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Am I Racist? Is My Grandma?
My Grandma Ruby (Mother’s side) was a racist.
I remember her teaching me “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo,” and it wasn’t a “tiger” that caught us by the toe. More seriously, I remember her talking about Los Angeles being overrun by “black people” (again, another word was used), and suggesting they were all criminals.
Even so, my primary memories about my grandma don’t center on her views on race. I remember her teaching my brother and me how to play canasta when we stayed overnight. And the chicken she fried and the biscuits she baked. And her teaching us Psalm 23, the Shepherd’s Prayer that she recited every night.
In Matt Walsh’s new film Am I Racist?, he meets quite a few people who wouldn’t care that my grandma did Jack LaLanne exercises or that she had a succession of Black Labs all named “Lady,” plus a line of parakeets all named “Peppy.” To the people like the ones Walsh meets in the film, all that would mean is that she was a racist — as all white people are.
This is the second documentary for Walsh. The first, What is a Woman?, was only available through streaming on the Daily Wire. This was his first theatrical release. It debuted at #3 at last weekend’s box office. Much of the film’s financial success comes from the fact that it is genuinely funny. A combination of documentary and comedy, Walsh explores the lucrative DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) industry. The film is made in the fashion of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, with Walsh going into disguise to put people in quite awkward situations. To Walsh’s credit, he pays most of the DEI “experts,” who look rather foolish in the film.
Walsh pulls some very funny stunts along the way, such as circulating a petition to get the George Washington Monument renamed for George Floyd. (It would then be painted black, of course.) He goes to a biker bar to teach the inhabitants to “decentralize their whiteness.” And he convinces Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, to give reparations to his black producer, Ben Capel ($30 out of the $15,000 she was paid to be interviewed).
But there are moments in the film that aren’t at all funny. Walsh attends a DEI seminar led by an instructor who teaches students that, though she used to be a Christian, she had to put away concepts such as “patience” and “kindness,” as these had no place in the work of anti-racists. Another woman featured hosts an anti-racist dinner and calls the United States “sh*t.” Another woman says the only two things “white civilization” has given the world are “buying and stealing.” (Hate to break this to you Shakespeare and Beethoven, but…)
I found the most unsettling moment at the end of the film. Walsh teaches a workshop (“Doing the Work Workshop”) and expounds on the importance of lecturing others, especially family members, about racism. His producer, Ben, then wheels out Walsh’s “Uncle Jack” in a chair. He rants at his “uncle” (an actor) about inappropriate jokes. He offers the students a chance to talk to his “uncle,” a quite defenseless old man. A couple of the women swear at him. “F*** you,” they say.
I realized that if my grandma had been in that seat, they would have happily cursed at her as well.
One of the worst things about the DEI movement—along with the greed, ignorance and guile—is the way they reduce people to one quality. For example, the only really important thing about white people is that they are racist. The only really important thing about black people is that they are victims.
Walsh does a good job of reminding us that there is more to all of us. (Which these people would understand if they had ever tasted my Grandma’s fried chicken.)
Published in General
You don’t have to like anything you don’t like. But it’s wise to tolerate things you don’t understand. That’s why we have law.
We lived a few blocks from the commercial center of our tiny enclave, inside NYC, and there were two “candy” stores (an outdated term; they were general stores of candy, tobacco, newspapers and magazine, stationery, and plastic car models.) One of them was sad, beginning to end. The owner was a drunk, always getting mixed up in get-rich-quick schemes. In fact, his name was Artie Quick. The store was half-lit, half-stocked, and slovenly. But Artie was a Catholic.
The other store was clean, the place was well stocked, the prices fair, and it was always busy. But the owner was Jewish, something that made my grandmother dubious about it. She called it “the Jewish candy store”. My mother just hated that. “Ma, you sound ignorant when you say that. Don’t say it around the kids. i don’t like having them hear that”.
Yeah, Grandma was prejudiced, all right, and even her daughter disliked it. She didn’t want it passed on to us.
But Grandma never said anything about blacks. She rarely encountered them. Do you know who she really bore a grudge against? Protestants.
The Big question is: Davidbatig, why don’t you comment and post more often? I fully realize that if you do, you’ll probably disagree with me. But that’s fine. Hell, everyone else does.
No we don’t!
Who knew Robin DiAngelo was this fragile?
My beloved and I went to the movie today. Terrificly fun flick. For anyone who sat through DEI training it was a cathartic moment. How did David Walsh keep a straight face when he suggested more DEI training for mascots.
Where we are headed by our Revolutionary Left.
It’s Uncle Frank, not Uncle Jack.
That struggle session against Uncle Frank at the end of the film was the most disturbing part. Matt Walsh in an interview said that they expected no one to go along with it, and that the seminar participants would walk out. That would be the end of the scene and the Matt Walsh DEI character would draw some conclusions from it. Instead they were surprised that the participants piled on Uncle Frank. Walsh is great on the spot and has a hilarious line as Uncle Frank is wheeled away.
I recall watching an episode of the old Mission Impossible TV series with my grandmother, my mother, and some of her siblings. Greg Morris, the team’s resident tech expert (every movie that inserts a now near-obligatory black computer/tech guru character is an homage to this groundbreaking role) was doing something clever with wires and my grandmother said “My, that little darky sure is handy.” Her daughters were horrified. I thought I would die laughing.
There was no malice in her. She was raised a wealthy Irish Catholic girl whose daddy owned a factory of some kind. She attended the same toney school as Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She married a Southerner from Georgia through some mutual contact at Georgetown U. (The school colors are blue and gray because of the geographic diversity–Jesuit schools in the south often sent their best northward since before the Civil War.)
She was atypically animated when discussing Endicott Peabody coming south to lecture Southerners about their racism because as a Boston Brahmin, he was guilty of overt bias against blacks and Catholic ethnics which she remembered firsthand.
As an aside, she used to often take out the Parcheesi game boards when I was eight or nine and rode my bike over for a visit. I dutifully agreed to a game but did not really like it much. As an adult, at her funeral I mentioned to my aunt that she seemed to like that game. She laughed and said she said Granny did not but assumed that her grandson did which is why she offered to play. So all those times we were just sincerely but mistakenly indulging the other’s love of the game.
My non-Jewish grandfather hated Jews. Which was awkward, being as we were Jewish. But his rather mundane dislike of Jews may actually have been one of his better qualities.
Sorry. If it’s any consolation I rather like the Jews.
Your comment just triggered a minor epiphany in me. It’s probably obvious to most people, but I’d never thought of it in such simple terms before.
With the recent surge of antisemitism, the question Why do people hate Jews? keeps coming up. It suddenly occurs to me that people hate God, and if you hate God, how could you not hate His chosen people?
Uh yeah.
Please watch Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. it talks about Jew hatred in there.
One thing the film never gets into is where the plausibility of the DEI/racism stuff comes from. It does a good job of showing the ultimate silliness of the DEI racket, but no one would pay any attention to DEI in the first place unless there was some reason to cede it an initial credence.
The DEI folks are quite explicit where that plausibility comes from. Minorities, especially blacks, are “underrepresented” in upper class positions like doctors, engineers and lawyers. Absent affirmative action programs, very few would be at elite universities. They are also “overrepresented” in poverty and police statistics. They get arrested a lot more than whites proportional to their percentage in the population.
Why is this so? If not to racism, then what? The most obvious alternative is also virtually unthinkable in our culture – the so-called “race realist” position that posits that biological differences in races are more than skin deep and extend to things like average IQ. The film carefully avoids going anywhere near there, which is a good thing as it would condemn the film to fringe status and it would never make it into theaters.
But it would have been interesting if one of the DEI experts had pushed back on Walsh and put him on the spot like he put them on the spot: “Tell me Matt, why is it that there are very few black physicists, doctors or billionaires?”
Here’s another:
Culture. Successful people make different choices than unsuccessful people. Those choices are heavily influenced by our values, which are transmitted through our culture.
Successful CULTURES also behave differently than unsuccessful CULTURES.
That’s been the Republican answer for the last 50 years. The problem with it is that it just pushes the question back a step to why some groups have successful cultures and others don’t, and why some unsuccessful groups persist in a culture of manifest failure.
More to the present point, given the history of slavery and racial discrimination in this country, whites are very reluctant to assign blame to minorities for the state of their situation. White guilt and all that. Blaming black culture for the state of blacks indirectly blames blacks themselves, which is not an option. Really the only option you have if you aren’t going to assign some responsibility for their situation to blacks themselves is racism, individual or systemic.
It always surprises conservatives that the reply to a demonstration of cultural benefits and effectiveness is often a demand that the successful beliefs and practices should be terminated so as to achieve equity.
My late aunt could probably be called “racist” in some sense of the word in that upon seeing a black person in a room, my aunt assumed that person was in a low role, the food server, the janitor, etc. She just couldn’t imagine a black person in a high-level position. She lived in the north. But she had no animosity toward black people, in general, or especially individually. She and their favorite waitress at their country club (an older black woman) would converse on and on about their respective children and grandchildren.
Reducing people to one characteristic, whether by the KKK or by DEI (both obsessed with race), is a recipe for lousy human interaction, and a lousy society.
So at least it was something over which the person had (theoretical) control, as somebody had made a decision to be a Protestant. :)
Or at least to remain Protestant, because their family was.
We had two small churches on our block–Immanuel Lutheran and Epworth Methodist. They both had beautiful-sounding bells. The neighborhood had lots of Protestant churches, but most of the original congregants had moved on and up, replaced by Irish and Italian Catholics. Now, half of us are gone, too, replaced by Greeks and Russians.
In my wife’s old neighborhood a mile away, the Jewish families have been gradually replaced by Asian ones.
This is a peaceful and normal process.
After centuries of Catholics being utterly inhospitable to Jews, that was no longer case where I grew up. In some ways we had plenty in common with them: most of us came to the US around 1870-1915. None of us came over on the Mayflower. All of our grandparents had accents.
So why was Grandma so suspicious of Protestants? She emigrated from Scotland in 1927, so the ancient feuds and religious wars of the British Isles were her background.
Thomas Sowell must certainly have an article or chapter on this subject.
That’s probably true. I can separate black culture from individual people, but many people can’t, or at least won’t.
Why do cultures align with ethnicity to some extent? Because people tend to reproduce with the same people with whom they’re also passing on a culture.
The persistence of a diversity of cultural types, not all of which are equally successful in the current version of the world by the criteria most of us use, may be a feature rather than a bug. In version x.22 of the world some of those currently unsuccessful traits may be needed to help the species survive. And some of them may not. You need a little time for them all to sort themselves out.
What are some of the currently unsuccessful traits that would lead to success in some other world? The Smithsonian a few years ago produced a display on the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture”, among which were “delayed gratification”, “emphasis on scientific method”, and “work before play.” Is there some version of the world where it is better to ignore the scientific method and refuse to delay gratification?