AM I RACIST? Became Top Political Doc by Fooling DEI Experts
Movieguide® Contributor
Matt Walsh’s conservative exploration of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) movement, AM I RACIST?, earned $4.5m at the box office — but not without a little playful espionage.
“‘Decolonize yourself. Do your own white supremacy dismantling, and then you can start to bring in other people,’ declares Regina Jackson at a Race2Dinner in Atlanta, part of an ongoing series she co-founded with Saira Rao designed to help white women confront their own racism, white supremacy and xenophobia,” The Hollywood Reporter said.
“Before anyone can respond, the waiter proposes a toast, instructing guests to ‘raise a glass if you’re racist.’ They all oblige — although Jackson, who is Black, quickly puts her glass down and laughs. ‘Oh, I’m not racist,’ she says.”
The caterer, who is really Walsh, clumsily interrupted the whole evening. He told the other guests he’s got his “DEI certificate” and that he’s “just on the journey.”
On a clip of the moment on social media Walsh joked, “I was honored to earn a seat at the table during a Race to Dinner session. I was even more honored to lead the women in a toast to racists.”
“With the backing of Jeremy Boreing and Ben Shapiro’s right-wing media company The Daily Wire,” Walsh “spent months filming the documentary AM I RACIST?, a comedic and scathing takedown of the DEI movement,” THR said.
“Borrowing a page from Sacha Baron Cohen’s DA ALI G SHOW and BORAT, the producers set up elaborate and surreptitious ruses, telling their subjects they were making a doc exploring anti-racism in America in the post-George Floyd era,” THR continued.
The movie earned the top opening for a political doc in 20 years. The last doc to get such high numbers was Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11 in 2004.
“The movie shot up the chart to No. 4 and did almost double the business of Dave Bautista’s action-thriller THE KILLER’S GAME ($2.6 million),” THR said.
Movieguide®’s review of the doc reads:
AM I RACIST? is a mockumentary starring columnist and radio host Matt Walsh, a Christian conservative. Matt gets a certificate to be a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) consultant. Then, wearing a disguise, he pretends to ask some top self-appointed DEI experts and Marxist race hustlers to teach him how to be a non-racist white man. One of the Marxists he discusses racism with is Robin DiAngelo, author of the book WHITE FRAGILITY. Her book is used in colleges campuses and employee training programs at Disney and large companies.
AM I RACIST? is often funny and sometimes hilarious. Some of the comments against racism and white people by the Marxist race hustlers are unintentionally hilarious but also outrageous. Matt plays along with them and says a few crazy things himself. AM I RACIST? uses satire to expose Marxist “antiracist” ideology and identity politics as the fraud they truly are. Some of the people in AM I RACIST who are interviewed or depicted utter some obscenities, but the “f” words are bleeped out to get a PG-13 rating. MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution.
The movie has the fourth-biggest opening in the last ten years for any doc, the first being Angel Studios’ 2023 hit, AFTER DEATH.
Walsh has no hesitation when it comes to sneaking about to get answers. He believed no DEI expert would speak candidly with him if they knew his real identity, so he wore a wig, skinny jeans and sneakers at his interviews. The producers did not mention The Daily Wire’s involvement and gave fake names for the doc.
Executive producer Dallas Sonnier said, “The scariest part of making this movie was not knowing, day to day, if we’d pull it off. We went undercover in hostile environments, but the most shocking part was that these people didn’t even realize they were being punked.”
Director-producer Justin Folk said, “The distinction between our movies and Borat is that Borat is making fun of everyday Americans. Our goal wasn’t to make fun of people, it was to really bring to light the bad ideas that are out there that are dividing our country.”
Folk claims there wasn’t any “manipulative editing” or taking things out of context.
“They may not like being in the movie, but again, I think they would stand by every word that they said,” the director said.
The producers paid Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, $15,000 to participate in the doc. Because she’s a white person, they asked her to employ her own ideology by asking her to pay $30 in reparations to black producer Benyam Capel.
“Walsh asks if his producer, whom he only identifies as Ben and is Black, can join them. Walsh suggests making on-the-spot reparations, pulls out money from his wallet and hands it to Capel. ‘This is really weird,’ DiAngelo says. After asking Ben directly if he’s OK with it, he says it is. She retrieves all the cash in her purse, which turns out to be $30,” THR said.
Capel was “over the moon” that DiAngelo was convicted to follow the “logical conclusion” of her ideology.
“It’s ridiculously insulting to Black people because ultimately saying that for a Black man, such as myself, to have a shot, that I can’t get there on my own merits, and that white people are going to have to lower themselves down for me to have an opportunity to rise to any level of station in this country,” he said.
Capel and Walsh stood in front of the Washington Monument and collected signatures in support of painting it black and renaming it the George Floyd Monument. They got over 20 signatures.
“To see it get that amount of support was shocking and disappointing,” he said.
“Walsh and Folk say they aren’t sure they could have executed the film without the pivotal reparations scene. And the film’s marketing team made maximum use of the scene prior the film’s release,” THR said. “Around the same time, DiAngelo issued a lengthy statement explaining she’d been contacted by a group ‘claiming to be making a documentary film called SHADES OF JUSTICE that address racism in the United States by speaking with anti-racist activists, authors and thought leaders in service of supporting the cause of racial equity. They offered me between $10-20,000 for an interview. I said let’s meet in the middle with $15,000 and agreed to participate (I have since donated that sum to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund).’”
“DiAngelo said while a few things ‘felt off,’ including the interviewer, who called himself Matt, appearing to be wearing an ill-fitting wig, the conversation seemed earnest and non-adversarial. ‘By the end, however, things go weird,’ she wrote in reference to the question of reparations for Black Americans,” she said.
She recounted the experience and noted that Matt seemed to put her and Ben “on the spot.”
“Because Matt was pushing this on us, I expressed my discomfort and checked in with Ben, to be sure he was okay with receiving cash in this way. Ben reassured me that he was, so I went to my wallet and handed him my cash and the interview ended,” she said.
“Walsh himself received more than $3,000 for hosting his own DEI workshop that he advertised on Craigslist, and which provides fodder for the end of the doc. Some of the attendees catch on and quickly bolt, but there’s still a small group left when Walsh pulls out a box of whips and paddles so that people can engage in self-flagellation. He actually gets as far as passing the implements out, but then stops and calls it a day,” THR said.
“The whole goal all along was to find out how far people would go to, especially white people, to absolve themselves of racial guilt. And apparently, it’s pretty far,” said Folk.
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