Punching Up by Laughing Out Loud- A Review of Am I Racist?

Regardless of one’s opinions of the Daily Wire, the company has done much recently to push back against the Left in the ongoing culture wars. Aside from its news and conservative commentary, they have also produced many well-made documentaries, such Scamala, which is an in-depth review of Kamala Harris’ unprincipled political career, and Mexico’s Door: The Center of America’s Border Fight, a rather frightening look at the horrors going on at the southern border. They have also entered into the film industry and produced tense films such as Run, Hide, Fight, a Western called Terror on the Prairie, and a comedy entitled Lady Ballers.

More recently, they combined their documentary and comedy skills to produce the film Am I Racist? Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh, following on his success with What is a Woman? which investigated the trans phenomenon, returns in this film with his own brand of deadpan humor and common-sense insight to tackle the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) industry –the latest “thing” in academia, business, and society.

As Walsh states in the trailer, “growing up I never thought much about race.” For someone raised in a society that had (supposedly) fully embraced Martin Luther King Jr’s words that America should be a nation where we are judged, “by the content of our character and not the color of our skin,” his words should seem axiomatic. However, in a rather dour and ironic turn of events, ever since the Obama presidency our nation has become filled with noisy ideologues who appear to have grown tired of Dr. King’s sentiments, and instead have opted for a more antagonistic Malcom X mentality regarding race and race relations. In Am I Racist?, Walsh investigates the DEI industry, currently the main instigator and propagator of these antagonistic ideals.

In What is a Woman?, after Walsh attempts to interview prominent figures or academics in the trans movement, they become agitated with him or are reticent to speak openly with him. The same happens in the first segments of this new film when Walsh, after studying up on the topic, attends a “white grief” support group to put what he learned into practice. However, after he takes a break in a “grief room,” Walsh returns to the group only to find that someone has recognized him and has called the police, whereupon he is asked to leave.

After this, Walsh decides to do an end-run around the obfuscatory public face of these ideologues and go undercover as a “DEI expert.” The remainder of the film shows how after taking some classes (online and in person) to become a “certified” DEI instructor, he enters headlong into the subculture that has infiltrated almost every aspect of our culture, from academia to the professional world.

The result is a film is worth seeing, if for nothing else that it is one of the funniest films to have been produced in a long time. Walsh is a master or dry humor, witty retorts, and in the case of Am I Racist?, slapstick humor, as demonstrated by scenes where he disguises himself as a waiter to attend a high-priced lunch for white liberal women, and also at the end of the film when he hosts his own DEI class. Through Walsh’s comedic insights, the film demonstrates how the latest woke song and dance that Americans are being asked to go along with, is yet again just another ideological empty vessel in three key ways.

America- Where You Can Become an Expert in Nonsense

The film spotlights numerous figures, from the relatively unknown, to prominent authors like Robin DiAngelo who are seen (by some) as experts in the DEI field. These "experts" bring with them all manner of degrees or certifications that lend an air of erudition to their words, but they are ultimately just playing the same age-old con-game that economist Thomas Sowell once quipped about:

  The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and   demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.

Using this analogy, the so-called experts and activists shown in the film act as though they are offering a novel brand of condiment intended to nourish your body and enlighten your soul, when in fact it is the same old Marxist-ish bafflegab nonsense that has infected our institutions of “higher” learning for almost half a century.

This dynamic is contrasted in the film when, after receiving his “certification,” Walsh goes out to conduct interviews with several young men on the street, some of whom are customers at a southern biker bar, and later with an Ghanan immigrant in New Orleans. In all cases, when Walsh makes use of the words and concepts that he has been trained to use, he leaves his listeners befuddled and unsure of what he is asking. When he makes further attempts to clarify his questions, they nod uneasily, and in a flash of insight, one biker simply blurts out, “Oh, well, just love one another and treat others with respect.” In what may have been the most interesting conversation though, Walsh asks a Ghanan immigrant his views on race and America as a racist nation. The interviewee fundamentally disagrees with the proposition and goes on to say that America has been so nice to him, and that he loves living here despite facing some bigotry (mostly from fellow blacks).

This man’s words highlight something significant. Considering the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, when a descendent of the slave catchers has more positive things to say about America than the descendent of the slaves that ended up in the United States, one ought to realize that only in America can a degree in nonsense be obtained under the guise of academia.

The DEI Enterprise is a Scam Through and Through

American great Booker T. Washington famously wrote that,

“There is a class of colored 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.”

Those words, which are over one hundred years old, basically sum up what Am I Racist? reveals about the activists, instructors, and authors of the DEI industry. Most of these "anti-racist" experts are con-artists and grifters who prey on people who lack a firm sense of identity and/or dignity. Throughout the film when each of these experts are interviewed, the amount of money that they were paid to be interviewed is flashed across the screen. For example, Robin DiAngelo, author of the best-selling anti-racist book White Fragility, was paid $15,000. In other example, Activist and authors Regina Jackson and Saira Rao host what they call “Race2Dinner” parties where participants are charged $2,500 per person (usually a party of eight) to criticize and berate white liberal women about how racist and insensitive they are. However, the queen of these racial grifters might just be the black mother and aunt of two girls who claimed to have been snubbed at a Sesame Street theme park by a costumed character. She filed a class action lawsuit for $25 million dollars and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Walsh was charged $50,000 to be interviewed by her, but did not end up saying much of anything due to the NDA limitations. To paraphrase an old song, the DEI industry can be summarized as, "Money for nothing and the clicks (and views) for free."

DEI is Simply Unworkable in Ordinary Life

Aside from showing how DEI is a money-making grift that puts certain people at odds with most ordinary people, the film Am I Racist? shows how these ideas are just plain unworkable in the real world (even if one could come to an amicable agreement with the so-called DEI crowd).

This truth was best exemplified in the film by what Walsh called “The Moana Problem.” While speaking to a white anti-racist female speaker named Kate Slater, she laments that her own daughter is “gravitating towards white princesses.” Walsh responds that his own daughter not only prefers the Disney princess Moana (to which the speaker cheers slightly), but that she desires to dress up as her character for Halloween. He wonders out loud whether he should buy her the Moana costume, wondering whether that might be considered as cultural appropriation. After Slater gives an emphatic "no" to the costume, Walsh laments that, “on the one hand there is cultural appropriation, on the other hand there is gravitation towards white characters. It’s almost like, no matter which way you go, you end up back at racism.” At first the speaker is strangely silent, but later basically provides a non-answer by saying that problem is with them as “white people” and the privileged place they hold in a “white supremacist society” in America.

Slater's answer is probably the one take away that should stick with you from Am I Racist?. It proves that what the DEI activists are peddling are ideas so patently stupid that you not only must be highly "educated" to believe them, but the more expertise you have in them, the more illogical you seem to become. The reason Slater has no answer to the “Moana Problem” is because there is no solution to it. The doctrines and dictums that these DEI “experts” offer are not meant to encourage, enlighten or improve the lives of others. No. They are ramblings borne of a Manichean worldview that posit a manufactured (but skewed) world of false light and dark, which are meant to coerce, shame or outright cudgel its listeners to give up their own thoughts and beliefs in favor of what is being sold to them. And just like commercials on TV, rational thought and careful deliberation are obstacles to accepting those ideas.

Laughter Ends up Being the Most Powerful Weapon

In later interviews, Walsh shares that all of the DEI experts who appear in Am I Racist? are real and agreed to speak to Walsh because they thought they were appearing in a documentary called Shades of Justice (which Walsh claimed to be making in his DEI expert alter-ego). Needless to say, many of those experts teetered off their self-righteousness rails when they found out that they had been tricked into appearing in a Daily Wire movie. Some of them were even forced to scrub their presence on social media in order to avoid the backlash they suffered as a result of showing their true colors in the film. Saira Rao, part of the white-whipping Race2Dinner party hosts, took to calling it a “fascist Nazi white supremacist film” and that she and Regina Jackson were “conned into appearing” in it. Given the old adage that it “takes one to know one,” that is certainly high praise. Robin DiAngelo issued a statement saying that the movie was is “designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists.” To this Walsh simply replied, “She couldn’t be more correct in that assessment.”

Meanwhile, outside the X-sphere, some independent theaters were pressured by anti-racist activists to not show the film while others did not permit customers to pre-order seats. After its release in September mainstream news sites refused to review the film, and when YouTuber Jeremy Johns (who runs a non-political film channel) saw and reviewed it, he was verbally torn to shreds by the online community and his fellow YouTubers in the most puerile and acerbic manner.

And yet, despite all this, the film eventually went all the way to number three on its opening weekend, and received high audience review scores at Rotten Tomatoes and even earned a “Verified Hot” badge. It is now considered the highest-grossing documentary of 2024, and is on its way to being the most watched documentary of the decade. ( If the total amount of vitriol aimed at this film is not proof that the film is hitting the mark on something important, then I don’t know what is. The film and Walsh do a phenomenal job with casting unflattering criticism on the DEI industry by simply letting its most prominent proponents talk about their beliefs. The fact that quite a few people have criticized the deceptive nature of Walsh’s undercover work just demonstrates the importance of Walsh’s revelations. If your passion and activism requires you to have two sets of talking points, one for the true believers and one for you critics, then this is something that necessarily should be called out and criticized.

In the case of Am I Racist?, Walsh realizes that in an age of unreason and public schools (that indoctrinate rather than educate), one of the most powerful tools to convey the truth is mockery and laughter. It is hard to watch this film and not laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of all these people, and in this case laughing out loud is probably the most powerful weapon against the nonsense. To use the Left’s own oppressor-oppressed paradigm, Walsh is “punching up” against the dominant oppressor class led by a class of experts who are the main instigators of the current fight-geist of battling worldviews where race has become the lens through which everything is viewed. This alone is why the film is worth seeing, in theaters, or when it begins streaming online on October 28^th.

Photo Credit- Geeksandgamers. com