Robin DiAngelo is a grifter who has made millions off a hateful book titled White Fragility. She is one of the left-wing “anti-racists” who were interviewed by Matt Walsh in the Daily Wire film Am I Racist?, which opened yesterday and which I reviewed at the link.
Walsh’s interview of DiAngelo is one of the film’s highlights. She has no idea who Walsh is, and he introduces himself as “Matt.” You can’t be too careful these days, she says. The high point of the interview is when they talk about reparations, which DiAngelo favors. It happens that a member of the film crew named Ben is black. Walsh calls him on camera and gives him $20 (I’m going from memory here) as his own personal reparations. He then asks DiAngelo whether she will do the same.
By this point, DiAngelo is visibly uncomfortable, but her ideology gives her no easy out. So she digs in her purse, finds $30, and gives the $30 to Ben. DiAngelo (like the other “anti-racists” who agreed to appear in the documentary) got paid–in her case, $15,000 for what couldn’t have been more than an hour or so of her time. Talk about price gouging!
During each of the interviews of “anti-racists,” the amount that the production company paid the interviewee is shown on the upper left of the screen. When DiAngelo gives Ben–who manages to keep a straight face–her $30, the amount on the screen ticks down to $14,970. It is a hilarious moment.
When word of DiAngelo’s humiliation began to spread, she deleted her social media accounts. Then she issued a statement about her experience.
In a note on her website titled “About That Film,” the “White Fragility” author says the “sequence of events” that ended with her taking $30 out of her purse to pay reparations to a black producer on set was “unsettling,” and that she figured out she “had been played” before the trailer for the film was released in July.
“After reviewing the sequence of events and discussing it with colleagues, I realized that they had lied about their agenda and I had been played,” DiAngelo says.
But what was the lie? DiAngelo doesn’t say. In fact, there was no lie: DiAngelo was asked whether she would appear in a documentary on anti-racism, and she said she would do so for $15,000. What she means, apparently, is that she is too fragile to be interviewed by anyone but a fellow left-winger.
But it wasn’t until after seeing the trailer for the film, which opens in theaters across the country this Friday, that she realized the interview was not “meant to support the anti-racist cause.”
So what? If an interviewer asks her questions, do her answers depend on the philosophical bent of the interviewer? Shouldn’t she be able, in any case, to make a positive case for her ideology?
Walsh, sporting a man bun, convinces DiAngelo she had a “powerful opportunity” to display her commitment to anti-racism by giving his black producer, Ben, money from her purse.
In her statement, DiAngelo claims she detected the wig and other things that “felt off,” but thought that Walsh “seemed earnest.”
That is one of Matt’s talents.
“When I arrived for the interview, a few things felt off,” DiAngelo writes. “The grips would not make eye contact with me and the interviewer, who was introduced as ‘Matt,’ appeared to be wearing an ill-fitting wig. Matt presented himself as someone new to antiracist work and seemed earnest, and his questions did not come across as adversarial.”
They weren’t. They were fair questions, and the fact that DiAngelo couldn’t answer them without exposing herself as a fool and a grifter isn’t Walsh’s fault. That said, DiAngelo must be pretty dense, if it wasn’t until she saw the trailer for “Am I Racist?” that she realized her appearance in the documentary had been less than triumphant.
The DiAngelo segment is obviously a highlight, but there is much more to enjoy in “Am I Racist?” But entertainment is only one reason to see the film. The “anti-racism” movement, which is itself horrifically racist, has done grave damage to our country. You should support this expose of a corrupt and venal movement by buying tickets.
STEVE adds: The left and the media are crying foul over Matt Walsh’s “false pretenses” in his interview of DiAngelo, while lots of people are noting that this is the very same technique of Sasha Baron Cohen in both his Da Ali G Show and the Borat films, without anyone harrumphing about his deceptions. Of course his targets were “deplorables,” so it’s okay with the left.
I have some first-hand experience of this technique myself. Back in 2007 an environmental filmmaker named Randy Olson, a marine biologist by training, asked me to be interviewed for a documentary he was making on climate change. He seemed like a straight shooter on the phone (and actually I came to like him, despite. . .) Unlike DiAngelo, I wasn’t paid a dime.
One thing you always do for documentaries is sign a legal release form, usually before taping. That gives the filmmaker the right to use anything you say.
About halfway through the taping, one of the camera crew busts in saying, “We need a quick break to change out the memory cassettes.” Unknown to me was that a separate camera was still recording, and one of the other crew members said something like, “Man—I’ve listened to these mainstream climate scientists and seem like they’re all full of crap” (or a similar term). The obvious hope here was that climate skeptics might drop their guard and say something gamey that could be used to embarrass them in the film. And sure enough these fake “outtakes” from Pat Michaels, Fred Singer (both passed away since then), Mark Marano and others who appeared ended up in the final film.
Except me. I wasn’t included, because I didn’t drop my guard, and whatever I said wasn’t useable for their purpose.
You can see the trailer to “Sizzle” here; it includes a very briefest appearance from me. As someone once counseled, always run your own camera—a GoPro will do—whenever you do an interview with an untrusted media outlet, so you have a complete record from which to expose “context” editing tricks and other deceptions:
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