Over the weekend, I caught Mass Walsh’s new documentary “Am I Racist?” which I found hilarious and wonderful. It’s the story of one man’s plunge into the anti-racism industry with its library of books, ongoing seminars, academic specializations and degrees, and unrelenting prattle about DEI in all the upper reaches of corporate culture.
In seeking out a path to be as non-racist as possible—sincerely at first and then in disguise—Walsh gains an expensive credential as a DEI trainer and tries out his skills on normal people. Hilarity ensues.
It’s true that I especially enjoyed it because the audience at this matinee showing was mostly black. That’s something I had not anticipated. I also could have not anticipated the reaction: they laughed uproariously from beginning to end.
It makes sense to me now. They found the send up of these preposterous white intellectuals in the “anti-racist” industry, pillaging money from other silly white people, to be a scream. I left that salient scene—all of us laughing together in a fun moment of multiracial community spirit—with this message: It really is the overeducated pseudo-credentialed hyper-ideologized elites versus the rest of us.
In the best moments of the film, Walsh interviews the famed author of “White Fragility,” years on the bestseller list, whose name is Professor Robin DiAngelo. In a convoluted and painful interview, drawn from a portion of her book, Walsh asks her to explain how and when it is permissible for a white person to smile at a black person.
Walsh invites DiAngelo to act out a scene in corporate culture in which he, as a black man, is offended one day that DiAngelo smiles too much, and, the next day, in which she smiles not enough. In both cases, DeAngelo debases and blames herself and offers to go to training with an instructor of the black person’s choice. The absurdity of the scenario is not lost on the viewer. DiAngelo is then guilt-tripped into paying direct in-cash reparations to a cameraman who was filming.
And that wraps up a funny film with dozens of preposterous interactions, among which include a visit to a biker bar in which the patrons denounce him for otherizing and patronizing black people. The patrons of the bar themselves denounce the enlightened (white) anti-racist as himself racist. Perfect!
It’s no wonder this is the highest grossing documentary of the year so far. With audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes of 99 percent, and not a single professional critic daring even to review it, this film is going to make Walsh and the team behind it a mint.
Because I enjoyed the subtlety and hilarity of “Am I Racist,” I saw his previous movie “What Is a Woman?” for the first time. It’s not as clever—the didacticism tipped the balance a bit—but it is still revealing.
In various spots, Matt is denounced in interviews for being rude or uncouth or otherwise asking questions he should not.
This movie finally reveals something I had not previously understood, at least not fully. Vast swaths of the academic/clinical/intellectual world are governed by a code of rhetorical etiquette, sometimes intellectualized as “discourse ethics,” with the source cited as Jurgen Habermas but replete throughout the whole of postmodern deconstruction.
Part of believing in these ideas—there is no capital-T truth and all propositions are merely that within the framework of an ideas community in which community consensus is the only real standard of plausibility, while disrupting this flow amounts to an aggressive act of rhetorical violence—constitutes academic training at the highest levels including the whole of the humanities and making inroads into the natural sciences too. It consists in careful and unrelenting training/indoctrination in how to deploy the use of language effectively as a signaling system for inclusion in a club.
It’s this vocabulary and grammar that figures strongly into the keeping together of a guild that works to exclude outsiders and include insiders, entirely consistent with the Gnostic tradition. It’s all about the in group and the out group. You can know the in group by virtue of their specialized vocabulary and grammar, while the outgroup keeps making mistakes and asking about truth and reality.
In the movie, Matt speaks as a smart person, which he undoubtedly is, but he keeps saying things he is not supposed to say, which triggers the person being interviewed. For example, he keeps asking about “reality” and “truth” and these words are complete poison to a class of people who agree mostly on constructing and protecting a world of in-group fantasy and word play.
In the case of gender, everything is said to be fluid and self-referential. To say that a woman is “a person who regards himself as a woman” is not absurd but propositionally plausible provided you correctly understand the perimeters of discourse. The capacity to engage in discourse among the community of scholars constitutes the right to think, speak, and influence.
The whole point of “discourse ethics” (as a replacement for actual ethics) and “rhetoric” (as a replacement for research to find truth) in academia is to learn and deploy word salads of confusion to avoid clarity and mouth what amounts to bromides and platitudes no matter how absurd. In fact, the more absurd the better because doing so shows that you regard words like “absurd” and “truth” as belonging to the dinosaurs.
Believe me, Veblen was a clear writer and thinker as compared with today’s academic gibberish, in which it is impossible to tell the difference between parody and the real thing. It has even affect the natural sciences, and no amount of successful hoaxing of mainstream journals seems to set back the movement at all.
To speak with the absence of all clarity, and think without the slightest concern for what’s truth, are themselves skills, which must be taught and result in rules of rhetoric to which guild members must adhere with pious scrupulosity. It’s how they distinguish themselves from mere mortals—readers of this column and watchers of Matt Walsh’s film—whom they despise.
What makes these movies funny is that Matt has this quiet and droll personality that carefully and patiently waits to deploy actual normal questions that regular people might have about completely wacky views. The delight comes from watching the clash of the two cultures: credentialed fakery vs. actual life. That’s what makes it all hilarious.
It follows from his thinking that the guild of the “educated classes” would invent ever more inscrutable methods of inclusion and exclusion, even constructing whole systems of ethics and etiquette about the right to communicate and speak to public life.
That is precisely what Walsh has exposed in his films. By bringing common sense and normal longings for a life well-lived against the gnostic strangeness of a world in which even biology itself is denied, Walsh has given the public a rare look into a peculiar if deeply influential void.
It’s all the better that Walsh’s new film is being shown to a thrilled ticket-buying public in theaters that are happy to show the movies if only to stay profitable. That’s a glorious irony and a fascinating twist in the unfolding drama of the academic elites vs. everyone else.
