Over the weekend, I caught Matt Walsh’s new documentary “Am I Racist?” and found it 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 (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in 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 obtains what turns out to be an expensive credential as a DEI trainer and then tries out his skills on normal people. Hilarity ensues.
It’s true that I especially enjoyed the movie 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 predominantly white intellectuals in the “anti-racist” industry, pillaging money from other silly and usually 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 moment of the film, Walsh interviews Robin DiAngelo, the famed author of “White Fragility,” a book that spent years on the bestseller lists. In a convoluted and painful exchange that draws on a portion of that 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, DiAngelo 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 an African American cameraman who was filming the scene.
And that wraps up a funny film with dozens of preposterous interactions, including a visit to a biker bar whose patrons denounce Walsh for otherizing and patronizing black people. The patrons of the bar themselves denounce the enlightened (white) anti-racist impersonator as himself racist. Perfect!
It’s no wonder this is the highest-grossing documentary of the year so far. With an audience score 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 so enjoyed the subtlety and hilarity of “Am I Racist?” I decided to see Walsh’s 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 of its subject.
In various spots, Walsh 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” and credited to Jurgen Habermas, that is replete throughout the whole of postmodern deconstruction.
These ideas hold that there is no capital-T truth, and that all propositions are merely to be viewed 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. Belief in these ideas is the product of academic training at the highest levels, including the whole of the humanities, with inroads now occurring in the natural sciences, too. It consists of 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 in the maintenance of a professional and academic 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 out group keeps making mistakes and asking about truth and reality.
In the movie, Walsh speaks as a smart person, which he undoubtedly is, but he keeps saying things he is not supposed to say, which triggers his interview subjects. For example, he keeps asking about “reality” and “truth,” and these words are complete poison to a class of people who are focused primarily on constructing and protecting a world of in-group fantasy and wordplay.
In the case of gender, for example, 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 this accepted 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 actual research to find truth) in academia is to learn and deploy word salads of confusion to avoid clarity, and to mouth what amount 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.
“The [first] result was a style that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses. The second result was a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I make no mistake, was the celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker,” Mencken wrote.
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 affected 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 that must be taught, and that result in rules of rhetoric to which guild members must adhere with pious scrupulousness. It’s how they distinguish themselves from mere mortals—the readers of this column and the watchers of Walsh’s film—whom they despise.
What makes these movies funny is that Walsh 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 versus actual life. That’s what makes it so 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 versus everyone else.
