Unlike Matt Walsh, I am not a card-carrying DEI expert. Also unlike Walsh, I’ve racked up the sort of street cred that should make me one—but according to the logic of the DEI movement that Walsh so mercilessly skewers, I am not and never will be the authority to whom HR departments turn.
Let me contextualize my perspective before sharing my take on the film. In addition to being a multilingual author, Fulbright scholar, Steinbeck fellow, MacDowell fellow, globetrotter, and entrepreneur with degrees in English literature, applied linguistics, and journalism, I’m nearly all the things that DEI advocates fetishize: an immigrant, a person of color, an indigenous person, a woman, a person with a disability, and a formerly homeless (Houseless? Unhoused? Temporarily Roof-Challenged?) person. True, I don’t identify as queer, but I am an orphan, and on top of that, I have abnormally small nails on my pinky toes, credentials that one hopes would count for something.
Imagine my surprise to discover, shortly after starting to think of myself as an advocate, that my MA in journalism, my intersectional identities, and the anatomy of my digitus minimus all carried equal weight with the people who control the resources, manage the institutions, and set the agenda of the DEI Movement.
I’m grateful to the individual who, despite running an advocacy organization, respected me enough to tell me to my face what others only said behind closed doors: that I would never get a chance to share the knowledge, strategies, and principles that got me out of homelessness and into an American university on a prestigious scholarship with others who might make good use of these tools.
“Our job is to advocate for people like you,” my informant informed me. “If you start advocating for yourself, then we’ll all be out of our jobs.”
Was this just another racist white person afraid of a job-stealing immigrant? Or did these words point to something else? Something deeper?
Had The Daily Wire funded me instead of Walsh, I might’ve titled my political mockumentary Am I Crazy? This question haunted me during my stint in the DEI space as relentlessly as the question Am I Racist? haunts so many white people, even after I’d gotten wise to the psychological and economic engines driving the hypocrisy and quietly slipped on my undercover journalist cap beneath the brim of my DEI advocate sombrero.
Most white people know perfectly well that they’re not racist, and I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t crazy, but being surrounded by people whose words and deeds continuously and unanimously amplify a certain premise, even if it’s obviously false, will make you question your reality from time to time. Why was it, a small voice in the back of my mind would pipe up now and then, that so many of these advocates and allies, who professed to support me and “people like me” publicly, were so quick to insult, belittle, and betray me one-on-one? Perhaps these conflicts owed to misunderstandings, I reasoned. And perhaps I was the common denominator. I was new to the US, after all, still learning the social conventions and norms, so maybe something about my personality, or my way of thinking, or my style of communication was provoking these conflicts.
Even as I wrestled with doubts, I kept digging, and the deeper I dug, the more I learned. The DEI industry operates on one simple principle, I gradually realized: that the wretched of the earth—including brown, blind, indigenous, immigrant women like me, of course, but generally excluding entrepreneurs and Fulbright scholars—need middle-class professionals of middling intelligence to protect, defend, and elevate them. We wouldn’t survive for five minutes without these virtuous guardian angels to wipe our noses and change our diapers. We depend on their patronage, live off their hand-outs, and regard them as our earthly gods.
Everybody knows that we’re incapable of scrappy feats such as surviving and escaping from homelessness, educating ourselves, starting businesses, writing books that do more than rehash various Wikipedia pages, questioning the reigning creeds, and working out that the very people who claim to help us are actually profiting off our misery behind our backs. If one of us were to step out of line in this way, she would set an example that others might follow. She would have to be silenced. Too many people have invested too much money to step back and let anyone threaten the industry’s bottom line, as Am I Racist? unequivocally reveals, and on top of that, too many people have invested too much emotional energy in the belief that they are Good because they help Those Less Fortunate Than Themselves to allow the veil to drop and recognize themselves for who and what they really are.
When I took my seat in the theater and listened as Walsh entangled analogs of the advocates and allies whom I knew in their own lies, the doubts that had haunted me were finally put to rest. If I ever get the chance, I would like to personally thank him and his team for lifting that weight off my shoulders by exposing the most esteemed DEI advocates in the world for the con artists and grifters that I knew them to be.
Does the fact that he resoundingly affirmed this brown woman’s controversial but evidence-based perspective make Matt Walsh a racist?
Not particularly.
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