A successful podcaster and Daily Wire personality, Walsh continues to pull off the act of effectively flummoxing progressive partisans into letting him into their support groups, interviews, and even dinner parties. I have to imagine there’s a decreasing return on investment on Walsh running around in the equivalent of glasses and a fake mustache and successfully running the deception play, but the gas hasn’t run out of the tank yet as Walsh brings audiences his latest foray into the politics of thinly veiled mockery: Am I Racist?
Walsh takes viewers on a ride through the past four years of American race politics, from the ramifications of George Floyd’s death to the modern state of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, framed as one white man’s attempt to understand how his race shapes his approach to the cultural and social problems of our current moment. Perhaps unsurprisingly — given Walsh’s previous cinematic offering, What Is A Woman? — hijinks ensue. At one point, when Walsh infiltrates a racial support group under a pseudonym, the revelation of his true identity leads the group actually to call the police to have the offending wrongthinker removed.
As someone who’s spent the past several years dealing (willingly and unwillingly) with the onslaught of race politics, I noticed many disagreeably familiar faces in the film, from an interview with the white and fragile Robin DiAngelo to the less white but similarly fragile minds behind “Race2Dinner,” a sanctimonious program aimed at teaching white women about how terrible they are over formal dinner and selling them racialized salvation for $2,500 a night. (Walsh was relegated to a waiter role for the dinner scene.)
The rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion’s loudest proponents is on full display throughout the film. The accusations made range from Walsh being a racist (the diagnosis, of course, coming from a lily-white practitioner of antiracism) to America itself being unworthy of saving. It’s nothing surprising to those who’ve been paying attention to the cancerous growth of DEI since late 2020, but a much-needed exposé for those who don’t spend all their time paying attention to politics.
It’s no new insight to note how the American racial “equity” movement broadly functions as a religion and one built on carefully crafted lies. If antiracism is bad religion, and it is, the people Walsh confronts in Am I Racist? aren’t acting in service of politics; they’re acolytes of a utopian religion that sees historical distortion, $ 2,500-a-day con jobs, and outright lies as necessary evils toward a desired goal.
In short, they’re the modern version of faith healers: Just like donating to a TV preacher brings healing, participating in an antiracist training session with DiAngelo or the Race2Dinner crew brings forgiveness for one’s sins of internalized prejudice. Walsh’s exposing of DEI’s most pedantic and radical figures functions similarly to unmasking faith healers. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and his reductio ad absurdum method is a completely viable strategy for conservatives looking to advance a better philosophy of race in America.
But it’s not the only strategy we need to employ.
Matt Walsh’s documentaries are case studies in political mockery, and let’s be clear: For conservatives seeking to architect cultural change and not just opine our way to victory, there are moments when this is good and necessary. In the case of What Is A Woman? those who are willing to deny biological differences between men and women in the face of the human costs that such denial creates have earned such mockery. In the case of Am I Racist? those who have undermined legitimate concerns about racial tensions either to cash out or advance further division and then cash out have also earned their mockery. But witty criticism is only one tool in the toolbox.
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Am I Racist? is a film made by the Right for the Right. It galvanizes people to take the fight to DEI advocates, but let’s not forget that the fight isn’t only won that way. Winning the fight takes the hard work of explaining to people who buy into DEI’s premises why there’s a better way out. Winning takes the hard work of explaining to marginalized people why the burdens of agency and freedom are better than the shortcuts of identity politics.
These are hard debates that won’t be won merely by making satirical documentaries. But winning them is the only way to achieve the goals shared by every American who cares about greater racial equality and national unity. It’s time to get in the trenches and fight the culture war. And it’s a lot easier to fight if we can do that with smiles on our faces.
Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism and a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. He is a Young Voices contributor and can be found on X @IsaacWillour.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
