Matt Walsh’s Hilarious New Film Asks: ‘Am I Racist?’

His documentary exposes the DEI industry by letting practitioners discredit themselves

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"An assessment of the DEI literature, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2012, was titled, “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work.” According to the article, one study of “829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace’ ” and that millions of dollars were spent annually on “training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes—and the diversity of the organizations—remained the same.”

Sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev reached a similar conclusion in a 2018 academic paper. They noted that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.” According to the authors, “two-thirds of human resources specialists report that diversity training does not have positive effects, and several field studies have found no effect of diversity training on women’s or minorities’ careers or on managerial diversity.”

Even diversity officials in higher education have had second thoughts about how DEI policies are implemented. Tabia Lee, a DEI administrator who in 2023 was fired from her position at De Anza Community College in California after less than two years on the job, explained what DEI initiatives in the academy amounted to in practice.

“On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion and antiracism,” she later wrote. “My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions.”"

"today’s diversity experts want all of us, white and nonwhite, to fixate on our ethnic identities, to obsess over accidents of race and gender and sexual orientation morning, noon and night. For them, human relations boil down to nothing more than group power structures—you are either an oppressor or a victim. They argue, as Ibram X. Kendi has, that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” and the “only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”"