The DailyWire+ satirical documentary Am I Racist? broke records by making more than $12 million at the box office. It also landed a session in Deadline’s awards-season showcase Contenders Documentary.
In the movie, director Justin Folk films Matt Walsh infiltrating leaders in diversity movements and causing a scene in disguise. Walsh interrupted a Saira Rao dinner lecture decrying white women by dropping stacks of plates.
While Walsh and Folk disagree with the sentiments expressed by activists like Rao, they also spoke with regular Americans in Black and white communities. Walsh said the message is that Americans want to move on from discussing race.
“I think for a lot of people, they feel like, ‘Let’s move on. Let’s not dwell on these things,’” Walsh said. “By the way, that was the message we heard in the film, not just from white people. We went down south to Louisiana — a Black community in Louisiana, New Orleans — and we heard the same thing. They said, ‘Look, I’m not focused on this racism thing. Let’s just live our lives.’”
Folk agreed that people want to move on, adding that many they spoke with entertained discussions of race out of politeness.
“I think people in general, whether it be white men or white women or anybody in between, even minorities, they’re polite,” Folk said. “They don’t want to be called haters. They don’t want to be called bigots. They don’t want to be called racist, and I think they’ve taken advantage of that and pushed an agenda and overstepped with that.”
Asked whether they acknowledged that there has been structural racism in the past, they concurred there has been. Walsh said credit is also due for correcting those systems.
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“We are a country that had slavery at one point,” Walsh said. “That’s a pretty good example. Now, although slavery existed as an institution all across the world for thousands of years, in this country it certainly was a racist institution. Nobody denies that. But, in modern America as it stands today, there are no laws or policies on the books that have the intention of disadvantaging Black people, people that we call, quote unquote, people of color. That doesn’t exist today, and I think you have to allow society to progress.”
Walsh also pushed back on the notion that the legacies of racist policies, such as Black soldiers being excluded from the GI Bill, still have impacts on minorities. He suggested that one wouldn’t have to go back far to find oppression in anyone’s lineage.
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“If my Irish ancestors, for example, were not horrifically discriminated against in the early part of the 20th century, where would my life be today?” Walsh said. “At a certain point you have to decide either we are going to stay dwelling on the past and trying to cash in on things that didn’t even happen to us but happened to people 100 years ago. Or we’re going to just move on and say, ‘Now is today. It’s the present moment, and we now live in a situation in a country where we can take charge of our own lives.’”
Folk agreed with the goal to move forward “and not repeat the same mistakes of the past, which were mistakes made because of race.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
