Will “Am I Racist?” Stand the Test of Time?

Am I Racist?, Matt Walsh’s searing attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, dominated the documentary film box office in 2024. Screening in 1,600 theaters at its height, the film earned $12.3 million before streaming on the Daily Wire. Walsh’s film grossed more at the box office than any other documentary since 2019. That’s when Peter Jackson’s artistically boundary-pushing World War I film They Shall Not Grow Old brought in $12.2 million. 

But will Am I Racist? stand the test of time? 

Unfortunately, probably not, even though the entertaining content will resonate with anti-DEI audiences. The film does an excellent job of skewering the extremes among DEI advocates. But it does little to push a meaningful discussion on race or more nuanced attempts to address racism.

Like many advocacy documentaries, Am I Racist? seems uninterested in grappling with the harder realities of racism, a persistent social problem. Ultimately, this limits the film’s reach and ability to engage in the aftermath of what the Economist magazine has artfully termed “peak woke,” a concept explored later in this discussion. 

DEI Initiatives in Retreat

More than a little truth is found in Walsh’s premise: The widespread adoption of DEI initiatives risks undermining American culture and its institutions. Many universities and government agencies, from Ivy League schools to the U.S. Department of Defense, are fixated on promoting racial and gender diversity and equity. These efforts come at the expense of merit-based approaches. 

Yet, more and more private companies are abandoning these initiatives as they fail to see benefits from their programs. The McDonald’s Corporation, long seen as a beacon of light for up-and-coming minority franchise owners, is the latest to step back from DEI initiatives. For further information, see this article. 

While the extent of this retreat is unclear, at least one investment fund, Azoria, focuses on Fortune 500 companies that have resisted corporate DEI temptations.

Given this context, the Economist recently argued we may be entering a period of “peak woke.” Terms such as “white privilege,” “transphobia,” “oppression,” “microaggression,” and “intersectionality” appear to peak in major media between 2019 and 2021.

Spreading “Wokeness”

This isn’t to say that Walsh’s movie is firing blanks. Quite the contrary. The spread of “wokeness” laid the cultural and political foundation for a bevy of programs and efforts geared toward disrupting civic culture. Many of these programs were untethered to rigorous evaluation and scrutiny, creating substantive fodder for Walsh.

But the concept of wokeness is not inherently negative or bad. A common dictionary definition of “wokeness” is the state of being aware of social injustice and unfairness, particularly as it applies to race. The term was around for decades as part of the African American vernacular well before popular invocations took off in the mid-2010s.

In the professional and academic world, wokeness manifested itself in practical terms in various “antiracism” programs. The term was popularized by journalist Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to be an Antiracist. Kendi argued that Americans need to be consciously and actively anti-racist in their everyday behavior. Operationalizing this recommendation is problematic (at best). 

Am I Racist questions the very premise of this argument, and, by extension, the worthiness of these programs.

Targeting Anti-Racism Programming

Am I Racist squarely lays bare the vacuous nature of the most extreme elements of the DEI movement. These extremes are easy to dissect, deconstruct, and dismiss because they are—extreme. 

For Walsh, the DEI absurdity manifests itself in a klatch of DEI “experts” who have taken on highly visible positions in pushing its agenda. Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, is one of several presumably unwitting cast of characters. 

DiAngelo’s (among others) work essentially operates on circular reasoning: Since white people are embedded in a White Supremacist culture, they need outsiders (like DiAngelo) to educate them on their innate White Supremacist beliefs. Her framework is a recipe for heavy-handed re-education and indoctrination. Her recommendations fundamentally rob individuals of agency and choice. By explicitly making white people an “outgroup,” their voices and experiences are marginalized, gaslighted, and discredited. 

Other targets of Walsh’s film include Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, founders of Race2Dinner. The two-hour dinner conversation is billed as an opportunity to have “radically honest conversations about race and racism” according to a Forbes profile. 

In Walsh’s documentary, the experience seems more like a heavy-handed re-education program to convince white women that merely being white is enough to make them co-conspirators, if unwitting ones, with white supremacists. 

As part of the movie, Walsh sets up his own workshops that inevitably and humorously lead to absurd conclusions and statements about race, racism, and remedies. The logic and progression are linear, and all fitting for a mockumentary. Daily Wire even billed the film as a comedy.

Does Am I Racist Miss the Forest Through the Trees?

While Am I Racist effectively challenges the extremes in the racial diversity movement, the movie does not grapple with the lagging effects of real racism. Viewers will not come away with a better understanding of race or its role in American culture and history. 

Nor will they come away with a better understanding of how America’s open economic and political system integrates ethnic minorities into its mainstream culture at remarkable rates. The list is long, but just to name a few: Cuban refugees in Miami, Germans in the mid-1800s, Italians in the late 19th century, Chinese and Japanese in the twentieth century, religious minorities at the nation’s founding, and Jews. 

Why haven’t African Americans more fully integrated into mainstream society? The list of potential explanations is extensive—a century of Jim Crow, poor educational opportunities for the vast majority, attitudes opposing interracial marriage, low levels of entrepreneurship (compared to other ethnic immigrants), the persistence of culturally isolating institutions such as HBCUs, etc. 

But Am I Racist chooses not to grapple with these issues. 

Of course, grappling with this historical and cultural legacy is likely not Walsh’s objective. Rather, he is tapping into the grievance-driven outrage of (mostly) white people who feel under siege by a dogmatic cadre of racial diversity advocates. In this effort, his film succeeds very well.