Movie review: "Am I Racist?"

The Borat-style guerilla documentary "Am I Racist?" shows conservative commentator Matt Walsh attending a DEI  (Diversity, Equity sand Inclusion) training program then going undercover as a pony-tailed woke progressive to actually become a DEI "expert" and ultimately trainer himself.

It does a nice job exposing the inanity of DEI and how racist the anti-racists are. Beyond that, he shows how the top DEI speakers, like "White Fragility" author Robin DiAngelo, get caught up in their own stupidity when asked sincere-sounding questions. 

While there are laugh-out loud moments, it was a bit too long for my tastes - I think it would have been a good one-hour film.

One of the best parts of the film was halfway through. Walsh, after hearing numerous "experts" claim that white people are irredeemably racist and must feel guilty forever, not to mention that America itself is a terrible country that should be taken down, then interviews both the stereotypical racists and their victims. He visits a biker bar with muscular Trump posters on the wall and asks the people about their whiteness and how racist they are, and they all say that they don't give a damn about skin color when they interact with people. He then goes to a poor southern predominantly Black town and asks residents if they feel that they are victims of racism, and they agree they are not - and they love America.

By the end of the movie, Walsh becomes a DEI trainer himself, making up absurd exercises for people to eliminate their "whiteness" and even being a guest on local TV shows to discuss his class. He makes thousands of dollars charging people to feel white guilt. (To their credit, several people leave the class when he goes over the top, but most stay at least until the "self-flagellation" exercise.) 

While it is easy to laugh at the real DEI training sessions Walsh films, I was troubled by thinking how Jews would be and probably are  treated in these sessions. It is impossible for the sessions to not be hostile towards Jews, because they consider Jews to be privileged whites who cannot possibly imagine what it is like to be discriminated against, when antisemitism predates racism by, oh, about 3,000 years. 

I couldn't help wondering whether I would face consequences from my employer if I would challenge this false narrative of the lives of my ancestors, my Holocaust survivor parents or myself. The "microaggressions," not to mention real aggression, that the DEI classes complain about are part and parcel of the daily lives of visible Jews. Wearing a yarmulka outside New York City and several heavily Jewish towns makes one the object of curiosity at the workplace, at the market and on the street. I did grow up with people throwing pennies at me or stealing my yarmulka. A sukkah I built in college was found destroyed when I returned on the intermediate days of the holiday. (It didn't even occur to me to call the police. No one talked about  "hate crimes" in those days.). Today, Hasidic Jews have to tolerate "oppressed" youths stealing their hats or knocking them to the ground and beating them, for fun. 

Jews only became considered white at roughly the time that whiteness became considered oppressive. 

So for me, the movie was not as enjoyable as it should have been because, to Jews, DEI is not just something to be mocked but something dangerous. It is used to justify modern antisemitism. 

I don't blame Walsh for not bringing up this topic, because that is not the point of the  movie, but it is a little harder to laugh when I can easily see how these sessions would target Jews as the most guilty of white, colonialist, oppressive people.

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