Matt Walsh’s ‘Am I Racist?’ Is an Imperfect Film Riddled With Issues, But It Still Made Me Laugh More Than Borat 2

YouTube/Matt Walsh

Am I Racist?, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s expose of the lucrative white guilt and anti-racism hustle, debuted in theatres over the weekend and immediately caused quite a splash. The film is, in spirit, the conservative answer to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, in which Walsh plays a character to gain access to the world of DEI consultancy.

On Reddit, movie theatre employees were caught plotting methods to sabotage ticket purchases. One theatre, the Del Oro in Grass Valley, California, even canceled its film screenings following a wave of backlash.

Walsh—undercover and disguised in a man bun and skinny jeans—spends most of the film highlighting the ridiculousness and downright absurdity of corporate anti-racism workshops, and it’s here that the movie really shines.

These moments, where Walsh puts a selection of grifters on display, were by far the most entertaining of the movie. While many of these workshops and seminars are available to the public, exorbitant ticket prices prohibit most from ever peering behind closed doors, and thus Walsh’s movie will be the first time that many people ever see what goes on inside.

One particular highlight of the movie sees Walsh tricking Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, into paying $30 in reparations to his black producer, Ben. Another sees Walsh undercover as a clumsy and disruptive waiter at one of Saira Rao’s exclusive DEI dinner parties.

In perhaps the funniest moment of the film, Walsh opens his own Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion workshop, to which he invites attendees from Craigslist. In one scene, Walsh lectures the attendees about “white silence” and the necessity to confront racist family members at the dinner table before wheeling his disabled, chair-bound ‘uncle’ out in front of the audience. After screaming at and berating his disabled uncle for making a racist joke about Mexicans, Walsh encourages the audience to join in with the abuse, to which they gladly oblige.

At the end of his workshop, Walsh brings out a box of Medieval-esque whips and flogs and encourages his attendees to engage in self-flagellation. At this point, too much even for those who had been thus far willing to engage in Walsh’s increasingly ridiculous activities, multiple attendees walk out of the room.

But these entertaining scenes often felt cut too short, not for a lack of time. Many moments included came across as pure filler. The result is an uneven movie, both exciting and dull, where Walsh’s Borat-esque trolling jarringly segues into scenes that feel about as exciting as a PragerU video.

This change of pace was often in service of Walsh’s endless virtue signaling about the need for color blindness, which felt like a preachy diversion from the heart of the film and a lazy and unnecessary attempt to avoid accusations of racism. It is possible to acknowledge the differences between races while at the same time criticizing those who profit from stoking racial division. The movie should have been allowed to speak for itself without the thinly veiled and out-of-date lectures about color blindness.

The film also makes a point of displaying the exorbitant costs the Daily Wire had to pay to attend each workshop, or to interview each individual, and the ease with which an individual can become a ‘DEI expert’. Where it comes up short is in investigating just how much money each of the featured anti-racist professionals were making from their chosen grift. The extent of their wealth and profiteering was never really delved into. Perhaps Walsh could have switched between undercover agent and documentarian, ridiculing the characters while also showing viewers just how lucrative the whole operation could be.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the movie, and something which didn’t sit right with me throughout, was Walsh’s decision to pay his targets to appear in the movie. Robin DiAngelo received $15,000, which she has since claimed to have donated. Another participant received a whopping $50,000 for less than two minutes of screen time. For a movie about exposing grifters, it feels a bit self defeating to then pay those people thousands of dollars.

Despite his polarizing nature, Walsh was arguably more ethical in his approach to trickery than Sacha Baron Cohen, and as a result the movie was more enjoyable than Baron Cohen’s 2020 Borat sequel.

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, who mostly punched down in his movie, taking advantage of working-class Americans who showed him kindness and turning them into a joke, Walsh targets a deserving cast of characters who have become obscenely wealthy by stoking division, guilt, and hatred.

It is a stark contrast and really elevates Walsh’s movie beyond anything Baron Cohen has done in recent years.

Am I Racist? is an imperfect, uneven film, and the audience for it is small. After all, to get the most enjoyment out of the film, you have to have at least somewhat of an inkling about who such characters as Saira Rao and Robin DiAngelo are. But it was an entertaining watch nonetheless.

For his next film, it would be interesting to see Walsh take on a multitude of disguises, or perhaps Ben Shapiro in a wig.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.