Am I a Racist?

Directed by Justin Folk ◆ Written by Justin Folk, Brian A. Hoffman, and Matt Walsh ◆ Produced by Daily Wire Studios and Digital Astronaut ◆ Distributed by SDG Releasing

America is racist to its bones. That’s according to Kate Slater, whose website says she “teaches, facilitates, and consults with organizations around the country who are focused on creating equitable, liberatory workspaces” and believes that “a core pillar of racial justice work is the redistribution of resources to people of color.” A self-described “anti-racist scholar-practitioner and facilitator,” Slater is the first person interviewed in conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s new documentary film Am I A Racist?

Walsh is best known for his previous documentary feature What Is A Woman? (2022), in which he asked gender theorists, feminist activists, and individuals sympathetic to their ideology to define the adult human female. Having received no clear or scientifically sound answer, he was instead treated to meaningless word salads, berserk diatribes, and requests to leave from interlocutors who, when pressed, seemed keenly aware that their culture-altering beliefs have no foundation beyond strong and apparently very confused emotions.

Released commercially in cinemas on Sept. 13, Am I A Racist?, is the highest-earning documentary film of 2024 to date, and the highest earning documentary produced in the last two decades. Over the weekend of its release, it was the fourth most popular movie in America, a fact that eluded me in a Washington, D.C., cinema where I was the only person in attendance. While the popularity of Am I A Racist? is undeniable, it has received relatively little critical attention, suggesting that the left would prefer to ignore it rather than engage in any argument or discussion.

Walsh takes the same approach to race that he took to gender, though with a twist since he is now well known enough to be recognized by the people he wants to examine. This is revealed early in the film when he attends a support group-style workshop discussion of “anti-racism and grief” whose leader, a pert black woman, promises the all-white participants that she “will be so happy if you all feel extremely uncomfortable.” Walsh introduces himself to the group as “Steven” and takes part in the discussion, but quickly finds that any critical inquiry is not merely deflected but grounds for removal to a separate room until such time as the excluded person is prepared to conform. While Walsh is away, the other participants slowly deduce his true identity. Upon his return, one woman announces that his mere presence is a threat to her physical safety. After similar denunciations, Walsh is escorted from the building, where two police cars await him.

That doesn’t sound very diverse, equitable, or inclusive in any true sense of those words’ meanings. To continue his inquiry all Walsh can do is disguise himself in the dress and manner one might expect of a guilty white progressive. Indeed, he has a role model from What Is A Woman?, a pony-tailed college professor who sports gray tweed, dorky specs, and athleisure shoes. To burnish his credentials further, Walsh enrolls in an online diversity, equity, and inclusion certification program, which issues him an “official” ID card that he can show people who might be skeptical. Detailed reading of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist, and similar texts, including a troublesome book whose title nobody can say aloud but that starts with “n” and rhymes with “trigger,” familiarizes Walsh with the movement’s jargon.

In his first forays into the world of anti-racist activism, Walsh encounters Sarra Tekola, the holder of a doctorate in “sustainability,” who “decolonizes” people through therapy sessions for the hefty sum of $1,500. Once inside the movement’s walls, Walsh learns more about what such people really think. “The only thing about white culture is buying things and stealing things,” Tekola assures him.

More revelatory is Walsh’s infiltration of a dinner party orchestrated by an outfit called “Race2Dinner,” which, for a $5,000 fee, exposes white women (no men allowed) to searing questions about their attitudes toward racism, “white privilege,” and how they have benefited from or perpetuated them. Walsh got in by posing as a waiter, his identity further concealed by wearing a pandemic-vintage mask. One woman at the dinner is admonished that she wrongly “tone policed” her black husband when she on one occasion asked him to keep his voice down in public. Another is reminded of the dangers of “white entitlement” when she recounts a friend’s son having complained about being rejected for college admission in favor of less qualified minority applicants. Lest the participants have any illusions about objectivity, Saira Rao, one the activists, forcefully reminds them that “Republicans are Nazis” and instructs them that “this country is not worth saving. This country is a piece of sh**.”

How popular are these ideas among the general public? Walsh explores the question in several revelatory public interactions. Along with a black actor called Ben, who poses as a producer of the film, he canvases passersby in Washington to sign a petition to rename the Washington monument the “George Floyd Monument,” a project that also proposes to paint the capital’s iconic building black and extend its length by 30 percent—a priapic reference rooted in an old racial stereotype no one seems or admits to comprehend. Most of the people Walsh approaches are urban whites with educated voices and professional miens who happily agree to sign, with one especially supine beta male among them even abjectly apologizing to Ben for 400 years of evildoing by white against blacks. The only people who refuse to sign appear to be visitors from Appalachia.

When Walsh visits the deep South, he finds that the regulars of an Alabama bar—the type of whites whom regime media would condition viewers to expect to be racists—have surprisingly tolerant attitudes toward those unlike themselves. “I accept people as they are,” says one man who states that his main concern in life is to support his family. Preoccupation with race is a bizarre luxury for urban elites. “Systemic? What they hell is that?” asks another man with a quizzical expression when Walsh asks how he plans to address “systemic racism” in his life.

Poor black communities Walsh visits reflect largely the same views, with one resident telling him “we don’t see color,” a position the anti-racist crowd now dismisses as inherently racist since “systemic racism” requires race to be seen, addressed, and accounted for at all times.

These results should only have been expected. A crime expert tells Walsh that out of some 2 million violent crimes committed annually, only a few thousand are recorded as “hate crimes,” and that many such incidents are fabrications. The film juxtaposes this sober fact with a montage of news reports falsely maintaining that racist “hate crimes” are daily commonplaces, while ignoring far more significant black-on-black crime.

The film also shows media interviews with the black actor Jussie Smollett, who in 2019 was accorded complete credulity by legacy outlets when he falsely claimed to have been attacked by white racists. Smollett’s false claims, which Walsh reenacts verbatim in one of the documentary’s funniest moments, received far more attention than their exposure as a fraud, for which he served a five-month prison term.

The film’s most sinister element explores the willingness of Americans to go along with anti-racist ideology. Interviewing DiAngelo, who has claimed that she “had been played” by the experience, Walsh invites her to join him in personal contrition by handing cash to Ben. DiAngelo, who had not yet been accused of plagiarizing the work of minority scholars at the time the film was made, tries to argue her way out of it, but eventually hands over $30.

In a similar vein, Walsh’s character organizes a public “Do the Work Workshop,” which receives local television media coverage and earns him over $3,000 in registration fees. When the participants assemble, he first invites them to identify the person in the room they feel is the most racist. Some leave rather than participate in this stigmatizing exercise, but most stay. Then he invites in his uncle, elderly and wheelchair-bound, to face accountability for an off-color joke he told at a family dinner many years before, and then invites the participants to tell the uncle what they think of him. Some say nothing, presumably not wishing to abuse an unwell old man, but two curse him out using the f-word. Finally, Walsh produces a box full of leather whips, announcing that the workshop’s final exercise is literal self-flagellation. About half of the remaining participants storm out, but the other half remains, presumably willing to engage in the masochistic exercise at Walsh’s direction.

Fortunately, and one hopes out of both propriety and an acute understanding of potential legal liability, Walsh ends the class before any blood is shed and pivots to his main message, that DEI and the “anti-racist” propaganda behind it is a fraud. The anti-racist ideology’s central tenets present a situation that can never be resolved since they hold whites inherently guilty of racism, effectively “selling us a disease and telling us there is no cure.” “It’s a lie meant to manipulate us,” Walsh concludes, and it is long past the time for us to say no.