Am I Racist? Is Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire's follow-up to the documentary What is a Woman?, their satirical critique of transgender ideology. What is a Woman? Succeeded because Walsh simply let gender experts and activits talk freely. No jokes, just honest listening with some insightful but straight-faced questions. It was the experts and activists who made a mockery of themselves and revealed the incoherence and intolerance of their beliefs. Funny, troubling...and honest.
Am I Racist? Might have succeeded if they'd followed the same formula. Take the centrepiece of the documentary, Race to Dinner, where DEI consultants Saira Rao and Regina Jackson are invited to berate a group of white women about their racism as they all enjoy an expensive meal. The ridiculousness of the situation is the stuff of high comedy and I would have loved to hear the whole conversation. Sadly, we hear little of it. Matt Walsh, channeling Borat, crashes the scene disguised as a waiter, interrupts the speakers with his own dumb comments, does stupid slapstick like dropping plates. What could have been a roast of "anti-racist" lunacy is actively undermined by the clowning which takes centre stage.
There's much material to mine when it comes to the excesses of the DEI industry but so little appears in Am I Racist? The treatment of the subject matter comes across as generally lazy. Another example is the "racist" blow-up involving a theme park animal character ignoring two black girls. The real story may not be as it seems, but instead of doing actual investigation they just take the cheap shot of paying the girls' mother $50K for an interview, implying that she was a grifter for being motivated by money. But who wouldn't take $50K??
All in all, a lazy effort with too little substance. The moments of real potential for satire are undermined by taking the focus away from the subjects to Walsh's Borat-style clown act.
