In his last film, What Is a Woman?, Matt Walsh sought to play a contemporary Socrates, the inquisitive philosopher, but in his new movie, he casts himself as Socrates’ rival, a sophist in training, becoming an “expert” in so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Many hilariously awkward moments in the movie are spent revealing the grift-like nature of the “anti-racist” industry. But the journey of Walsh’s persona has a higher aim, suggesting that the hope for sanity which we ought to seek is the possibility of converting back to common sense and Christian charity those of our fellow Americans who in the emotional turbulence of the years after 2020 bought the lies of the consultant class so brilliantly exposed in the documentary. Such conversion, as we see happening to Walsh’s man-bun wearing alter ego, will be brought about not primarily by argument but by experience, the very grounds which the anti-racist left has sought to exploit for its own gain.
Am I Racist? begins with Walsh trying to attend a group-therapy session on anti-racism and grief, but when he’s discovered, he’s escorted off the premises and the police are called because the very presence of a conservative is taken to be an existential threat to those attending. Such a reaction is no wonder in a heightened environment like that of our country, in which we’ve now seen not one but two assassination attempts on a major presidential candidate, Donald Trump, which a hostile media has sought to blame on the candidate himself rather than their political allies.
After this incident in group therapy, Walsh’s character realizes he needs “a whole new identity. If I want to be an ally, I need to look like one.” He then takes on an almost identical look to a professor of psychology he interviewed in What Is a Woman? (whose profile picture on his academic web page includes a similar blazer as that which Walsh dons). This begins a quest to assume a new identity, that of the sophistic DEI “expert,” who obtains credentials through an hour-long class sponsored by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the federal government funded by American tax dollars).
One of the most awkward scenes in the film occurs when Walsh’s character hires himself out as a waiter for one of Saira Rao and Regina Jackson’s “Race2Dinner” events. These dinners are essentially the 2020s version of the “consciousness raising” w(h)ine socials of the 1960s, except where previously women arrived at a new awareness of how they were (supposedly) being oppressed by the patriarchy, here white women are “educated” by the women of color in the room about their complicity in white supremacy (such as thinking that Republicans are anything other than Nazis).
Walsh as a mask-wearing, clumsy waiter plays a convincingly enthusiastic new anti-racist acolyte, still unsure of the boundaries of what he, as a white man, can say to the class just above him on the intersectional totem-pole: white women. Walsh transitions with subtlety from accidentally dropping a plate to subtle liturgical bows to the intersectional priestesses, and manages to use the leftist jargon his character learned from the last documentary along the way. When one of the women says to the group “Is he an actor?” (as they know they’re being filmed for some sort of documentary), Walsh responds in the finest Judith Butler-esque, “We’re all acting all the time in our lives.”
One of the best reversals of the film arises in Walsh’s conversation with the queen of the race-hustlers Robin DiAngelo (who dodged a plagiarism inquiry over alleged theft of material from scholars of color, presumably due to the fact that she’s still too much of a celebrity to be toppled, unlike Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard). At the end of their conversation, Walsh invites one of his producers, a black man named Ben, to come on camera, and insists on the good of racial reparations—not in the abstract but in the particular moment, and pulls out his own wallet to “do the work.” DiAngelo is then indirectly pressured (she remembers she’s on camera, perhaps) to follow suit, and the on-screen money counter deducts her $30 contribution from her $15,000 fee. One of the nice things about the church of anti-racism is that it doesn’t require the .2% contribution that DiAngelo felt so squeamish about.
But the most intriguing moment comes at the film’s very end, where Walsh’s character, having learned the important lesson that the only thing better than learning to be an anti-racist is to profit from spreading its doctrines, experiences a striking moment of confusion that leads him to reject the “journey” he’s been on during the movie’s arc. During the course of leading his new “Do the Work Workshop,” which multiple participants leave at different points, man-bun Walsh not only wheels in his handicapped Uncle Frank—who made an insensitive joke years ago—for public castigation, even inviting workshop participants to join in, but also concludes by producing actual whips and inviting participants to join him in self-flagellation. It is at this point when the larger exodus from the workshop begins, but a number of participants stay behind. Walsh’s character wonders not why some have left, but why some have stayed, willing to whip themselves in atonement for their white privilege.
One might reasonably be cynical about how much Walsh’s character arc could actually occur in the real world. As Walsh so carefully shows, among the DEI consultant class, real money is at stake along with the social credit that goes along with membership in such an elite (many of those interviewed in the film have since denounced Walsh). But the hope the movie presents is that with enough exposure to the experience of the absurdities of this hustle, more or less ordinary people—your college classmate who changed his or her Facebook profile picture to support BLM, your younger cousin who shared some progressive TikTok one time—can return to common sense about race. The film embodies this common sense in the residents of the biker bar in Tennessee or the African immigrant who settled in Louisiana, giving thanks for the peace he’s found in America and claiming that the Bible shows that love between persons, rather than any high-falutin’ critical theory, will be what brings about true peace.