When my father, Shelby Steele, author, columnist, and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, began publishing his essays on race in the late 1980s, my teenage self was often by his side when he gave speeches. After each speech, the same scene unfolded as a crowd of people gathered to the side of the podium, each wanting a word.
I remember one man in particular who hurried to reach my father first. He wore a corduroy sports coat with leather elbow patches. He said, “Dr. Steele, that was truly a remarkable speech. I want to thank you for saying the things you said up there.”
My father thanked him, and the man lowered his voice and leaned in as if to share a conspiracy. “You know I can’t say those things.” My father leaned back and said, “Why not?” The man smiled, as if to say, come on, “I am a White man.”
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My father had spent the past hour arguing for moving beyond the stifling limits of racial identity to the far greater possibilities within the American identity. The man agreed with every word, yet he could not bring himself to say them. He did not do so out of modesty but out of fear. To escape the charge of racism, he reduced himself to his race. The fear had done to him exactly what racism does. So, he stayed silent and let others like my father speak for him.
No charge in American life carries more destructive power than the accusation of racism. Once charged with this modern-day Scarlet Letter, how do you disprove it? Do you trot out your Black friends and have them testify to your innocence? Or do you look into your accuser’s eyes and say the words that no one believes: I am not a racist? You cannot disprove it — the accusation is the verdict.
This terror has reigned since the civil rights era, when the nation admitted to centuries of racial horror and rightfully vowed never to repeat it. Americans wanted to be better.
For many, this terror came to overtake even the biblical sins. A man could be forgiven for greed, a lie, or even adultery, but not racism. Those sins of the Bible had a way back through confession, repentance, and forgiveness. Racism had none. There was no amount of confession that absolved it. There was only endless penance.
Some Americans went further. They believed that their nation’s founding principles were stained with racism to the point that they no longer held any legitimacy or role in their redemptive efforts. They embraced the Marxism of liberation ideology, dividing us into White oppressors and oppressed people of color. And when they came to understand the full power of this White guilt terror, they molded it to their advantage.
Anyone who stood in their way also stood in the path of justice. The charge was racism if you were White. It was race traitor if you were Black.
At first, this terror enforced our behavior from the outside, and then it began to seep into our minds.
On the nightly news, in newspaper headlines, or before our own eyes — we saw people or companies shamed as racist for not being diverse enough, for a word taken out of context, or for a donation to the wrong cause. Careers ended. Offenders were socially ostracized.
We saw all of this, and we began to police our own speech and thoughts out of fear of saying the wrong thing. We even learned how to apologetically preface anything we said that could be misconstrued. We told ourselves we were being decent. We were afraid.
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My father defines this terror as White guilt. I have heard many Whites declare, “I have no White guilt.” Of course they don’t.
One cannot feel actual guilt for what one has not done. White guilt is the collective guilt imposed on the White race for the sins of America’s past. It is the terror of being seen as carrying on that racist legacy.
Real guilt ends. You make amends, and you are free. White guilt never ends, because there is nothing to atone for, only the burden of skin color to answer for.
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The history this terror rests on is real. My own family has ancestors who were born as the property of White men. They worked their entire lives without pay, and their lives held such little value that they could be beaten or even killed.
Even Christianity was distorted to support the idea that a White man had more value than a Black man. When the convulsions of the 1960s destroyed the moral legitimacy of the racial order of White supremacy, Whites suddenly found their lie of racial supremacy exposed, and they were without moral authority. An entire race condemned as guilty needed a way to prove it was innocent.
What eventually became known as the diversity industry showed no mercy with this power. It understood that this terror could be monetized.
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It was around 1970 that the word diversity began to gain prominence, and it became the societal measure of innocence. Its logic was unforgiving: the more people of color an institution had, the more innocent it became. Absolution was the point.
But absolution is a mirage. No one arrives. Paul Rossi, then a math teacher at Grace Church School in New York City, was relieved of his teaching duties after publicly challenging the school’s approach to race and later left the school.
Rossi’s troubles began when he questioned his school’s conditioning of students to view their whiteness as a perpetual apology.
In my documentary, “White Guilt,” he describes a training session where the administration segregated the entire school into two racial groups. He was placed in the White room. The facilitator warned that they might feel some White feelings, and Paul asked, “What is a White feeling?”
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The trainings, he came to understand, were designed never to arrive. They endlessly expand what counts as racist and push justice beyond reach, into the future, into the keeping of experts. It was never meant to arrive. Widening the charge was how it sustained and grew its power.
Each flareup, from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown, escalated the accusation that America is systemically racist. It reached its height during the summer of George Floyd, when a single video led to the reorganization of America and the West in corporate boardrooms, classrooms, and the arts. And still it was not enough. No amount of penance can satisfy an accuser whose power depends on your guilt. The formula only needed a new oppressed group and a new oppressor.
It is no wonder this terror has spread beyond race. Other protected classes saw the power to be had and recognized the formula that White guilt had established. The constant in this formula was the White oppressor. The variable was the oppressed, a role any approved minority could take up.
Yasser Arafat, the PLO, and other Palestinian organizations understood this early, courting Black revolutionaries as early as Arafat’s visit with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers in Algiers in the 1970s.
When the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, happened in Israel, the decades of groundwork paid off. The White guilt-Black power symbiosis became a White guilt-Palestinian one, and the slaughter of Jews was reframed as resistance before the bodies were counted.
This terror of White guilt has grown into the evil of our time. Far too many of us have surrendered to it out of convenience, and our institutions have grown weaker, our free speech has been constrained, and our children have become less educated.
Too often, we ask, “Who let it happen?” as if it were done to us. But too many Whites allowed themselves to be reduced to color in hopes that the charge of racism would pass over their heads. And some activists saw in it an easy source of power, defending racial discrimination in the name of justice.
The White guilt terror has grown into a great evil of today because we let it. The man who did it is not hard to find. He felt the fear, saw his Whiteness, and chose silence, and he is still there, smiling in a corduroy jacket.
He never needed permission to say what he believed.
He needed courage. So do we.
