. Along with her collaborator, Regina Jackson, Rao plainly gets off on humiliating the affluent suburban women who regard them as experts. In their “Race2Dinner” sessions, the antiracist educators have just one rule. “If you have to cry, you have to leave the table,” Jackson announces. “When a white woman starts crying, it draws all the attention from the room onto that poor white woman.”  

One of the film’s skits farcically recreates Jussie Smollett’s 2019 hate crime hoax, reminding viewers how gonzo his claims were. While visiting Chicago, Smollett left his hotel at 2 a.m. in subzero weather in order, he said, to buy a Subway sandwich. While walking down an otherwise deserted street he claimed he was violently attacked by two mask-wearing Trump supporters who recognized him as a celebrity, taunted him with homophobic and racist slurs, poured bleach on him, flung a noose around his neck, and yelled, outlandishly, “This is MAGA country!” The alacrity with which Smollett’s supporters believed him remains striking—and the whole incident seems made for its send-up in Am I Racist?

In the film’s defining scene, Walsh snookers Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling White Fragility, into sitting for an interview in exchange for $15,000. Walsh is so disarmingly fluent in antiracist psychobabble that the two get along swimmingly, right until the point where DiAngelo appears to realize, with escalating apprehension, that she’s been had.

On other occasions, however, Walsh inadvertently monkeywrenches his agenda. He’s on the hunt for hustlers and dupes, but many of the people he encounters are pleasant and obviously well-intentioned. Some of them are extraordinarily patient as Walsh sets out to disrupt their gatherings. One can disagree with “diversity” as a governing ideology while understanding that many of its supporters are attempting to reckon with genuine historical injustices.

Alas, Walsh doesn’t provide a whit of context for the Great Awokening. George Floyd’s murder isn’t mentioned except as a gag. (Walsh collects signatures for a petition to rename the Washington Monument the “George Floyd Monument.”) Walsh says nothing about the ugly downsides of Trumpian populism, which—it is only fair to point out—made some form of backlash inevitable. And it is not good for Walsh’s argument that Am I Racist? hit theaters during a presidential campaign in which Republicans are spreading racially inflammatory lies about black migrants eating peoples’ pets.

In a post on X, Walsh acknowledged that the sneaky methods that went into the film bordered on “ruthless” and, at a minimum, were not nice. The excuse, Walsh claims, is that “niceness is a luxury we don’t always have”—and that the underhanded tactics he used in the film were necessary as a tool of last resort. That claim is central to the project Walsh is embarked on in the film. But he is wrong. 

DEI is already in retreat. After the peak of the “Great Awokening,” many universities are quietly course-correcting and embracing institutional neutrality. Last month, The Economist ran a special report, based on polling and statistical analysis, which found that “America is becoming less ‘Woke,’” with, for instance, “attempts to censure academics” far below their peak in 2021. More recently, the New York Times Magazine published an approximately 9,000-word investigative report by Nicholas Confessore, examining how the University of Michigan has implemented diversity, equity, and inclusion. He found that a backlash was brewing, not from right-wing provocateurs like Walsh, “but from inside the university’s own dorms and faculty lounges,” where most people regard D.E.I. with “a kind of wary disdain.” Turns out, left-wing illiberalism can be defeated through the normal process of cultural change. (And it has helped that some scholars and opinion-makers refuse to be bullied by it.)

The culture wars have a way of driving everyone a little bit crazy. The thought occurred to me again, for the umpteenth time, while listening to Walsh promote Am I Racist? on the Joe Rogan Experience. Walsh spent an hour gently pushing back against Rogan’s musings about whether the Apollo moon landing was faked. Then he genially entertained the possibility that the earrings that Kamala Harris wore in her September 10 presidential debate were actually Nova H1 earpieces.

It’s one thing to keep odd bedfellows. Lately, even our presidential candidates have been appearing on eccentric or wingnut podcasts. But it’s another thing to wallow in sensationalism to the point where reestablishing a reasonable center seems almost impossible. Am I Racist? fans the flames of the culture wars rather than tamping them down.

Put it this way. Mr. Walsh, if you’re reading this: you’re in the midst of a successful career, and for good reasons. But you’re leaning heavily into a style of far-right partisanship that nowadays can seem like its own form of ideological mania. So, if someone approaches you saying they want to make a flattering documentary about embattled podcast bros, remember something you mischievously told Robin DiAngelo. “You can never be too careful.” 

John McMillian is a professor of American history at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He is writing a book on crime and policing in New York City since the 1960s. 

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