“Back in 2023,” her lenghty post begins, “I was contacted by a group who claimed to be making a documentary film called Shades of Justice, about efforts to address racism in the United States. They planned to interview anti-racist activists, authors and thought leaders in service of supporting the cause of racial equity. They offered me between $10-20,000 for an interview. I said let’s meet in the middle with $15,000 and agreed to participate.” She notes that, since becoming aware of the circumstances, she has “since donated that sum to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.”
“When I arrived for the interview, a few things felt off,” she notes, though she appeared perfectly comfortable on camera. “The grips would not make eye contact with me,” she claimed, “and the interviewer, who was introduced as ‘Matt,’ appeared to be wearing an ill-fitting wig. Matt presented himself as someone new to antiracist work and seemed earnest, and his questions did not come across as adversarial. By the end, however, things got weird.”
She then writes about the key moment in the film where she was convinced by Walsh to pay cash reparations to his producer, Ben, who is black. DiAngelo admits her white privilege and takes bills out of her wallet, handing them to Ben. The moment in the film made her look foolish.
“Matt asked what I thought about reparations for Black Americans,” DiAngelo writes. “I said that I agreed with reparations but that it was not my area of expertise. He then pulled up a chair and invited a Black crew-member who went by ‘Ben’ to sit with us, took out his wallet and handed Ben some cash. He said that if I believed in reparations, I should also give Ben cash.
“While some Black people have asked white people to engage in reparations by giving directly to individuals, reparations are generally understood as a systemic approach to past and current injustice. The way Matt set this up felt intended to put Ben and I on the spot. Because Matt was pushing this on us, I expressed my discomfort and checked in with Ben, to be sure he was okay with receiving cash in this way. Ben reassured me that he was, so I went to my wallet and handed him my cash and the interview ended.”
She said she was “unsettled” and felt that Walsh “manipulated” the last scene. DiAngelo then reached out to contact person “Lee Hampton” to ask that this segment of the interview not be included in the film, saying that the “scene was not an example of reparations and could mislead viewers.” It was after speaking with colleagues that she realized she “had been played.”
In her post, DiAngelo laments that the title of the film was not Shades of Justice, as she’d been told it was, and that it “is it meant to support the anti-racist cause. It is a Borat-style mockumentary titled Am I Racist? and designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists.”
“Am I A Racist? is not only about me and I was not the only one who fell for their deception,” DiAngelo writes, before saying, in anti-racist fashion, that the suffering of the “women of color” is likely worse. “Sadly,” she states, “many of those being mocked are women of Color.”
After maligning Walsh, The Daily Wire, founder Ben Shapiro, and their “backers” with insults about their white supremacy, misogyny, racism, and transphobia, DiAngelo notes that the “experience has reinforced for me how critically important it is to do in-depth background research before making yourself vulnerable to people you don’t know, or believing and sharing what you see online.
“They will not prevail in their efforts to stop the work for racial justice,” she concluded.
