'Am I Racist?' Review
Matt Walsh brings us one of the most insightful and genuinely funny comedies in years
In Season 3, Episode 4 of the hit FX series Atlanta, titled "The Big Payback", a white man in his mid-30s named Marshall finds himself in a bizarre, almost Job-esque scenario where he gradually loses his job, wife, and custody of his child all because of a new "reparations" trend where anyone who had an ancestor who owned a slave at any point. He becomes consistently harassed by the woman whose family his ancestor owned as slaves, and she shows very little care for him and his well-being as his life falls apart around him. I was actually taken by surprise by the episode at first because it was portraying the idea of "reparations," a very real idea that has been propagated in recent years, as something ludicrous and harmful…right until the end where they flash forward and Marshall has just happily adjusted to the new normal of having to spend the rest of his years paying off his reparations as the waitstaff of a restaurant which serves almost exclusively non-white people. It’s a remarkably odd pivot and almost feels as if series creator Donald Glover- who in the first two seasons of the show used his platform to point out the hypocrisies and oddities of contemporary secular culture and the music industry- initially meant for the episode to play out as a criticism of reparations before Disney execs demanded a change in the ending.1 It’s a complete failure in satire that leaves the viewer more confused than anything, and a reminder that sometimes the third season of a show can make or break a previously excellent series.
Matt Walsh’s provocatively titled Am I Racist?, produced by Ben Shapiro and the folks at The Daily Wire, succeeds tremendously where Donald Glover failed, producing a thought-provoking documentary that has even those on the Left marveling at its success. I at first wasn’t really interested in seeing this, it just felt like one of those YouTube videos where someone goes in disguise at the DNC (something Matt actually did in promoting this film) to highlight all the bizarre things people are willing to say on camera. It’s always funny, but I wasn’t sure if that could sustain almost two hours of runtime.
My doubts, however, were assuaged: Am I Racist? succeeds primarily for two reasons. Firstly, the pacing of the different "set-ups": for those who don’t know, the film is set around Matt’s undercover journey to expose "racial experts" from all around the US who essentially make money off of helping white people "fix" their inherent racism (one such "expert" is revealed to charge $30,000 for a session). The slow build-up and gradual escalation of each scenario is both perfectly paced and each scene logically builds off the next. The editing finds a great balance between cringey, hard-to-watch moments- which are intentionally edited to play out as long as necessary in certain scenarios- and the more silly, laugh-out-loud moments that are a result of Walsh and producer Ben Capel’s (the latter of whom has some of the funniest moments in the film with his roles in Matt’s set-ups) careful planning and execution.
Secondly, Matt Walsh himself is what makes this work: after watching the film it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing a better job than him at getting the people he interviews to realize the ridiculousness of what they believe (or claim to believe). He never once gets emotional, raises his voice, or goes farther than is necessary in his goal of revealing the truth. All he really has to do is ask the right questions (and find a good disguise) in order to accomplish his mission, and sometimes that means patiently sitting through hours of being told that he is a natural racist just because he is white.
The experience of seeing it in a theater is one that I highly recommend if you are interested in seeing it at all: I seriously can’t remember the last time I sat in a theater and laughed that hard with a bunch of other people who were laughing with me. It’s just as edifying as it is entertaining, and I hope it continues to dominate the box office for the length of its run.
It’s worth noting that this was the first season of Atlanta to premiere after Disney acquired FX through their acquisition of 20th Century Fox
Yes, watch in the theater if at all possible - the nearly sold-out audience in our theater on opening day was multi-generational and multi-racial and we all seemed to roar with laughter, cringe, and loudly applaud at the same things. I saw no sulkers, and believe me I was looking - anyone with the guts to come to a movie they were determined to hate was going to get at least a friendly nod from me on the way out. People stood around outside the door after the movie laughing and making jokes e.g. "hey baby - I'll sure take some reparation money!" A very relaxed and friendly and in-sync crowd. We'd have missed so much if we'd waited for streaming.
I saw it this weekend. My husband and I thought it was pretty narrowly focused on the DEI industry, rather than racism itself, making it a wider net movie. It seemed aimed to give a feel-good ending to most regular people who are not DEI-academics. Anywhere in academia gets into to weird trends and niches, but this one affects average Americans more than medieval studies or archeology PhDs, since every corporate office and college and government-related anything does DEI trainings now and asks for diversity statements on applications for grants or scholarships, etc.
We think Matt Walsh played it safe with the narrow scope, so that to anyone complaining about the existence of the movie, he could respond, "So you don't want grifters exposed?" I was surprised how feel-good this movie was, when "What is a Woman?" left me feeling sick (it was excellently made, just awful, awful content that parents should be aware of). Parts of this were so cringey to me that I was squirming in my seat, but I did laugh out loud several times.
Years ago, I stopped volunteering to help with college recruiting at my engineering company because the DEI quotas (pushed by the government) got so absurd. The people setting them and talking about them (percentage of US citizen women or US citizen minorities in electrical engineering that they wanted to hire) seemed so disconnected from reality. If a graduating class of 100 engineers has 5-10 women and 2-5 black students (and not all US citizens), you can't honestly expect all of them will come to our company. Google has basically infinity money and they can't hire to meet the diversity goals they set. And it makes everything so affirmative actiony and messed up. I was hired based on my talents and experiences, but the more low GPA young women we hired and the more high GPA white young men we turned away, the more I felt like people would look at me, a woman in electrical engineering, as a diversity hire.