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Film Review: Am I Racist?
Yesterday I went to go see one of the, uh, more controversial movies of the year. So a plot summary, some general thoughts, and then speculation about the culture war implications.
The story of the movie
It begins with Matt trying to learn about America's systemic racism and be a good ally. I don't know that anyone will actually believe this part, but it's the plot justification. So, he meets with some anti-racism experts and it does not go well. After he's kicked out of a anti-racism workshop when his real identity is discovered, he decides to disguise himself as a hipster, inspired by the fashion choices of his interview subjects for What is a Woman?. He becomes a certified DEI expert on the internet and begins attending interviews and workshops to see what the anti-racists have to say, then attempts to spread the word, still disguised as a hipster. This does not go well either, some stoners call him a racist and then a biker bar decides to hold an intervention about how he needs to respect black people more. So, he decides to sit his white ass down and listen to black people in some dirt poor majority black podunk town in the deep south. A collection of pastors, grannies, and small business owners- all of them very dark black- advise him to put down the critical race theory and pick up the bible.
Instead of taking this advice, he returns to found his own DEI training company. https://www.dotheworkworkshop.com/ is clearly satire, but the film plays it as completely serious, and he recruits the attendees for his first anti-racism workshop on craigslist. They have clearly been told that this is a genuine anti-racist DEI exercise and that the documentary they appear in is for genuine anti-racist DEI educational purposes, and they start walking out as they realize it isn't- some when they have to label themselves on a racist scale, the same one in the link, some when he brings in his racist uncle in a wheelchair for participants to berate over an insensitive joke from twenty years ago, and the rest who don't show signs of mental illness when he brings out the whips for self-flagellation. It is one of the participant's eagerness to actually do the last part which leads him to break character and have an onscreen crisis of faith, which he goes through as a guest appearance as a diversity expert on one of those local news programs my dad always called 'Gay Morning (insert locality)'.
The film ends with a monologue about treating people equally, and the virtue of colorblindness.
General Thoughts
The film subtitled meetings with diversity experts with the fee they charged to appear. While some of them seemed to genuinely be believers, many of them came off as just wanting the money and not caring very much at all about what they were saying. Indeed, a few of them looked like they knew they were appearing in a hostile documentary and were more than happy to do so for the right price. Only one of them- a combative campus activist- seemed ready to make personal sacrifices for the sake of her ideology. I would consider her a bit unhinged, but she has my respect as a true believer. Other than in that one case, the point of anti-racism being a money making industry not very concerned with the people it's notionally helping was made very effectively. In What is a Woman? interviewees got offended at hostile questioning all the time; not here. The mother who made national news about her black children being snubbed by sesame street in particular gave off a strong vibe of 'well I guess I have to stick to this story to collect tens of thousands of dollars, so there we are'.
As you might expect, DEI activists did not come off well. Several of them seemed unhinged, many of them seemed cynically lying. The first anti-racist workshop host(her fee- $30k) mentioned that she felt unsafe emotionally around so many white people to open the workshop. I can, for myself, remember doing some work for my day job at a 'racial healing center' hosting an 'antiracist yoga class'. I felt uncomfortable in the sense of just clearly not belonging, but also a bit creeped out at the sense of fear directed at me, not with the suspicion that I would actually do anything, but just fear because? I also remember wondering how these people were all free at 10 am on a Tuesday. This idea of suspicion of white people doing?, where ? was clearly not any actual action- like they weren't worried about the KKK showing up here or even a white person getting angry and subjecting them to verbal abuse- but just something that upsets the vibes/makes things ritually impure, it's unclear.
The people who more conventionally pay these thousands-of-dollars fees for DEI experts come off as mostly gullible and unwilling to make personal changes or sacrifices. Lots of them are portrayed as very concerned about first world problems. And they would rather spend thousands of dollars for woke Cathari to absolve their guilt than do anything about it. I don't think the intent was to point to anti-racism as an analogue to gnosticism, if for no other reason than the normies not knowing what gnosticism is. But the parallels are really there! A lot of this stuff is knowledge that will be revealed as the initiate becomes purified and perfected from an outside world which is evil and can't be fixed, and can only be guided by the pure ones. There's a scene early in the movie where Matt visits an anti-racist bookstore and is told a book, titled after the N-word(the cover is shown but the title is never pronounced), is one he's not ready for and he should come back later on in his anti-racist journey. But to the Cathari in the film, dropping $$ is the best evidence of separation from the demiurge.
This movie was hilarious, but it did not seem to be a super-reliable source of information. Evidence of selective footage use, careful tricksiness to get damning soundbites, etc was very there. Particular the Robin DiAngelo scene, she came off as perhaps being pressured into doing and agreeing with things she wasn't a fan of- but the interviewees for What is a Woman? would have just kicked him out and forfeited their $15k.
Culture war
First off, I think this really cements that the right has figured out to hit the left by portraying their fringes as ridiculous. No hyperventilating about 1984 or they're coming for our guns- more 'this is what they actually believe(cast in the least charitable possible light)- decide for yourself if it's stupid'. I think this film did an ok job of that, but a much better job of casting DEI experts as being experts in anti-raci$m. It probably shows a broader shift, as well, towards the use of right-wing humor as a political strategy; the normies will watch things which entertain them.
Second, right wing talking points are fairly mainstream. It's OK to be a normiecon in the public sphere; I saw this in a normal theater that was showing Betelgeuse and Alien: Romulus down the hallway. It doesn't seem to have been supercontroversial that Am I Racist? was getting released in normal theaters. I didn't see any protesters- and I went to see it in a not-white part of Dallas- and the ticket guy didn't care.
Third, Matt Walsh is clearly influential among normiecons. This film had a lot more money behind it than What is a Woman?, and the people backing normiecon advocacy are obviously willing to put themselves behind Walsh. This is important because Matt Walsh seems willing to at least try to push the overton window rightwards; it's possible that this is an early indicator of the partisan lines hardening tribally.
I don't "trust" Matt Walsh. He's exactly the kind of controlled opposition boomercon who would lean into DR3 fail takes and decry the left for its racism and prejudice.
Do you think we're going to get to a world where elected officials say "HBD is true actually and that's why blacks underperform". I really don't think so. I'm not even sure we should, although it would be better if people could understand it without necessarily saying it.
The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.
And Matt Walsh is incredibly brave. It takes a lot of guts to make a movie like this. I trust him not to cuck a lot more than I would someone who needs good standing from the elites such as Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney.
Hell, the guy went on Joe Rogan and said straight up that marriage is between a man and a woman and is for the purpose of procreation. He sticks to his guns.
As I’ve pointed out a million times before, it was not a good Schelling point, because it was inherently unstable. It required a massive, society-wide coordinated effort to pretend not to notice something that’s obvious. And more specifically, it required black people to participate in that coordination, and to sacrifice a huge amount psychologically as a result. This is a culture with multigenerational stories of (what they consider) grievous mistreatment that has never been made right, and which (as they see it) is directly responsible for the profound differences in achievement and prestige between themselves and other racial groups.
In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.
A plurality of blacks were willing to temporarily accept this new paradigm because they earnestly believed that, given a procedurally (if not materially) level playing field, blacks would inevitably start to move toward parity with whites. Thirty years later that absolutely has not happened, and shows no signs of even getting closer to happening. Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie. HBD-aware whites disagree with blacks about what exactly that lie was, but neither side fails to recognize that it was indeed a lie.
Racial grievances have more to do with the fanning of racial grievances than with actual grievances. Or, put it another way, blacks seemed happier about their status in the 1990s than they do today, even though today they benefit from much greater affirmative action.
People are bound to notice that blacks do worse in society. Here is the menu of choices for how to deal with this problem. I think there's a clear winner.
In an ideal world we'd be at #2. Scientists and policy makers would understand that #1 is the truth but it's not super polite to talk about it.
Don't want #2? Well, I hope you've enjoyed the last 10 years of racial grievance politics. Because the next stop is Brazil then South Africa.
No, In an ideal world we would be at a point where racial Difference in IQ are acknowledged and an attempt is made to "help out" the underperformers. (Affirmative action without the pretense of "systemic racism" and without scapegoating whitey for failure to achieve).
Further the affirmative action would be scaled by "personal" IQ so you would be able to help out white trash/trailer park dwellers at the same time.
When encountering HBD for the first time, this sort of thing was also my conclusion on what a good, fair system would work like. From what I can tell, one of the most prominent mainstream faces of HBD, Charles Murray, largely follows the same reasoning, leading to him supporting UBI (which isn't IQ-based affirmative action, but is meant to alleviate some of the same problems, by guaranteeing that no matter how bad you are at making money due to any reason, including low intelligence, you have some guaranteed income you can depend on for survival).
This is one reason why I find the argument that HBD needs to be suppressed, lest people use it to justify racism. Believing that belonging to a race that happens to have average high IQ or even having high IQ oneself entitles one to greater rights and privileges than those who don't happen to belong to such a race or don't happen to have high IQ is something separate and distinct from believing that different races have different average IQ, and the latter doesn't cause the former.
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