It’s a bad sign for the American film industry, and for American culture in general, that Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? is a box-office success. The film is Walsh’s second feature-length documentary—following What is a Woman?, his diatribe against transgender people from 2022—and it’s the first production from the right-wing Daily Wire media network to get a theatrical release. It’s also the highest-grossing documentary of 2024, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, it has entered the top 40 highest-selling documentaries of all time (although other rankings have it lower). 

This is bad for cinema, because it means that Walsh and his associates at the Daily Wire have been successful in their project of getting mainstream audiences to watch their propaganda films. We’ll probably be seeing more of their material in theaters soon, taking up screens that could be used to show superior works like Godzilla Minus One or Cat Video Fest. But it’s also unfortunate for America as a whole, because Am I Racist? is dedicated to telling a pair of enormous lies: that race and racism are not really serious issues today, and that people concerned with them are either delusional or perpetrating a fraud. If the film’s audience comes away thinking Walsh is correct about those points, it may seriously hamper the ongoing efforts to correct the country’s very real racial injustices. That’s why it’s important to expose Walsh’s falsehoods and manipulations now, point by point, before they go any further.

Am I Racist? is presented as a comedy, and it even succeeds in cracking one or two decent jokes. This makes it more likely to appeal to ordinary moviegoers than other right-wing documentaries, like Dinesh D’Souza’s Vindicating Trump, which are more like extended Facebook rants in cinematic form. But Am I Racist? also has serious political points to make, and those are what have to be addressed. The film’s central arguments are these: 

1. Racism is not really very common in the United States. There may be certain individuals and incidents that are racist, but they are relatively rare, and are not representative of the country or its institutions. 
2. Instead, racism is exaggerated and blown out of proportion by left-wing activists and grifters, two categories that closely overlap. These people are either silly and misguided, or they’re “race hustlers” pushing the idea of widespread racism in order to make money. (Or both.)

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Walsh makes an impassioned speech to a roadside diner full of people, where he lays out his points like this: 

The antiracist industry says that America is racist down to its bones[...] But it’s a lie. It’s a lie meant to manipulate us. Look, we’ll never live in a utopia, we all know that. But we don’t have to be held hostage by these race-baiting con artists who want us to be bitter and angry and resentful. They’re selling us the disease. They’re telling us there’s no cure. They don’t say that I’m racist and you’re a victim because that’s what they think we are. They tell us that because that’s what they want us to be. It’s time for us to say no.

Because Am I Racist? is a little too smug for its own good, the scene ends with everyone in the diner applauding. In a title card between scenes, Walsh also quotes fellow propagandist Thomas Sowell, who says that “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support—kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’” That, in a nutshell, is Walsh’s thesis too. 

To prove these points, Walsh follows a format that’s familiar from “mockumentaries” like the Borat films. (Indeed, he’s been called the “Borat of the Right.”) He disguises himself in a grey herringbone jacket, skinny jeans, and a ponytail, essentially dressing as an outdated caricature of a leftist hipster. Armed with this costume, he goes undercover to a variety of “antiracist” workshops and speaking events, secretly filming them the whole time, in order to show how silly and misguided the self-proclaimed antiracists are. He also interviews people you might stereotypically expect to be racist, like the patrons of a seedy-looking biker bar, only to discover that they aren’t racist at all. The format is a little disjointed—like a Monty Python or Jackass film, it’s more a series of skits and stunts that have been edited together than a single coherent narrative—but it’s competent enough filmmaking.

Almost immediately, though, it becomes clear that Walsh is manipulating his audience. For instance, take the evidence he gives for how uncommon racism supposedly is in America today. Most of it comes from the film’s biker-bar scene, where Walsh rolls up on a scooter (Get it? Because leftists are too weak and girly to have real motorcycles?) and starts asking people what they think about race. There are two Confederate flags on the walls, plus a “Trump as Rambo” poster—the bar itself appears to be in Tennessee—so you’re visually prompted to expect a torrent of slurs and ignorance from the interviewees. But instead, they all say stuff like this: 

Who cares? The way the world’s going right now, people need to be concerned with how they’re going to feed their families, not “what color is that man’s skin?” I got Black friends, I love them too.

In a similar vein, Walsh interviews a first-generation immigrant from Guyana who says he hasn’t experienced any “systemic racism” in the U.S. (and seems confused by the term). He also speaks to the author of a book called Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, who points out that “hate crimes” make up a tiny percentage of violent crime overall. (This is true, but irrelevant to the question of whether hate crimes are a problem. You might as well say that lynchings are a tiny percentage of all murders, so we shouldn’t worry about them, or that we should give up on trying to cure rare diseases since they don’t affect many people.) Walsh even reenacts the Jussie Smollett lynching hoax, complete with goofy-looking attackers who yell “Hit him with the bleach!”, to drive the point home. Taken together, the impression these segments are meant to give is a feel-good Hey, America’s not so racist after all!

The issue with this is twofold. In the first place, these are mostly just isolated, anecdotal examples. Yes, Walsh has found a bar where the bikers aren’t racist—or at least, are smart enough not to say they’re racist when questioned by a weird-looking stranger—and he’s found a Black man from Guyana who says nobody treats him badly. Yes, Jussie Smollett tried to pull a gross and manipulative scam. But that doesn’t tell us much about more general trends in the United States. I could just as easily find a bar with nastier bikers, an immigrant who has been discriminated against, and a real hate-crime victim, and claim those things prove that racism is rampant. But that, too, wouldn’t actually prove much of anything. 

Second, Walsh’s definition of racism is narrow. When he says “racism,” what he appears to mean is blatant displays of racial hatred, like being attacked on the street Smollett-style, or someone explicitly saying they dislike another racial group. If you define “racism” that way, then sure, “racism” is probably less common than it used to be. (Although there are still blatantly racist incidents, like when someone sent anonymous text messages to Black people across the U.S. telling them to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation” after Trump won the election last month.) But Walsh never makes a case for why overt expressions of racial hatred should be the focus, and he never seriously engages with the idea of racial bias and inequality in matters of power and wealth.

If he did, his whole case would fall apart. It may be difficult to get someone to say something racist to your face—unless they are Bill Maher—but there is plenty of evidence that Americans harbor racist attitudes, especially when money or property is involved. For instance, a 2021 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that job applicants with a traditionally Black name like “Jamal” or “Lakisha” were 10 percent less likely to get an interview than those with a traditionally white name like “Emily” or “Greg,” even when everything else about their resumes was the same. Or to use another example, it’s well-documented that homes with Black and Latino owners are, on average, valued lower than similar homes owned by white people. In fact, there’s more than one high-profile case from the last few years where the exact same home was appraised hundreds of thousands of dollars higher after the Black owners removed their family photos and had a white friend greet the appraiser. For that matter, 71 percent of Black Americans say they’ve experienced racist mistreatment of some kind, making Walsh’s friend from Guyana something of an outlier. When Walsh waves away racism as an issue, he is saying that the vast majority of Black people are wrong about their own lives and experiences, and that he, a white man, understands their situation better than they do themselves. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, that’s a pretty racist thing to think. 

Contrary to what the Daily Wire will tell you, racial bias and injustice can be found in nearly every aspect of life in the United States. In medicine, it’s significantly more likely for a Black woman to die of a pregnancy-related condition than a white woman, even though most of the deaths for both groups are preventable. In economics, there is a persistent racial wealth gap, which means that “in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held only $15”—and the gap is growing, not shrinking. There’s also a suspicious lack of Black CEOs on the Fortune 500—not that diversifying the corporate elite is how we solve anything, but it’s still notable. Even hunger breaks down along racial lines, with 22.8 percent of Black households and 19.5 percent of Hispanic households reporting that their children sometimes don’t get enough to eat compared to just 8.1 percent of white households in 2023. In the criminal punishment system—where the word “justice” does not apply—federal data shows that Black and Hispanic defendants receive longer sentences for the same crimes than white defendants do, and a murder involving a Black perpetrator and a non-Black victim is more likely to result in the death penalty than any other kind. In academia, a survey of data from all disciplines at five universities between 2015 and 2022 shows that Black and Hispanic scholars are more likely to receive “no” votes when they seek tenure compared to their white and Asian colleagues, even when they’re equally productive. Racism is in the very air we breathe and the water we drink, as majority-Black areas like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” are used as dumping grounds for chemical pollution in a way wealthier white neighborhoods are not.

If we try to list all ways that racism shows up in the United States today, we’ll be here a while. In public schools, Black and Native American children are routinely punished for having the traditional hairstyles associated with their families’ culture. In the NFL, Colin Kaepernick got blackballed at the height of his athletic talents because he kneeled in protest for Black lives, but defensive end Nick Bosa can wear a MAGA hat to his press interviews and do the Trump dance on the field, on the very same San Francisco 49ers team, without a similar blow to his career. On Capitol Hill, even Black Republicans like Senator Tim Scott receive racist abuse in their voicemail inboxes, and both Scott and Black conservative writer Jason Riley have discussed how they’ve faced racist discrimination from the police. Policing in general is one of the most obvious sources of racism, since Black people are disproportionately pulled over and are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by cops than white people. Interestingly, Matt Walsh made a YouTube video about “unjust police shootings” back in December 2018—shortly after the indefensible killing of Emantic Bradford Jr. by Alabama police, who shot Bradford three times from behind—where he argued that “racism is too quickly assumed” in such cases. But he also said that “I’m not going to completely dismiss the racial element of this,” and was critical of the police overall. So on some level, Walsh knows that race and racism are salient facts in American life, even if he chooses to downplay their significance. Anyone with eyes and ears knows it. 

In Am I Racist?, though, Walsh is much less honest and reasonable than his 2018 self. He doesn’t even attempt to address any of the forms of racial injustice listed above, or the criticisms that have been made of them. Instead, he goes cherrypicking. He chooses to feature only the silliest examples of “antiracism” he can find, and uses those to construct a caricature of the whole concept. For instance, he disguises himself as a waiter and attends a banquet hosted by “Race2Dinner,” a program run by entrepreneurs Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. At these dinners, affluent white women pay exorbitant sums of money—reportedly ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 a plate—to ritually confess any racist acts they’ve committed, or attitudes they might hold, and to be lectured by Jackson and Rao about their privilege. It’s all very performative and self-flagellating, and Walsh successfully makes the Race2Dinner guests look ridiculous, even convincing them to “raise a glass if you’re racist!” at one point. In another scene, Walsh trolls White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who we’ve criticized at length in Current Affairs. First he convinces her to make an elaborate apology for slavery to his producer Ben Capel—who’s Black—and then he gives Capel $30 from his wallet as a form of “reparations,” and persuades DiAngelo to do the same from her own purse. In a now-deleted public statement, DiAngelo described the experience as humiliating, and you certainly get a sense of second-hand embarrassment watching her fall for the trick. 

On a purely comedic level, these are decent bits. I confess, “raise a glass if you’re racist!” got a chuckle out of me. Walsh effectively shows that there’s a cottage industry of people making a lot of money from their “antiracism”—a large counter reads “$15,000” when DiAngelo comes onscreen, her fee for the interview. He also shows that their “antiracist” events are often self-indulgent exercises in white guilt, where the attendees talk about themselves rather than any of the challenges facing racial minorities. But ironically enough, he also proves some of their points. For instance, he attends an “antiracist allyship training” hosted by grief counselor Breeshia Wade, which seems to consist mostly of a meditation circle and a lecture on the concept of “white grief.” On its face, this seems a bit goofy and cringe-inducing—but we never get to find out what “white grief” is, because Walsh keeps interrupting everyone with irrelevant nonsense, disrupting the whole event. He also interrupts repeatedly at Race2Dinner, even dropping a big stack of plates in the middle of a speech. If you wanted proof of the common observation that white guys behave like jackasses and make themselves the center of attention in public, he unwittingly provides it. Even DiAngelo’s concept of “white fragility” is validated by the fact that Walsh composed an entire feature-length film and released it in theaters to scoff at the idea that there could possibly be an unjust racial hierarchy. Seems pretty fragile!

What Walsh does not do is engage seriously with commentators on the subject of racism who are not obvious kooks or grifters. He does not speak to journalists like Cerise Castle, who has spent the last few years exhaustively documenting the activities of racist police gangs like the Compton Executioners and Lynwood Vikings in California. He does not interview authors like Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow is the definitive study of how mass incarceration has targeted and devastated African American people and communities. He doesn’t dare to engage with intellectual heavyweights like Cornel West, Nina Turner, James Forman Jr., Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Current Affairs contributors like Prince Shakur and Briahna Joy Gray—all of whose discussions of systemic racism can’t be so easily shrugged off. He knows he can’t touch them on their worst day. Instead, he stays in the shallow waters, content to mock the DiAngelos and Breeshia Wades of the world and pretend they’re representative of “antiracism” as a whole. 

It’s a dishonest tactic, and it’s one Walsh has likely learned from his boss at the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has built his career by filming YouTube videos where he debates awkward college students (sometimes described as “snowflakes”) on contentious social issues, and allegedly OBLITERATES them with FACTS and REASON. Really, he just talks too fast for them to form a coherent response, and he carefully avoids any debate with adult leftists who might prove challenging. Walsh uses the same strategy, choosing only the softest of targets for his mockery and pretending that antiracists with real arguments don’t exist. It’s frankly kind of pathetic, like watching a grown adult dunk basketballs on a four-foot kiddie hoop. 

The dishonesty doesn’t end there, either. In “mockumentaries” like Am I Racist?, a certain amount of trickery is expected. The whole premise is that someone takes on a false identity to show something surprising about the topic at hand. But Matt Walsh’s approach is not quite the same as, say, Sacha Baron Cohen when he plays Borat or Ali G, tricking the people he films. Walsh is also lying about his persona when he’s not in disguise. In Am I Racist?, he presents himself as an average guy who’s confused about All This Race Stuff Nowadays, and who genuinely wonders whether he might be racist and not realize it. One of the film’s opening scenes has him in a roadside diner, wondering whether it’s okay for him to ask an African American waitress for “black” coffee, or whether that would be considered racist. (Answer: no, of course not. What are you talking about? When has anyone said that?) He then sets off on a mission to find out what antiracism is all about, approaching the subject with a more or less open mind. He’s essentially a surrogate for the viewer, who might really be confused about these social issues and not know what to think. If Am I Racist? is your first introduction to Matt Walsh, you might come away thinking he seems fairly reasonable. But Matt Walsh is not a normal, reasonable person, and he’s not approaching his topic in good faith. He’s a committed ideologue, a slick propagandist (though not as slick as he thinks)—and, yes, he’s pretty racist too. 

 The website Media Matters For America has covered Walsh’s career extensively, along with those of his Daily Wire colleagues, and his track record includes all kinds of unambiguously racist incidents dating from 2010 to the present. Among other things, Walsh has: 

• Said it’s impossible to be racist against Chinese people because “Chinese is not a race.”
• Argued on at least two different occasions that he should be allowed to say the N-word in public. 
• Said that “All of us today would be in a worse spot if slavery never existed,” including African Americans.
• Prank-called Barack Obama Elementary School doing an impression of a Black man’s voice and saying that “just cause you ain’t put in the work for something don’t mean that you shouldn’t be supplied with it,” portraying Black people as lazy and entitled.
• Worn a Confederate flag T-shirt to work.
• Said he’d be “quite happy” to use an airport that was built and maintained only by white men, in response to a supposed agenda to “erase white men from the workforce.”
• Defended a Babylon Bee joke about Vivek Ramaswamy running a 7-11 corner store because he’s Indian, and said that “Old school ethnic stereotype jokes are almost always at least mildly amusing.”
• Said that immigrants to the U.S. come from “decaying, dying, dead, nonexistent civilizations without the skills to build a civilization.”
• Defended comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s speech at a Trump rally, in which Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and told a watermelon joke about a Black man in the audience, as simply “the kinds of jokes that normal people tell.”
• Said that Native Americans shouldn’t have any sovereign land because they “got conquered” and it’s “not actually theirs.”
• Endorsed the idea that Haitian immigrants are a threat to the United States because they would make the country “more like Haiti” (and thus, presumably, bad).

This isn’t even an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. Obviously, Walsh has strong opinions about race, and they revolve consistently around the idea that it’s okay—“amusing,” even—for white people like himself to mock and disparage other racial groups. If that’s not racist, nothing is. But, again, racism is not just about an individual’s bigotry or tendency to make nasty comments about others. It’s about the larger effects of these attitudes. When Walsh uses his platform as a commentator to make disparaging comments about Haitians or immigrants in general, he’s adding fuel to the flames of xenophobia. The recent Haitian “pet-eating” blood libel started by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and Trump’s plan to cruelly deport or put into camps tens of millions of immigrants, are things that endanger the lives of immigrants on an ongoing basis. Defending the idea of Puerto Rico as “garbage” also defends the colonial relationship the U.S. maintains with the island, which directly harms Puerto Ricans every day. Promoting racist stereotypes of Black people or Indian people does real damage to legitimate attempts to understand and address harms impacting those groups. And on and on. 

What’s worse is that Walsh conceals his record on race from the audience of Am I Racist?, pushing his agenda while trying to appear as if he doesn’t have one. Here, it’s useful to compare and contrast Walsh’s documentary to Michael Moore’s work. Both Walsh and Sacha Baron Cohen owe a great debt to Moore, who pioneered the concept of a documentarian putting themself at the center of the story and mixing pranks and stunts into more serious coverage. But in a Moore film, you always know up-front where he stands politically. Moore doesn’t pretend that he’s approaching subjects like General Motors or the American healthcare system for the first time, as a wide-eyed innocent. Walsh does with the issue of racism, and it’s an insult to the audience’s intelligence. 

Why, then, are Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire so desperate to tell these lies? Why are they so invested in the project of racism denial? We can get a hint from another of Walsh’s little monologues, this one from the opening moments of Am I Racist?: 

I’ve been a white guy my whole life. Growing up in the ’90s, I never thought much about race. I mean yeah, sure, you noticed if somebody was Black or white or Mexican or whatever, but it never really seemed to matter that much. At least not to me. These days though, we’re told that racial tensions are high. It’s all over the media.

This reveals some things about Walsh’s perspective that I don’t think he intended to reveal. By his own account, he believes that “racial tensions” only became a problem recently, prompted mostly by “the media.” By contrast, he sees his own childhood in the 1990s as an idyllic time where race “never really seemed to matter that much.” He just “never thought much about race,” and seems to think that if everyone else would stop thinking about it today, everything would be okay. Let’s be generous, and assume that he sincerely believes all this and really thinks that he’s helping people by exposing the “antiracist industry.”

The obvious reply is: of course Walsh “never thought much about race” growing up! He’s white! People who look like him, with names like “Matt Walsh,” were never on the receiving end of racism and white supremacy; they never had to think about it. But the 1990s were, in fact, a decade marked by tremendous racial violence and injustice. It was 1991 when the LAPD beat Rodney King within an inch of his life, and when the cops responsible got acquitted, sparking a mass uprising against police brutality across the city. It was 1993 when Tupac Shakur shot two off-duty white cops who were harassing a Black man in Atlanta, and beat the ensuing court case, becoming a folk hero in the process. Bill Clinton signed Joe Biden’s infamous crime bill in 1994, causing people of color to be disproportionately thrown into the hell of the U.S. prison system and even executed. Hillary Clinton added insult to injury in 1996, calling Black youth “superpredators” and calling for police to “bring them to heel.” The 1990s also saw the rise of the now discredited “broken windows” policing, which targeted young Black men and boys. If you were Black in America in those years, you were sure as hell thinking about race, whether you wanted to or not. Only white guys with names like “Walsh” could remain blissfully ignorant and assume that because they and their immediate circle of friends weren’t judging people based on skin color—or weren’t aware of doing so—no serious issue of racism existed in the country. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of white privilege in action. 

In his classic 1963 book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin—whose intellectual output is worth a hundred of Matt Walsh’s—succinctly described this phenomenon of white people remaining willfully ignorant of racism and its consequences: 

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. [...] But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

People like Matt Walsh badly want to remain innocent—to stay mentally in their childhood bedrooms, and never face the realities of the world. They want to avoid the hard work of fixing societal problems, especially when they personally aren’t the ones suffering, and instead just pretend the problems aren’t there. They want it so badly that they’ll film a whole documentary to lie to your face, trying to convince you there’s no such thing as racism. Right now, they’re doing a pretty good job of selling the lie, at least if the box office is any indication. But they mustn’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Racism is real, and it’s destroying lives every day, just as it did in Baldwin’s time—and those who deny it are helping to ensure the damage keeps being done. So, congratulations, Matt, your views on race are just as simplistic, ill-informed, and regressive as your views on gender. Yes, you’re racist, and so is your movie. But at least it’s so badly constructed that a little poking allows the truth to show through.