Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, was tricked into paying money out of her own pocket to pay reparations to a Black producer featured in podcaster Matt Walsh's upcoming documentary, Am I Racist?
Walsh, 38, an undercover man-bun-wearing agent, first paid for the money himself and then persuaded D'Angelo to pay a producer named Ben to make amends for his past sins.
Walsh was interviewing DiAngelo for a documentary project, posing as an activist and harboring anti-racist sentiments, but after finishing most of his questions he called on Benn.
“I'm Ben, a producer on this film, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to speak directly to people of color and to confront our racism and also apologize for the white supremacist system that oppresses Ben,” Walsh began.
DiAngelo, 68, followed suit, saying, “On behalf of myself and my fellow white people, I apologize. The problem is not you, the problem is us. And as long as I stand, I will fight with all my might.”
Walsh then announced that he would pay compensation if Ben would accept it, to which the producer joked that he was “not going to say no”, after which Walsh handed Ben some bills from his wallet.
“It doesn't make up for 400 years of oppression, but it's all I can give,” Walsh said.
Holding the new cash tucked away in his wallet, Ben was fully complicit in the ruse, explaining, “I don't know if this is enough,” but praised Walsh for “trying” and acknowledging “the little progress we've made today.”
Mr. D'Angelo appeared reflective and perplexed as the events unfolded.
“That was really weird,” said a bewildered and nearly speechless D'Angelo, who gasped before forming a response when Walsh asked, “Did you want to pay?”
“I think reparations is kind of a systemic dynamic and approach,” she added, “so I think some people might be uncomfortable with reparations. [that].”
“We're not going to turn down cash,” Ben explained. A solemn Walsh emphasized the need to “allow ourselves to be uncomfortable.” “This is something we can do right now,” he insisted, and asked, “Why not?”
“Sure you can go get some cash,” she managed to refute Walsh and Ben's logic before finally relenting. “If that's what makes you comfortable, that's fine.”
After getting Ben's permission, D'Angelo walked over to his wallet, pulled out approximately $30, and told him, “This is all the cash I have.”
“Thanks,” Ben replied with a smile.
When D'Angelo speaks with Walsh early in the documentary, she briefly asks for information about who he is, saying she “has to be careful.”
Ms. DiAngelo's book, “White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” was published in 2018 and helped launch her reputation as an expert in so-called anti-bias training.
Her New York Times bestselling epic includes some controversial assessments of racism, arguing that “white people who grow up in Western societies are accustomed to a white supremacist worldview because it is the foundation of our society and its institutions.”
At another time she I wrote it in a book“People of color may harbor prejudice and discrimination against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power to transform their prejudice and discrimination into racism. The impact of their prejudices on white people is temporary and situational.”
Ironically, in 2021 D'Angelo won $12,750. Her speaking fee at the University of Wisconsin Diversity Forum was significantly more than the $7,500 paid to Austin Channing Brown, a Black woman keynote speaker.
More recently, DiAngelo faced accusations that he plagiarized writing from a minority scholar in his doctoral thesis, according to a complaint obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Post has reached out to D'Angelo for comment.
Walsh's documentary is set to be released on September 13th and will be the first film The Daily Wire will release in cinemas.
The film is intended to function as a deconstruction of anti-racism activism, similar to the critical examination of gender ideology in the 2022 documentary “What Is a Woman?”
He went undercover, pretending to dig deep into his soul to investigate the movement. Wash's documentary even shows him barging into an expensive Race2Dinner and persuading the liberal white women at the table to raise their glasses in a toast to “being racist.”
