Am I a racist? What IS a racist? What is racism? The term has skyrocketed in frequency of use and expanded in application in recent times beyond what anyone can clearly or consistently recognize, let alone define. It has been a phantasmagoric term plagued by multiple, elusive, and oftentimes self-contradictory meanings for some time now.
It is probably for that very reason that it has become so useful in modern discourse. Unclear but emotionally resonant verbiage has proven time and again to be extremely effective in winning legions of unthinking masses to a cause. As Aldous Huxley observed, when such verbiage entails offering the masses a collective villain to trounce, reception is increased.
Rhetoric around racism is awash with both, and thus is well overdue for some hard critical analysis. Take note, dear reader, that to analyze something doesn’t necessarily result in total disposal. I don’t think the subject of racism warrants that. And seemingly, neither does Matt Walsh…
Content Guide
Violence/Scary Images: A satirical reenactment of the Jussie Smollett hoax. No actual violence.
Language/Crude Humor: At least one instance of “bulls***”.
Drug/Alcohol References: A scene is set in a bar. Drinks and cigarettes are shown.
Sexual Content: A man wears a very inappropriate shirt (which makes a pun involving “vegetarianism”), and an inappropriate flag is on the wall in one scene. Both refer to female body parts.
Spiritual content: None.
Other negative themes: Tense conversations with various idealogues.
Positive Content: Walsh spends much of the time simply letting people speak for themselves, occasionally interjecting with questions of clarification.
Review
Hello, dear reader. It’s been some time.
There is an oft-cited quote from Napoleon that reads “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. I’m sure there has to be some pragmatic caveats to such sage advice. Your enemies’ mistakes may very well be detrimental not only to the enemy, but also to yourself, your home, your livelihood, or anything else you’re trying to protect. Then again, that depends quite heavily on what we mean by “mistake”. That which the enemy is doing that is self-destructive as well as a bane to you may very well have been the intention all along. Blotting one’s eye out may enable one to blot out both of another’s.
Indeed, the meaning of words seems to be front and center in Am I Racist?, the second mockumentary project by The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh. There are a couple of ways in which Walsh can be described with regard to his approach, both in this case and with reference to his previous intentionally incisive release of What Is A Woman? He could be said to be the one who points out the elephant in the room. He could be analogized to the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale unafraid and socially unrefined enough to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Or maybe he has been socially refined plenty and has had enough of that.
Either way, Walsh is one among many who sees something of a need for critical analysis with all the rhetoric surrounding the issue of “racism”, which has noticeably increased in both frequency and intensity in recent years. There’s been a lot of heat surrounding such discussions, but relatively little light. Tribalistic division and dogmatic alliances have been the standard operating procedure, with our base primal inclinations for “Us vs. Them” thinking being given undue primacy.
Walsh seems to believe that the best way to go about bridging that gap is to simply step over into that school of thought, much as he did in What is a Woman? This time, however, he’s going undercover as one of the people ON the other side, giving them the chance to speak wholly and openly on their own terms. It was bafflingly easy, with Walsh able to become DEI-certified within half an hour or so in real-time minutes. I must admit that I was not too won over by this less challenging approach initially.
This may be a result of Walsh’s own priming, but one could be forgiven for expecting more of the stimulating questioning campaign that Walsh carried out in What is a Woman? Here instead, Walsh is taking a more satirical approach of simply feigning alliance with his ideological opponents in order to have them give the most honest and mask-off representation of themselves that can be allowed. It’s a daring move, and one that Walsh does with remarkable deftness, thinking on his feet in awkward and heated situations.
I’ve heard some reviewers – the handful brave enough to even speak on the film – refer to Walsh as a “conservative Borat”. I can see why they are coming from that angle, but they might have their eyes in backwards with that take. What Sacha Baron Cohen did as the character of Borat and what Matt Walsh is doing as the character of himself in many ways couldn’t be more different. Cohen made himself the butt of his own antics. Walsh allows his satirical targets to fall prey to their own antics. If Borat was a clown, Walsh is a jester. As I read someone put it, Borat asked ridiculous questions of normal people. Walsh asks normal questions of ridiculous people.
This routine starts off pretty early on in Am I Racist?, with Walsh wrestling with himself as to how he’s going to get some clarity on the issue of racism, by defaulting to a casual – albeit, quite costly – conversation with “this white woman” (Kate Slater), who seems, despite all her expertise and training, to almost immediately find herself in an impossible bind in how to “decentralize whiteness” in both herself and her young daughter.
The encounters that Walsh has with several folks rapidly turn cringe-inducing in a very similar way, with unspecified buzzwords being tossed to and fro with little to no rhyme or reason, and everyone seemingly being left with more questions than answers. At times, the secondhand embarrassment was so overwhelming, I found myself having a hard time sitting through it. It certainly wasn’t as breezy and smooth a watch as Walsh’s previous venture into the self-defeating jargon of the over-educated radical left. Perhaps that was the intent all along?
A bit of old wisdom I’ve been carrying around for some time is that sunlight is a powerful disinfectant. A more relevant token is that one cannot effectively argue with a sneer. Because the most prominent proponents of what has been appropriately called “Neoracism” (which, like the old racism, refuses to see members of society as anything other than faceless specimens of a group abstraction with no individual identity or value worth acknowledging), are so seasoned in the deplorable art of sneering at any and all dissent, Walsh doesn’t bother wasting time arguing with them. Instead, he simply brings their ugly and wretched irrationality, detachment from mundane reality, hubris, lack of integrity, opportunistic greed, and self-righteousness out in the open for all to see. Walsh doesn’t have to go through the trouble of demonstrating any of this. His opponents do it themselves. It’s no surprise that so many of the speakers he interviewed (with disquietingly high fees paid to them, mind you) over the course of this film have gone radio silent online since its release.
Of all people, it was Booker T. Washington who observed in the early 20th Century a kind of virulent malice behind a movement in society that has evolved into what we now know today as the “DEI industry”. As he wrote in 1911:
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
He follows up in another writing:
“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
If what Washington wrote over 110 years ago was relevant then, it is several times more alarmingly applicable now. The high price tags to the short interviews that Walsh has with each of these grifters is more than proof positive of that.
While the venomous ideology of the neoracists is plain in their attitudes, behavior, and cantankerous takes on what “needs to be done” to “decentralize whiteness” in society, the venom manifests itself in many forms. Some of these proponents are simply misguided opportunists who, like Washington’s “race-problem solvers”, are simply taking advantage of a cultural gold rush in collective racial shame present in American public discourse. Others are more antagonistic and bitter, actively doing all they can to cultivate shame in individual members of the white population for wrongs that they never committed in order to provide the fertile grounds for capitalizing on such collective disgrace.
One of the more repulsive ne’er-do-wells is Saira Rao, a woman who uses her “Race to Dinner” service to gather high-paying white women together as a captive audience at a dinner table in order to relentlessly berate them for simply being who they are in the current year. Walsh uses impressively convincing physical comedy at this time, disguised as a manbun-wearing DEI-certified waiter at the dinner, to offer whatever relief he can from Rao’s slanderous onslaught. Time will tell how effective it was.
Thankfully, not all of Walsh’s journey across the landscape of racial attitudes in modern-day America were so insufferable a slog. I’m just about ready to put it up as a canon that the greatest enemy of the radical will not be the equal-but-opposite extremists on the other side. It will be the massive ocean of mundane normality humbly resting between them. The greatest and most welcome respite that Walsh could have offered his audience is a much-needed trip among ordinary American folk living at peace outside of this toxic paradigm of “race consciousness”.
Black, white, young, old, rural, and urban faces all make their quiet harmony and freedom from the ever-present anxiety of being “for the cause” known and so refreshingly desirable. They are living out Dr. King’s dream of judging others by content of character, rather than color of skin. In this, Walsh responsibly gives his audience a choice as to whom they would like to emulate and whose visions would be better to carry out.
For a number of reasons, a movie like Am I Racist? really shouldn’t exist. It shouldn’t be the case that such a cabal of charlatans are doing their utmost to take advantage of contrived hive mind indignity and insecurity for a handsome paycheck, and that someone like Matt Walsh has to come along to bring that out into the open. By another angle it is truly astounding how many people Walsh managed to get to agree to a sit down with him, manbun adorned or not. Probably the climax to the whole film was an unexpected faux interview with Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling White Fragility. Unlike Rao, DiAngelo doesn’t come across as curt, belligerent, caustic, or resentful. She is rather foolish, however, with Walsh easily swindling her into paying $30 in “reparations” to Walsh’s black assistant Benyam Capel as a prank.
One more reason why this movie shouldn’t exist is that it ought not be the case that folks who pride themselves as being so socially aware and “thinking” people are so ideologically possessed and insulated within their own echo chambers of thought that such a well-known social commentator like Walsh can easily slip by them unnoticed while making such attention-grabbing clamor among their ranks. It’s the selective attention experiment involving the unnoticed gorilla writ large. In a dragging opening sequence in which Walsh doesn’t even adopt the manbun wig and simply attends an “anti-racism” session under the alias of “Stephen”, it takes quite a while before anyone in the room even recognizes him and calls the authorities to have him removed.
In a much later sequence, Walsh hosts his own anti-racism lecture, going so far as to offer his attendees their own choice of flail with which to literally flagellate themselves for the sins of the past. Some of the patrons check out from the quasi-religious weirdness of it all, but it is astounding how many in the room actually take Walsh up on his offer of a tool for self-harm. No one identifies Walsh that time around. Either these types are so woefully ignorant of anyone outside of their myopic purview of feigned and ill-advised compassion, or there may be something to Superman’s method of “disguising” himself among mild-mannered folk.
Whatever the reasons why Am I Racist? shouldn’t exist, something like it really has to exist for now. Hopefully this will serve as the catalyst to more effective incisions into and treatment for this cancer of Neoracism – one where whatever court that this jester serves will be more involved. Lord knows we could use their help now more than ever.
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