“Am I racist?”

Before you answer that question, center yourself. Close your eyes. Ground your body in your chair. Take several deep breaths. Really feel yourself in the space. Give $30,000 to a grifter with a PhD in “Sustainability” who will tell you that, no matter what you do, you can’t disavow your whiteness and are doomed to a life as a racist in a racist country that “should be burned to the ground.” Open your eyes. Take another deep breath. Ready?

Matt Walsh’s documentary “Am I Racist?” asks the titular question to a fairly diverse array of Americans, from leathery bikers in the Deep South, to bucket-hat-clad Deadheads in a New Orleans alleyway, to shrewish yuppies around a Washington D.C. dinner table. And fittingly, Walsh gets a fairly diverse array of answers. Walsh, the Daily Wire’s firebrand -in-chief, is probably most known for his controversial 2022 documentary “What is a Woman?” in which he attempted to answer the transgender question. (Incidentally, look how that turned out.)

Walsh, like a right-wing Borat, sneaks into DEI workshops, tries to get petitions signed to rename the Washington Monument to the “George Floyd Monument,” and snags interviews with big names among the anti-racist crowd, like Robin DiAngelo, the (white) author of the bestseller “White Fragility” and the (also white) anti-racist educator Kate Slater, inventor of the Anti-Racist Roadmap. Walsh’s interview with Slater, early in the film, preps the audience for the next hour-plus of the rhetorical word salad that is emblematic of the anti-racist grift economy.

“It’s about doing the work,” Slater scolds when Walsh asks what he can do as a white man to disown his racism, and then says that he needs to be the one to call out his “racist uncle” at Thanksgiving dinners.

“Doing the work” is one of the film’s most pervasive phrases, along with “systemic,” “privilege,” and “reparations.” The “work” in question, as it turns out, can run the gamut. It can require attendance in a workshop hosted by “grief chaplain and anti-racist educator” Breeshia Wade, where affluent white people pay an exorbitant amount of money ($30,000 for the whole experience) to sit in a circle, tell each other their pronouns, and then have Wade tell them that she feels unsafe in a room full of… affluent white people.

In this segment, Walsh, clad in the requisite N95 Covid mask, tries to point out the ridiculousness of the whole affair, only to be asked to leave the workshop and go into the “crying room.” (That’s the whole other room, separate from the main circle room, in case Wade thinks the aforementioned affluent whites need to go express their emotions separately from the rest of the group.) And then, faster than you can say “Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kente cloth” the rest of the group sees through Walsh’s disguise, and he is half-heartedly asked to leave by one of the group’s least effete men.

“Doing the work” can also look like attending a Race2Dinner event, in which a group of schlubby liberal white women host a dinner for “educators” Saira Rao and Regina Jackson, who, for the bargain price of $5,000, will explain that: Republicans are Nazis, there is no extricating yourself from the rest of the “bad white people,” and that America, racist to its very bones, is not a country worth saving. Walsh plays a bumbling waiter at one of these events, and in between dropping plates and spilling water glasses, interjects with his own calculated platitudes about white privilege and doing the work. It’s one of the funnier scenes in the movie, and it’s very Borat-esque (real word) in its execution.

Walsh also “does the work” by completing a diversity and inclusion training seminar online, which allows him to tote around a laminated card branding him a “DEI Expert,” which he waves around on the street and during interviews with his subjects. “I’m not an expert,” he giggles during the aforementioned Race2Dinner, “but I’m not, not, an expert.”

To get some different perspectives, Walsh visits a biker bar and an autobody shop, where the blue-collar answers are pretty much the same. No one has any idea what “learned racism” or “white privilege” is, and the white Hell’s Angels drinking at the bar and the black mechanic taking a break outside his shop both agree – treat people right, regardless of skin color, and they’ll treat you right. The mechanic, an aged immigrant from British Guiana, laughs off Walsh’s offer to lend him a copy of DiAngelo’s book. “I don’t read that,” he says. “Only book I read is the Bible.” One of the bikers, a heavily tattooed white guy with a “Vaginatarian” t-shirt, sneers at Walsh’s DEI certificate, and argues that to try and disown your own race is a fool’s errand. “We all bleed the same, man,” he says, laughing.

The interview Walsh manages to get with champion grifter and DiAngelo herself is the highlight of the whole documentary. At the risk of spoiling the most uncomfortable 30 seconds, Walsh gets her to wrestle with the concept of reparations, and roleplays as a person of color in her office, prompting DiAngelo to remark, “That was really weird.”

Walsh also discusses the alleged (now debunked) hate crime against Jussie Smollett, in a segment on hate crime hoaxes, which reminded me how goddamned funny the line “This is MAGA country!” was. How did anyone ever buy into the most obvious hoax in history? Was there something in the water in 2019? Walsh’s discussion with Wilfred Reilly, author of “Hate Crime Hoax,” lends some real statistics to the documentary, explaining that of about 20 million crimes reported annually in the United States, only about 6,000 of them are what could be classified as “hate crimes.”

Some of the gags Walsh does do fall flat, or run too long. The climax of the film – Walsh’s own “Do The Work Workshop” – in which a gaggle of Californians answer a Craigslist ad and are treated to Walsh berating his racist uncle, Slater-style, for a joke asking “What’s the difference between a Mexican and a picnic table?” kind of seems like he’s trying a little too hard. But the central thesis of the film, that anti-racist educators are running a self-fulfilling con on liberal whites, is pretty solid, and is supported by Walsh’s stronger moments as an interviewer.

I think this movie is coming out at an ideal time, and the box office numbers seem to support that. Even at 11:30 on a Sunday morning when I saw this with some friends, the theater was half full of Republican boomers guffawing at Walsh’s antics, and cheering when a Thomas Sowell quote marked the end of the movie. God bless the comments from the movie theater peanut gallery (a term I just learned might have racist origins. Apparently, I too need to do the work.)

It’s a silly film, more reminiscent of “Jackass” than of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But it swings for the fences, and succeeds in unmasking a lot of the stupidity and hypocrisy inherent in the anti-racist education grift. The DiAngelos and Wades of the world preach out of one side of their mouth, while they rake in the dollars hand over fist. (It’s worth mentioning that DiAngelo is under fire for plagiarizing some passages in her doctoral thesis from, in the highest of ironies, BIPOC researchers.) There is always going to be a market for self-flagellating affluent left-wing whites, and it’s almost hard to fault these people for trying to make a buck exploiting that market. What’s more, it’s even harder to feel bad for the terminally soft-spoken low-T guys and overweight dyed-hair cat ladies with money to burn on a drum circle devoted to “unpacking your white privilege.”

But it’s very, very cathartic to point and laugh, which is what Matt Walsh and company do to great effect in “Am I Racist?”

It might be worth asking yourself the question I posed at the beginning of this column. I’d be willing to bet the answer is something like “Yes? No? Maybe? I don’t know, can you repeat the question?’”

And if you still aren’t sure, I’ll be hosting a workshop this November. Reservations start at $1,000 a head, and it’s BYOB.

Jacob Hersh is studying law and “doing the work.” He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer. He plans on using the proceeds from this review to buy a sixer of Shiner Bock and a bottle of Jim Beam. He hopes you got the Minor Threat reference in the column title.