The Fraud of White Guilt

I'm not feeling it. Honestly I don't even drag my ass into temple to atone on Yom Kipper. Perhaps if I was Catholic?

The Fraud of White Guilt

‘The terror of being seen as a racist’ has nothing to do with helping black people.

By William McGurn, WSJ

Oct. 5, 2026 4:48 pm ET

When you hear people say we need a conversation about race, you know instantly what they mean. They want an accusation: that a corrupt America remains unwilling to confront racial injustice and inequality.

That is what makes Shelby Steele so bracing. He believes a national conversation on race needs to be had. But Mr. Steele believes an honest conversation would acknowledge the real progress America has made since the days when schools and water fountains were segregated.

Above all, he believes that while some people may hold bigoted beliefs, racism is no longer the main barrier to black achievement. To the contrary, he sees affirmative action and dependency as creating a culture that assumes African-Americans can’t compete and hobbles them by disregarding merit.

In his younger days, he says, he came from the streets of Chicago’s South Side “full of black rage” over the inequality he saw.
Today Mr. Steele is an author, a professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the featured narrator in a new documentary called “White Guilt,” which he produced with his son, Eli. The film will be released Oct. 6 and can be streamed at whiteguiltfilm.com or from Prime Video, Google Play or Apple TV.

“My father first wrote about white guilt in the 1980s, and it has only grown, from our classrooms to our corporations to the campuses that cheered Hamas after October 7,” Eli Steele says. “I made this film because white guilt is the force behind so much of what is transforming and breaking America, and almost no one will name it. This film names this evil, and I hope it will give Americans the courage to embrace the freedom necessary to defeat it.”

The elder Mr. Steele has an interracial marriage, his parents had an interracial marriage, and Eli has an interracial marriage. In 2006, Shelby told the American Enterprise Institute that having a white mother and black father has been a “profound advantage” because it demystified race.

The father-and-son film features Shelby walking through the desert landscape of Pinnacle Peak, Ariz. As he walks, he muses about where he thinks America went wrong on race, punctuated with interjections by similar-minded thinkers. These notables include playwright David Mamet, Wai Wah Chin of the Manhattan Institute and Journal columnist Jason Riley.

The first thing Mr. Steele notes is that his film probably isn’t what you think it is. The film isn’t really about guilt at all, least of all guilt about slavery or other depredations against blacks.

White guilt, Mr. Steele says, is the “terror of being seen as a racist.” And expiating white guilt turns out to have nothing to do with changes that would improve life for those whom whites deem oppressed. Instead it’s about using claims of victimhood for power. White guilt has even been grafted onto the conflict in Gaza, where Palestinians have become the slaves and Israelis the evil American slave owners.

A personal turning point for Mr. Steele came in 1970. He and his wife traveled to North Africa to see members of the Black Panthers, who were living in exile in Algiers. Mr. Steele says he was “starstruck” when he met Donald Cox, an early Black Panther leader. In the film Mr. Steele recalls, “I was ready to talk revolution with these men making history. But the most striking thing about Field Marshal DC was his homesickness. . . . They wanted to know if Motown had put out some new records.”

All of which eventually brought Mr. Steele around to the genius of the American founding. White guilt and black power, he realized, are flip sides of the same coin. Learning that white guilt was a prescription for failure helped him appreciate the authentically radical nature of individual freedom and the American promise.

“The one truth I’ve known my entire life [is that] the principles of Western civilization are not tribal,” Mr. Steele says. “They are universal. I’ve had my turn in America. People have always asked me, ‘Shelby, what’s the answer to this evil of white guilt?’

“My answer is always the same: Courage. Be an American. Believe in the founding principles of America. Most of all, believe in freedom itself. It only finds expression in the individual. Nobody gave me my freedom. No one can. Freedom is within you. Seize it—or don’t.”