“Seems like a lose-lose.”

If the films of Michael Moore provided the model for Justin Folk and Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman?, the pair have added Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary Borat as an additional influence on Am I Racist? Except where Borat made ridiculous requests of normal people, Walsh makes normal requests of ridiculous people. It begins early on when he trips up a PhD “anti-racist scholar” (Kate Slater) with what he calls the “Moana” problem: his daughter claims Moana is her favorite Disney princess (which Slater thinks is awesome), and that she is excited to dress up as her for Halloween (cultural appropriation, and therefore bad). Racist if you do, racist if you don’t. The rest of the film unfolds in a similar fashion, allowing neo-racist charlatans to expose their own irrationality, self-righteousness, hubris, greed, and lack of integrity of their own accord, grasping and floundering in front of the camera to make sure they say the right bits of jargon and don’t commit any microaggressions.

Much less sincere than the previous film—seemingly because the ramifications of the race-obsessed aspect of the zeitgeist are much less severe than those of the gender-obsessed one—it posits Walsh as a confused white man on a journey to “do the work” of confronting his own whiteness, his racism, and his privilege, which, as a matter of course, means he needs a man bun wig and skinny jeans. Once again, through whatever sleight of hand, Walsh manages to get himself seated across from people who must know his goal is to expose the contradictions, intolerances, and lack of substance in their protean ideologies. (Ibram X. Kendi, who is especially bad at not only defending his ideas, but simply stating them without contradicting himself, is regrettably present only in a series of intertitle quotes.) In this context, his deadpan humor is plays well because he knows exactly what buttons to push to keep dialing up the absurdity while keeping a straight face. One of the funniest of these interviews is with well-known anti-white author Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility), whom he convinces to pay cash reparations to his black friend Benyam Capel. DiAngelo is foolish and myopic, but much less caustic and condescending than her fellow DEI con artists.

Amidst the conversations with pseudo-academic grifters (whose exorbitant interview fees are shown at the beginning of their discussions) and sidewalk interviews with common sense folks living out Dr. King’s dream of a colorblind society, there are numerous staged social experiments, like walking around D.C. with a petition to rename the Washington Monument after George Floyd and paint it black or hosting a paid workshop as a DEI-certified expert where the final step to recovery is literal self-flagellation. Somehow he got a gig as a server at one of those ludicrous Race2Dinner events where Regina Jackson and Saira Rao berate subservient white women who think paying rich colored women to tell them they are racists will cleanse them of their sins. Jackson makes a Freudian slip when Walsh asks everyone who is a racist to raise their glass and she is the first and fiercest to respond with a raised glass. He also gets Wilfred Reilly, author of Hate Crime Hoax, to use statistics to undermine narratives promulgated by the media to stoke racial tensions which segues into a silly recreation of the ad hoc narrative of Jussie Smollet’s assault in which he paid two guys to fake a hate crime against him.

I won’t say I wasn’t entertained by Am I Racist?, but unlike What Is a Woman?, which included some genuine discussions and led to prolonged rumination, this one mostly features Walsh being willfully obtuse, slyly mocking and generally acting like a belligerent troll where before he at least sought respectful dialogue with those he disagreed with. He gets easy laughs but not much else. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have some quack to tell me that I am racist and that there is no way for me to ever not be racist, and that she doesn’t feel safe in a room of affluent white people paying her outrageous sums to teach them how not to be racists.