Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Am I Racist?’ on DailyWire+, Another Attempt By Matt Walsh to Own the Libs

By John Serba

Sitting down to watch Am I Racist?, a Matt Walsh mockumentary streaming on DailyWire+, feels like the result of drawing the shortest straw. But all you can do is pry open your mind as wide as possible and see where the thing goes, the thing that right-wing trolls made to pwn the libtards!!!1!!1!, even though things like this usually end up in echo chambers like DailyWire+. To be fair: The film enjoyed a lucrative-for-documentaries theatrical run, grossing $12 million, so it’s not like you had to subscribe to a politically narrow streaming service in order to see it. And it also might have a legit point to make sometimes, even though it’s fronted by a guy with some repulsive views.  

AM I RACIST?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Brief background: Walsh, if you’re not aware, is a conservative commentator who says a lot of stuff about transgender people and race that comes off as purely contrarian provocation, with a core point-of-view that’s essentially the things I don’t like are awful and if you like them you’re garbage. His commentary often seems willfully misinformed, honed and crafted to get a rise out of his political opponents. With Am I Racist?, his goal is to put on the guise of a “woke liberal” – skinny jeans, a man-bun wig – and pretend to be someone who wants to be more informed about modern DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) philosophies and racism. But his secret agenda is to make everyone around him look stupid while not learning a single thing about others’ views. His persona is that of a perennially bored, inexpressive middle-aged guy, his eyes at half-mast, his voice monotonic, his mouth seemingly incapable of opening wide enough to smile. He exists on the divide between droll and catatonic. Is he funny? Well, comedy is so terribly subjective, I risk going way out on a precariously flimsy limb to say, no, not really.

Walsh explores the topic in a few different ways: He participates in anti-racist workshops led by people who make good money putting these things on. He sits down for one-on-one interviews with DEI advocates and authors who, the movie points out, charged fees to do so. He punks small-time regional talk-show hosts by posing as a DEI expert on live television. And he wears his stupid get-up to conduct man-on-the-street interviews where he throws around jargon like “white fragility” and “lived experience” to people who look at him like he’s speaking an alien language. Walsh mercilessly effs with everyone, even a few people who might actually be supporting some of his points, which tells us his primary goals are trolling (successful) and comedy (unsuccessful). Your mileage may vary.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Borat is the template for take-on-a-persona-and-let-people-hang-themselves-with-their-own-words mockumentaries. So take that and mix it with op-ed political-documentary screeds ranging from Ben Stein “intelligent design” movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed to Bill Maher’s Religulous. (Walsh also made What Is A Woman?, which is more or less cut from the same cloth.)

Performance Worth Watching: The vaguely comprehensible guy who chugs Natty Lights while Walsh chats with him in a biker bar is a hoot.

Memorable Dialogue: The setup: Walsh poses as a DEI expert hosting a seminar that involves passing out whips to the attendees so they can self-flagellate. Some walk out, while some stay. Voiceover: “Why weren’t they willing to whip themselves?”, he asks. “Wait, why were they willing to whip themselves? None of this feels right.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Photo: Everett Collection

Our Take: Stay with me here: This documentary’s brand of anti-intellectualism isn’t inherently stupid or evil. It can be a rebellion against overthinking everything until one finds one’s head up one’s own ass, spewing intellectual snake oil into one’s colon. I extracted this notion from Walsh’s cluttered, shotgunned and thoroughly unserious approach to a serious topic, which is rooted in an idea that’s far too anti-intellectual to be constructive: Hey, I grew up in the ’90s and it was better because nobody talked about racism like they do now. It’s the old pretend-it-doesn’t-exist M.O. that selectively ignores inequities in laws and policies, and race riots, and other stuff that didn’t pierce suburban white bubbles back then. 

I’d say Walsh’s POV on DEI and racism is unfocused, but Am I Racist? makes it pretty clear that having any focus at all isn’t much of a concern. Most of his “skewering” of overpriced anti-racist dinners and workshops finds him not engaging in any sort of debate, instead interrupting speakers and performing slapstick around the fringes of the discussion while attendees give him side-eye who-is-this-weirdo glances. When he sits across from key figures in the anti-racist movement – e.g., White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo – he’s more diligent, working to trap them within the contradictions of their viewpoints and philosophies. Maybe he wants to point out the flaws in their ideas, but you get the sense that he’d much rather make them look stupid for having the ideas in the first place.

All this is to say the film never takes intention into account. Walsh chooses his “victims” from the opposite side of the political spectrum (the word “far” inevitably describes representatives of right and left in this film) strictly to set them up to fail. And he has some valid points to make; maybe some of the people he exposes are opportunists capitalizing handsomely on people’s guilt. But he doesn’t want to consider that racism is a horrible thing, and some people are doing what they can to address a serious societal problem, even if their arguments are flimsy and their actions are misguided. Take DiAngelo’s assertion that a white person can “oversmile” or not smile enough at a person of color – is it a level of hypersensitivity that seems silly, especially when divorced from context? Walsh wants us to ponder that, and I have to say, it’s worth pondering.

But Walsh also doesn’t offer anything beyond simplistic nonsolutions to racism – ignore it and it’ll go away, he implies – instead choosing to engage in the usual tire-spinning, regressive arguments, and choosing not to examine how his particular brand of partisan-media political-baiting is its own brand of financially lucrative opportunism. He can’t resist peppering his potentially thoughtful hey look at the crazy contradictions in this theory points with ha ha libs can’t throw a punch cheap shots. The guy struggles mightily with the idea of cognitive dissonance, that two opposing views can and will exist in the same space. Some might suggest that, instead of participating in destructive chain-reaction crap-slinging politics, we should make the best of it. Walsh’s answer to that seems to be a decisive nah.

Our Call: Walsh isn’t very good at this mockumentary stuff. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.