If You Prick Us

Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? is a study of class in America.

Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? is one of the most interesting movies about class in America I’ve ever seen. Technically of course it’s a movie about race, not class. But I’ve often felt that Americans default to talking about race when they want to get at their feelings about class—that uncomfortably old-world idea that your wealth, origins, and mannerisms combine in some indefinable way to identify you as a member of a particular social rank. And what the movie succeeds in arguing, among other things, is that the most profound racial division in contemporary America is not actually a division between races but about races, between classes.

Am I Racist? follows the pattern of What is a Woman?, Walsh’s breakout hit from 2022 in which he went around the country “heightening the contradictions” at the core of mainstream gender theory. The difference this time is that unlike Judith Butler or Andrea Long Chu, who want a woman to be anything and nothing at the same time, purveyors of current racial doctrine have a clear and unambiguous answer to Walsh’s question: yes, as a white man, he is racist.

Posing as an earnest novice on the ladder of divine ascent, Walsh repeatedly solicits and receives confirmation that he is “embedded” in “fundamental” structures of oppression from which he can never extricate himself until, perhaps, America is dismantled. First and foremost the movie serves as a reminder, for those who have forgotten since the gale winds of 2020 died down, that there is a hugely lucrative market for this view and a well-staffed industry of life coaches, media personalities, and business consultants who advance it passionately.

But there’s a sequence right in the middle of the film that reminds the viewer of something even more readily forgotten. Supposedly in an effort to raise his consciousness, Matt journeys into the deep South to visit bikers, mechanics, pastors, and one fellow who gives the impression of being a professional drunk. There’s a risk of condescending to these people by idealizing them, just as there’s a risk of demonizing the misguided fools who fall for high-profile race grift. The movie doesn’t do either, but the contrast it draws between the two groups could not be more stark.

Where the white-shoe consultants Walsh interviews squiggle elaborate dry-erase diagrams to prove that he is locked forever into the oppressor caste, the rural Southerners unanimously offer him plainspoken clarity: we are all children of God. In two separate interviews, a white bar patron and a black immigrant spontaneously volunteer almost identical versions of the same sentiment: “if you cut us, we bleed the same blood.”

From that moment on, Am I Racist? became a totally different movie for me. I’ve often heard, and found it to be true since moving here, that people in today’s South are actually on the whole less racist than the urbane sophisticates of the North. As one black woman explains to Walsh, everyone down here has been living alongside everyone else for generations; even when they hated each other, they knew each other. Now they do what no one except Americans have ever thought possible, what the framers of the Constitution hoped against hope to make possible on some distant day: they just don’t think about race that much.

Astonishingly, given everything we’ve been through, I believe them when they say that. I also believe Robin DiAngelo, the mega-celebrity of the white guilt movement, when she says that it is literally impossible for her to go grocery shopping without noticing who in the store is black. DiAngelo’s is the marquee interview of the movie, and the biggest revelation it unearths is that she is utterly sincere. She’s not trying to profit off gullible dupes: she genuinely cannot get skin color out of her head. The worst that can be said about her—and it’s pretty bad—is that she has avoided coming to terms with this obsession as a character flaw by generalizing it into a Ph.D. thesis.

The movie puts plenty of true hustlers on display, and its smartest editorial choice is to show how much each of them demanded for their appearance ($50,000 for one woman who seems to have made her whole life about dining out on the time her kids might have gotten snubbed by a cartoon character). But this racket is only sustainable because of white people like Robin DiAngelo, many of whom I know and even love—sincere, tender-hearted people who just cannot believe we could ever move past racial guilt because they, personally, cannot. They punish themselves for this failure of imagination by paying thousands of dollars to be carped at by Saira Rao. One might think at this point they’ve suffered enough.

Am I Racist? demonstrates what a privilege it is to fixate on race in 21st-century America. Held up against the dirt-poor Southerners at the movie’s core, the fretful white postulants and the profiteers who walk them through rituals of humiliation appear as an entitled leisure class, their elaborate structural theory a neurotic product of overheated brains with too few real problems to worry about. The idea that you or I or America might be genetically doomed to hatred is the archetypal example of what Rob Henderson would call a luxury belief.

Americans on the whole may not realize what a historically bizarre situation this is. The norm in the vast majority of human societies is for ethnic minutiae to consume the attention of high and low alike, making race one major determiner of class. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Shakespeare’s Shylock had to ask because his Jewish faith was also a racial fact, setting him definitively below the Christian citizenry. In America, the people who ask that same question are outcasts of every color whose most unfashionable idea is that race doesn’t matter.

For this to have become a low-status rather than a high-status conviction is an extreme oddity. It suggests that American class divisions are more nearly defined by what you think about race than by what race you are. The common man’s assumption here, as in no other place on earth, is that children of God bleed the same blood. The courtier’s watchword, by contrast, is “racism forever.” Between the two, it’s an easy choice where to stand.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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