"Am I Racist?" (Film Essay)

Matt Walsh’s devastating exposé of the DEI industry offers important insights into current approaches to social justice in librarianship.

[Warning: contains major spoilers].

To the uninitiated observer, the profession of librarianship in the 21^st Century might appear to be only tangentially concerned with the acquisition, description, organization, and provision of documents for use by the public. Instead, such an observer could easily be forgiven for concluding that the purpose of librarianship was to locate systems of oppression, to destroy white supremacy, to confront biases, and to commit itself to anti-racism and opposing fascism.

Such, at any rate, might be their conclusion based on a perusal of our professional literature, curricula, professional development training, and conference programs, which have in recent years—like much of higher education and the corporate sector—become thoroughly dominated with the imperatives associated with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The mainstream acceptance of DEI ideology in librarianship is such that its lexicon thoroughly permeates our official documents, most recently illustrated with the release of the Ontario Library Association’s “Commitment Towards Inclusive Librarianship”, (previously analyzed on this Substack), a text replete with such concepts as “anti-oppression”, “intersectionality”, and “dismantling systemic oppressive practices”.

However, the drafters of this document could hardly have anticipated that these very words—delivered with such earnest solemnity—would soon be eliciting howls of uproarious (if uneasy) laughter from audiences at multiplexes across the continent attending the new Matt Walsh documentary “Am I Racist?” in which the deadpan conservative podcaster brilliantly trolls DEI trainers and the field’s leading luminaries, including none other than Robin (White Fragility) DiAngelo. On the surface, there is nothing in the film that has anything whatever to do with librarianship, apart from (at a stretch) the fact that it is a stack of anti-racist books purchased at a bookstore that launches Walsh’s journey. Yet, the extent to which DEI ideology has been integrated into almost every aspect of our work means that this film is directly concerned with what has become a major focus of our profession.

Framed as a “personal journey” on the part of Walsh to discover what the present cultural and political obsession with race and racism is all about, the film moves from one cringe-inducing encounter to the next, as Walsh adopts the persona (and appearance) of a woke anti-racist “expert” complete with ill-fitting blazer, “man bun” wig, and proof of DEI certification—the latter purchased online for less than $30.  Going simply by “Matt”, he insinuates himself into a number of anti-racist trainings, ultimately hosting at the climax of the film his own (disastrous) DEI workshop.

Currently scoring an audience rating of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes—despite having garnered in its first ten days not a single review from major media critics—the film earned $4.75 million in its opening weekend, coming in 5^th place in North American box office, right behind the Marvel/Sony hit Deadpool & Wolverine. Produced by the conservative media website The Daily Wire (which hosts Walsh’s podcast) and directed by Justin Folk (who also directed Walsh’s 2022 broadside against gender identity ideology What is a Woman?), Am I Racist? plays very much like a cross between a Michael Moore film and the 2006 mockumentary film Borat. However, where the latter saw its star Sasha Baron Cohen dupe, hoax and humiliate many of the everyday Americans encountered in the film, Walsh’s targets are the leaders of the DEI industry, while his “people on the street” interviews are often sympathetic and touching, even if his subjects are befuddled by his ridiculous persona.

Much of the online commentary regarding Am I Racist? has been (in my view) undertaken in fairly bad faith by those who haven’t even seen the movie, or refuse to do so, yet still condemn it as “right wing” or racist. This is why it has garnered no mainstream reviews while those YouTubers who have posted reviews have themselves been subject to online accusations of racism. Yes, Matt Walsh is a conservative Christian, but his personal political and religious convictions play no role in the film’s content.

Before proceeding, it’s important to stress that the current headline-making reactions against the excesses of DEI are not only coming from conservatives like Walsh or Republican governors like Ron DeSantis; in fact, they are also being articulated by DEI practitioners themselves, some of whom are pointing out that the current training practices related to such concepts of “unconscious bias” are based on no reliable metrics and appear to be ineffective on their own terms. As DEI consultant Lily Zheng writes in the Harvard Business Review, the “big, poorly kept secret” in the industry is that

[u]nconscious bias training rarely changes actual behaviors and has little impact on explicit biases. A meta-analysis of hundreds of prejudice-reduction interventions found few that unambiguously achieved their goals. Many popular interventions run the risk of backlash, strong adverse reactions that sustain or even worsen the inequity that practitioners attempt to eliminate. Even “the business case for diversity,” a decades-old rhetorical framing and justification for DEI work, has been found to backfire on marginalized groups’ feelings of belonging and weaken support for diversity programs when organizational performance drops.

She argues that current practices may “purport[] to end inequity but instead sustain[] it at great cost to marginalized populations.” Conor Friedersdorf concurs, arguing in The Atlantic, that there is a level of cynicism at work in the DEI industry:

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good. In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.

These views also align with that of radical LIS scholar Eino Sierpe, who critiques DEI regimes as being little more than “liberal illusions” disguising the “white supremacy” in the profession.

In other words, it would be a mistake to view Am I Racist? in isolation from many mainstream—event radical—objections to DEI regimes.

There are four main themes in the film: one, that the ideology and precepts taught by DEI literature and educators are incoherent and place their intended audience (i.e., white people) in an endless series of no-win and morally-freighted scenarios in which they can never escape their racism, but must nonetheless continuously “do the work” to confront and “de-center” their whiteness; second, because well-intentioned white people agree they must “do the work” for the rest of their lives, this leaves them vulnerable to those seeking to take economic advantage of their guilt—in other words, the ideology of DEI has led to the creation of a veritable “racism industry” which is little more than a grift; and, third, that many of those in the DEI industry often engage in hypocrisy.

The fourth revelation is far more troubling: that, carried to their logical conclusion, the imperatives of anti-racism are nothing short of dehumanizing, and have the very real potential to drive people to do terrible things to one another.

A scene early on in the film (before Walsh adopts his “Matt” disguise) perfectly illustrates the no-win scenario. In the course of interviewing DEI educator Dr. Katie Slater, the topic of Disney princesses is raised, with Walsh saying (to Slater’s approval) that his 3-year old daughter likes Moana; but since she also wants to be Moana for Halloween, Walsh asks, would dressing her in South Sea Islander costume be cultural appropriation? Slater replies yes, that she “wouldn’t f***ing do it.” Walsh points out that the choices—that white children can either like and emulate only white Disney princesses, or engage in cultural appropriation—both lead back to racism. That this manufactured moral conundrum is being imposed on small children is only one of the many troubling issues raised by the film.

The second theme—the nature of the grift—is highlighted throughout, with price tags placed on the screen indicating the amounts paid to the DEI educators to have them speak in the film (DiAngelo proposed and was paid $15,000, which, she has announced on social media, was donated to the NAACP legal fund). The film suggests that the financial temptations are such that some people will make extraordinary accusations of racism, such as the black mother who complained that her children were snubbed on camera by a Sesame Place mascot character, and sued the theme park for $25 million despite not even knowing if the actor in the suit was white; or engage in outright hate crime hoaxes, as did actor Jussie Smollett, for which he was convicted, sentenced to 150 days in prison and ordered to pay more than $145,000 in fines and in restitution to the city of Chicago. (One shortcoming of the film is that its re-enactment of the “incident” with “Matt” assuming the Smollett role doesn’t make it entirely clear that it never happened, which might confuse some viewers).

Hypocrisy—or, at the very least, a total lack of self-awareness—was also on display in the awkward “race to dinner” scene, in which consultants Regina Jackson and Saira Rao are invited to a high-end dinner party with a table of white women (for which “Matt” acts as a server) in order to berate them for their complicity in white supremacy. At one point (in a scene included in the film’s trailer) Rao declares that “the entire system has to burn. This country is not worth saving, this country is a piece of s***”—all the while enjoying fine dining and (presumably) expensive wine.   

Where the dark side of DEI is truly exposed is the film’s climax, in which “Matt” takes everything he’s learned and puts on his own public workshop entitled, “Do the Work Workshop” (the event included an absurd website intended to promote the film). What follows is a shocking scenario in which he introduces his own proverbial “racist uncle” Frank—an elderly and apparently helpless man bent over in a wheelchair, whom he proceeds to verbally abuse and yell at for the better part of a minute, excoriating him for having told a racist joke about Mexicans 20 years previously. Not only do his participants do nothing whatever to intervene and defend the unresponsive victim of this tirade, but two of the attendees are actually inspired to follow his lead and spew their own hatred at “Uncle Frank.”

After “Frank” is wheeled out, “Matt” brings out a box of whips and paddles for the participants to literally flagellate themselves. With this, two people storm out, one sputtering “this is ridiculous!” but the remaining class members accept the devices and appear to be contemplating actually using the instruments on themselves. At this point, however,  “Matt” brings the event to an abrupt close, “realizing” he has gone too far.

That supposedly progressive convictions can lead to cruelty towards others was also revealed by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian in their famous “grievance affair” hoax academic papers, one of which argued that

privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The [peer] reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment. 

If anything, the outcome of Walsh’s “social experiment” bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Stanley Milgram experiments in the early 1960s, which saw subjects (under the belief they were a confederate of the researcher) continue to press buttons to (supposedly) administer electric shocks to an unseen—and increasingly agitated and desperate—person in the next room, even to the point of believing they were “killing” them, all because the researcher instructed them to do so. Am I Racist? forwards similarly disturbing conclusions about deference to authority, but perhaps with even with greater intensity because it is imbued with a moral and ideological imperative.

What, then, might librarianship learn from Am I Racist? I see four takeaways:

1.      The abstruse, theoretical language of DEI and Critical Social Justice may not be the best approach to communicating with the public. 

Much of the humor in the film comes from the confused reaction of everyday people to “Matt’s” attempts to engage them using the lexicon of DEI, strongly suggesting that while these ideas comprise the core vocabulary in scholarly LIS journals and within a small bubble of academia, they may have little resonance among the general public. This calls into question the pragmatic and community-relations value of the sorts of documents characterized by the OLA Commitment Towards Inclusive Librarianship: are they in fact intended to connect with stakeholders in the community, or are they actually performative virtue-signalling within the profession and the academy? This question becomes more troubling when we consider that…

2.      The lexicon of Critical Social Justice includes socially toxic connotations which are incompatible with the values of librarianship. 

That so many of the “Do the Work Workshop” participants in the film did nothing to defend a helpless old man or were eager to vent their own vitriol against him before picking up whips to flagellate themselves is a pretty good indication that the concepts associated with DEI may not what they appear to be. Most reasonable people would probably agree that principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (as generally understood) sound positive and benign—who could possibly object to them? Yet when one examines them more closely according to the lexicon of Critical Social Justice they convey deeper and quite illiberal meanings. As James Lindsay writes at his New Discourses website,

“Diversity”…tends to mean uniformity of viewpoint about ideological matters… Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.” In that sense, equity is something like a kind of “social communism”…[inclusion] means to create a welcoming environment specifically for groups considered marginalized, and this entails the exclusion of anything that could feel unwelcoming to any identity groups…Thus, inclusion is an expansive concept that could apply to silencing certain ideas like conservatism, meritocracy, or support for freedom of speech, usually in the name of safety and preventing the “trauma” or “violence” that such ideas could inflict upon progressives who see them as ideologies that perpetuate systemic harm (emphasis added).¹

Ideological uniformity, administering equal outcomes rather than creating equal opportunities, and the forbidding or elimination of ideas, speakers, groups, or books to which particular groups may object: these are distinctly illiberal values quite at odds with what we have traditionally held to be the goals of librarianship. The Jefferson Council at the University of Virginia puts it this way: “DEI programs chill free speech and undermine a culture of civil dialogue, the free exchange of competing ideas, and intellectual diversity throughout the University.”

The film also suggests that DEI initiatives not only fail on their own terms but actually exacerbate racism: in one memorable scene, a young man on the street tells “Matt” after listening to him for a few minutes that he’s the most racist person he’s ever met. As Matt Osborne notes at The Distance, “Matt Walsh does not start out racist: he becomes racist by applying his DEI ‘education.’…At the end of the film, Walsh performs the realization that he has made his ‘students’ more hateful.”

For these reasons and more—and as we saw above—DEI training programs are increasingly the subject of controversy, and not because their critics are “bigots”.

3.     There are other ways beside DEI regimes to ensuring that organizations can meet the needs of diverse clientele.

In a genuinely touching moment, Walsh interviews an older black gentleman who immigrated to the U.S. years ago from (if I recall correctly) French Guiana, and who tells Walsh that he never really experienced racism. When Walsh asks him what Americans should do about racism, he replies simply, “love one another.”

This speaks to, I think, our commitment as library workers and administrators to “meet library users where they are,” to respond to diverse needs whether our users are experiencing a disability, are newly-arrived immigrants with minimal English language skills, or are students (of whatever racial or ethnic background) struggling in poorly-funded schools. We are more than prepared and willing to comply with accessibility legislation (such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, or in Canada, disability-related legislation at the Provincial levels), and to design and deliver programming aimed at specific and identified needs in the community. Nobody disputes this. However, where such efforts part ways with the critical ideology of DEI is that they are oriented to meeting the needs of individuals, not essentializing entire groups of people according to immutable characteristics or notions of self-identification. This is the difference between liberal conceptions of social justice, and Critical Social Justice. As such…

4.     Librarians should not be promulgating DEI through our institutions and professional associations as the only acceptable lens through which to view or approach matters of social justice.

We need to understand that 21^st century DEI regimes are not the inheritors of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, which sought to extend the promise of the American way of life to African Americans, women, and same-sex attracted people, stressing our shared humanity and universal human rights. In contrast to the tenets of Critical Social Justice, those earlier movements championed liberal social justice premised on Enlightenment values, including individual liberty, evidence-based decision making, free speech, freedom of thought, and equality before the law. Instead, DEI is essentialist regarding social categories and therefore polarizing—one is either an oppressor or among the oppressed—and seeks to “disrupt and dismantle” institutions rather than improving their integrity and resilience (recall Saira Rao’s remark, “the entire system has to burn”). This message is driven home in the film’s final moments when Walsh (in something of a fantasy sequence) stands up in a coffee shop and declares that we should all treat each other as fellow human beings, regardless of race, and refuse to let ideologues divide us—a message that would hardly have been out of place at a 1960s Civil Rights rally.

I sincerely hope that this sentiment may once again soon become common currency in librarianship.

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1. Respective definitions excerpted from the “Translations from the Wokish” part of the site.