It’s only been a few years since the concept of anti-racism went mainstream, and while it seemed absurd at first to label all white people who weren’t activists against racism, or protesting for “black lives” as white supremacist, that, too, has now become mainstream. It has been totally normalized to believe that a white person hates black people simply because that person is white. The skin of a white person has become a stand-in for racist, evil, bad, ignorant, colonialist, settler… I mean really, pick your poison. There is no cultural sin a white person can commit that is worse than being white. Trying to figure out how to navigate this, as a white man, is the premise of Matt Walsh’s latest film Am I Racist? The film premiered in a Nashville-area multi-plex on Monday night.
The film is at times sarcastic and at times earnest, with Walsh going to workshops against whiteness with recognized anti-racism experts and speaking to anti-racist spokespersons who claim to have been oppressed by white people. The film opens with Walsh seeming to do some real soul-searching, just the kind the progressive left wants white men to do to get them to shut up, recognize their privilege, step back, and cede whatever authority or opportunities they have to those who are not white or male or “cisgender” or straight. “You’re probably wondering if this is real,” Walsh asks. “The answer is yes, it’s real. That’s me, Matt Walsh, in real life, with the man bun and the skinny jeans on an actual news show as a certified DEI expert.”
He attends a workshop where a black woman charging $30,000 to hold the event says she’s not safe among the white people attending her seminar due entirely to their skin color, and hers. When asked about this, she said “Being an African American in primarily white spaces is not safe for me, mentally or emotionally.” She promised to go more in-depth on that, but Walsh is discovered before he can get a real answer.
He questions every choice he makes, including whether or not ordering black coffee is somehow racist. I mean it could be, right? In the era of micro-aggressions, anything is possible. All this to say that he set out to “do the work.” Bryson Gray provides a rap track to the film delving into this very concept. Walsh doesn’t start out undercover, but he realizes that the only way to get honest answers from people is if they don’t know who he really is. He dons a man bun wig, skinny jeans, a tweed blazer, and refashions himself as a liberal male-feminist type who hates his own whiteness and wants to un-racist himself.
If mainstream culture is to be believed, being white goes along with an aversion to spicy food, being unable to dance, being privileged over all others, entitlement, creating race in order to oppress people, being fragile, and if you’re a man, being either an evil oppressor or the butt of jokes. Many universities even offer whiteness studies courses, but these are the only ethnic or racial studies courses that primarily teach hatred of the subject instead of discussing pride or accomplishments. Indeed, “white pride” is an abhorrent concept, while black pride is praised and pride in hailing from other minority groups is also celebrated. There’s an entire movement dedicated to fostering and bragging about pride in being a minority when it comes to sexual preference or gender identity.
Among the left-leaning pundits and academics in the United States, which constitutes the majority, speaking about whiteness can only be done with derision. White race scholars, and I use the term loosely, like Robin DiAngelo, are essentially self-hating due to their own race. Yet these are the people from whom white Americans are supposed to take their marching orders when it comes to perceptions of race and racism. The rhetoric and vitriol have become so heated that a white person’s stating that they are not racist is akin to an admission of racism and a white person’s stating that they “don’t see color,” and do not therefore discriminate against persons based on race, is too an admission that they are simply racist.
This is what Walsh learns as he frequents bookshops to educate himself on anti-racism. He attends a workshop by Race 2 Dinner grifters Saira Rao, who admittedly hates white people, and her partner Regina Jackson. The two hold dinner parties in the homes of wine-drinking white women, charging thousands of dollars to tell the women that they’re racist. They insist that even those women with black husbands and biracial babies, even those women engaged in “the work,” are nothing more than racist mouthpieces who are complicit in the racist settler colonialism of white men.
The theory has been building to break through the surface for decades and can be traced back to two seminal ideas, both of which emerged in 1989. Kimberle Crenshaw created the concept of intersectionality, or the condition of being oppressed in multiple ways on account of having multiple identities, all of which are discriminated against by society at large. Her essay was called “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” In that same year, Harvard-educated Peggy MacIntosh, a researcher at Wellesley Centers for Women, authored “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In it, she discussed the “unearned” privileges white people had, just as a matter of course, simply due to their skin color. Since then, it has only compounded.
About a decade ago, I wrote a short play called Auto Moron detailing this compounding. It followed a young woman who got auto-correct installed in her brain to stop her from sounding racist. When she explained this to her friend, her friend asked “so you don’t mind being racist, you just want to stop sounding racist?” The young woman says that as a white person, she knows she can’t not be racist, saying “It’s hard-wired into my white person DNA.” But at the very least, she’d like to not sound racist—hence, the new auto-correct feature to prevent her from committing any micro-aggressions against minorities.
So where does that all leave white people who don’t want to hate themselves? White people are left with two options in the progressive rubric, either be racist, or do the work. This is what was facing cultural commentator Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire as he embarked on his latest film, and the company’s first theatrical release, Am I Racist? The film takes a similar approach to his previous cinematic venture, What Is a Woman? in that it focuses around the central question. But in this case, instead of outright blasting the leftist view that all white people are racist, such as he did with the gender ideology that questions the nature of biological reality in saying that men who say they are women really are women, Am I Racist? sees Walsh engaging with leftist critical race theory by attempting to subordinate himself to its precepts.
In a moment of ultimate trolling, Walsh manages to land an interview with White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, for a fee of several thousand dollars. She asks who he is, saying “I had to ask who you are because you have to be careful.”
“Never be too careful,” Walsh says, in a disguise that even fooled attendees at the Democrat National Convention before he was outed and ejected from the Chicago event by security.
DiAngelo tells him her theory, that white people must acknowledge the race of black people and acknowledge the assumptions they may have about those persons. She insists that even if you do not believe you have negative assumptions, you do. This is part of the concept of unconscious bias. In the end, he convinces her to give cash to one of the film’s producers as a means of reparations simply because he is black. Before DiAngelo hands over bills from her wallet, she apologizes to Ben, the producer, saying “Well, on behalf of myself and my fellow white people, I apologize. It is not you. It is us. As long as I’m standing I will do my best to challenge it.”
She admits that she found the exchange “weird,” that having the approach to reparations be personal, and not systemic, could cause “some people” to be “offended.” And while DiAngelo sat with her discomfort, the crux of the problem became clear. For the progressive left, racism can only be solved by governments and institutions and white people must atone for their original sin of skin by feeling guilt on behalf of their entire race. For conservatives, racism is not an inherent condition, but is overcome in personal relationships, much like Daryl Davis, who reformed KKK members one at a time.
In the end, Walsh concludes that anti-racist teaching is “a lie meant to manipulate us.” The entire anti-racist industry, in his view, is a grift designed to encourage all people, regardless of race, to “be bitter and angry and resentful. They’re selling us the disease. They’re telling us there’s no cure.”
As with all bogus ideologies, what it takes is for good men and women to say “no,” to not go along with the narrative, to fight back, with their words, with their satire, with their courage. We were told that “black lives matter” is doctrine and “all lives matter” is racist. We were told that white parents must indoctrinate their children to hate their own skin color before they could even talk. We were told that to be white is to be racist. We were told that America itself is evil because it was founded by white men. All of it is a wretched lie, and it behooves us all to speak out against it, to not remain silent, and to do the real work of speaking truth.
