Am I Racist?

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 a 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. Catechism of the Catholic  Church 1,935.

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.