In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu wrote, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” In “Am I Racist?,” the satirical documentary released by the Daily Wire that’s in theaters now, writer and star Matt Walsh leans into that concept with gusto, doing the work necessary to become an anti-racist. Fortunately for him, the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) experts he lampoons don’t have the same level of dedication to studying their purported enemies.
Walsh earns a certification in DEI, he visits a bookstore to pick up plagiarist Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” he goes to a workshop examining how to dismantle systemic racism, and he disrupts the opening meditation session at that workshop. Somehow, no one initially recognizes him nor realizes he’s mocking them, though the microaggressions he commits lead to him being found out by the other workshop attendees. Rather than allowing him to do the work after that discovery — and surely, they see that he is someone who needs to do the work — he gets escorted out. They also call the police on him.
This macroaggression means that Walsh has but one choice for his project — he must go undercover a la Eddie Murphy. The subterfuge allows him to truly start doing the work. He learns that whiteness is insidious, all Republicans are Nazis, and white women are the worst. Through his efforts, viewers also learn those things and more, such as the fact that you should never hire him to be a
