Once upon a time, critical legal studies (CLS) and its offshoot critical race theory (CRT) were niche academic movements in higher education. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, they were suddenly catapulted into the center of public life. CRT concepts like “equity” and “antiracism” became buzzwords, and books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And many Americans confronted with the claims of CRT started to ask themselves, “Am I racist?”
In his new mockumentary film, Matt Walsh—a conservative and Roman Catholic podcaster at The Daily Wire—takes up the question.
Many reviewers have compared the film to Borat. I wasn’t sure what to make of this comparison, since I would rather watch paint dry than watch Borat. Still, suspecting the comparison was wrong, I decided to waste about fifteen minutes of my life watching some online clips and reading a plot summary to confirm my suspicion. In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen posed as an immigrant from Kazakhstan trying to learn about American customs, who then said and did outrageous things that a stereotypical Kazakhstani wouldn’t actually do, for shock laughs and to make fun of middle America. But, in the clips I saw, Cohen is obviously the buffoon and butt of his own buffoonery, while his marks come off as graceful and patient regular Americans who were earnestly trying to help him.
True, Walsh also engages in deceptive buffoonery, albeit with a stone-cold deadpan delivery. But it is the very Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) buffoonery (with some mild to moderately exaggerated DEI buffoonery) and DEI industry grift that the film exposes. And, as in his previous film What Is a Woman?, his marks become the butt of the joke as he draws out their earnest expression of their true beliefs. This time, Walsh plays a bespectacled and bewigged character, “Matt,” who goes on an antiracist journey of self-discovery and self-improvement, infiltrating various DEI-themed gatherings along the way. The hilarity and cringe that ensue are poured out in turns, and in equal measure.
According to the CRT-DEI teaching, whiteness is forever tainted by the “original sins” committed by white Europeans of slavery and colonialism.
In one scene, Walsh infiltrates a Race2Dinner experience, in which eight white women pay handsomely for a dinner lecture on racism from two DEI experts and women of color, Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. In these dinners, white women learn the principles of critical race theory, which include the claims that racism pervades our society “systemically,” and that whiteness endows them with privileges and discriminatory beliefs that need to be dismantled. Hence these women are encouraged to “decolonize” themselves, to deconstruct their inherent, racist white supremacism. They are also taught that the antiracist journey is never complete. As Robin DiAngelo explains in her book, fighting racism in oneself and society is a lifelong work that can “never be finished.”
Walsh interrupts to propose a toast, saying, “Raise a glass if you’re racist.” Everyone raises their glasses—except for Regina Jackson, a black woman, who says, “I’m not racist” (This, despite having just nodded along with the claim that the white women present cannot separate themselves from bad white people, a claim that seems to attribute bad actions of a subset to an entire race—i.e., textbook racism). Indeed, according to CRT, white people are presumptively racist transgressors because they have power, and people of color are presumptively innocent victims, even if they harbor racial prejudices, since they don’t have power.
In my view, the film thus provides evidence that the CRT-DEI vision traffics in essentially Christian heresies, because it co-opts and transmogrifies Christian concepts that have been detached from their original theological context. As Joshua Mitchell has argued, identity politics is sort of a super-genus, in which the various theories of innocent victimhood are species. In the CRT-DEI species, persons of color are inherently innocent, and white people are inherently transgressors. According to the teaching of the Bible, Adam’s transgression stained the entire human race, and man’s redemption could only be brought about by the sacrifice of the Innocent One. According to the CRT-DEI teaching, whiteness is forever tainted by the “original sins” committed by white Europeans of slavery and colonialism. But there is no grace, no forgiveness for the white transgressors, because they owe a debt that can never be repaid. Nothing less than a full innocents-led scapegoating and laying-low of white transgressors and the inheritance associated with whiteness—the whole Western cultural and political tradition—will suffice for atonement.
But the white person can purchase a kind of indulgence or quasi-forgiveness from the priestly caste of DEI experts. By buying a DEI session, silencing his own voice, centering the person of color’s DEI narrative, confessing the sins associated with his whiteness, and learning how to scapegoat the knuckle-dragging whites who have not yet seen the DEI light, he can (not quite fully) regain his innocence.
So Walsh creates his own “Do the Work Workshop,” to see just how far those suffering from white guilt are willing to go to regain their innocence. The absurdity and hilarity of the antics reaches a crescendo when he starts handing out whips for the white transgressors to self-flagellate.
The film also presents a contrasting view of racism. Walsh journeys to the American South to talk to regular working people, white and black. He finds there is a lot of skepticism about the claims of CRT. Several blue-collar white and black folks he speaks to don’t believe America is systemically racist. They express the belief that, for all its mistakes and shortcomings, the country they love provides equal opportunities to all. They confess to never having read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and say they prefer to read the Bible. And, they suggest that racism is primarily a problem of the heart and that more grace—not more DEI seminars—is needed for healing.
Hence, the film invites us to reject the CRT-DEI’s false political religion and recover the Christian accounting of things. On the Christian accounting, the ground of human equality is our createdness in the image of God. The profoundness of human dignity is testified to by Christ’s sacrifice to redeem all human beings. From the profoundness of human dignity, the Catechism of the Catholic Church derives a nondiscrimination principle:
Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.
The Church teaches that the focal instances of sinful racial discrimination are personal and the remedy is cardiac in nature. Hence, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace avers: “We must look first to the human heart; it is the heart that must be continually purified so that it is no longer governed by fear or the spirit of domination, but by openness to others, by fraternity and solidarity.” The classic statement of the cardiac approach in American history came in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he dreamed of a day in which his children lived in a nation “where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Still, the Church also teaches that racism can be “systemic” and “institutional,” such as when norms or rules that animate institutions blatantly disfavor persons just because of their race. The Catholic Church in the United States admits that it has been guilty of this sin in the past, as in the case of the former slave Augustus Tolton who in the early postbellum years was denied admission to all the seminaries in the United States because he was black. (Venerable Fr. Tolton would complete his studies at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome before returning to the U.S. as its first black priest and heroically enduring extreme racist abuse.)
In making bad arguments for systemic racism, the CRT-DEI industry has sullied the very idea of structural sin to the point of discreditation in the minds of many.
What then can be made of the broad CRT claim that today—in our post-Civil Rights Act and post-Brown v. Board of Education 14th Amendment jurisprudence, in which the Supreme Court exercises its highest level of scrutiny of any laws that treat people disparately on the basis of race—legal racial discrimination perdures, subtly woven into the very fabric of the country? In opting for a more comedic tone, the film doesn’t consider much social science evidence. A brief discussion of hate crime data and hate crime hoaxes sets up a gag. But what about other evidence advanced to support the hypothesis of ongoing systemic racism, such as the difference between white and black household income?
While such data could be evidence of insidious systemic discrimination, it turns out that such data can overgeneralize in a way that obscures more than it reveals. To take just one example, as Thomas Sowell showed, when one parses the data of black households into subcategories, second-generation West Indian black immigrants’ household median income was higher than native black American and white households in the 1970s. This suggests that other cultural factors were at play and that the reason for unequal outcomes was not simply a system arrayed against people with non-white skin.
To take a more contemporary example, the median household income of Asians across the country is way higher than every other racial demographic (and this is not because of the inherent superiority of their race—it isn’t a coincidence that Asians also have the highest intact marriage rates of any race; culture matters). And, as political scientist Wilfred Reilly points out, black immigrant household income today tends to be fairly successful, earning pretty close to the same median household income as whites. Meanwhile, as Reilly relates, the poorest ethnic American population currently is Appalachian Americans, who perform just about as well as native-born African Americans, which doesn’t seem coincidental if there turn out to be similar underlying cultural factors contributing to these outcomes.
This is of course just one piece of evidence, and much more would need to be considered to fully assess CRT’s interpretation of the empirical evidence. The point here is twofold. First, when broad claims are made about the “racism” of our institutions today, they need to be assessed in light of careful consideration of the evidence and the many variables that may contribute to disparate outcomes, as Sowell has recently argued. And second, one need not accept the CRT-DEI accounting of things, nor deny the Christian emphasis on the heart, to acknowledge systemic and institutional racism.
I think it is a shortcoming of the film that these points weren’t made. In making bad arguments for systemic racism, the CRT-DEI industry has sullied the very idea of structural sin to the point of discreditation in the minds of many. In fact, racism is just one of all sorts of sins that can become embedded and perpetuated through social institutions, what St. John Paul II called “structures of sin.” For his part, John Paul II believed that the institutional matrix supporting and promoting abortion and euthanasia—which constitute the culture of death—exemplifies the idea of a “structure of sin.”
In the end, this film is so unique that I struggled to think of an alternative comparison to Cohen’s Borat for Walsh’s character, but here it goes. Imagine a middle-aged white guy with a man bun who somehow synthesizes Ron Swanson’s deadpan delivery of hilarious one-liners with Michael Scott’s knack for utterly cringeworthy social awkwardness, as he is doing the work—i.e., teaching paying adults in a DEI seminar about how racism is non-binary. That alone is worth the price of admission.