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.
Exit question: How did Robin DiAngelo get away with it for so long? “This is the irony of the white shame that is so à la mode in cultural circles: it hides a new species of white pride, where educated whites fancy themselves as morally superior to both unlearned white people and pained black people. The former they must enlighten, the latter they must repair.”
Related: The ‘conservative Michael Moore’ taking on the ‘crazy’ diversity industry. “Matt Walsh has been described as the Right-wing Michael Moore, a satirical filmmaker who invites people to walk into a trap of their own construction.”