Just a bit over a month before we release White Guilt on October 6. Word of mouth is already spreading and we’re booking key podcasts and shows. Exciting times.

As most of you know, I’m pretty much a one-man-show over here as we ready the film for release. One of the things I had to tackle was the website, which is not my forte at all, but I’m now happy to say that I’ve gotten it to the point where it is somewhat presentable.

Everything now lives here: whiteguiltfilm.com.

A few things:

PRE-ORDER
You can pre-order the DVD and/or Blu-ray today. We will ship by October 2nd. We work with limited quantity so your order now ensures you’ll be part of the first batch. Also, to mark the 20th anniversary of White Guilt, the book, we are offering 100 copies of the paperback book that have been signed by Shelby Steele. We expect them to go fast

SHELBY’S ESSAYS
Before this film came along, there were the essays, the op-eds, and the book. I thought it would be a good idea to devote a page to Shelby’s essays throughout the decades. There were so many essays that I had to leave many out. I did not have the time to digitize the ones in print only from the 1980s and 1990s. Even now I’m remembering that I left out more recent op-eds on Trayvon Martin and other cultural flashpoints. Still, I think what is assembled gives one a good insight into how white guilt has evolved over the years.

One last thing. I have gotten emails from some of you who wish to donate in order to help with the film’s release. I had pushed that off since I was not sure of how the film was going to be released and now we have a firm vision and plan. It is our goal to have an even greater impact on the culture than even our last film, What Killed Michael Brown? If you would like to donate to the film release efforts, you can make a tax-deductible donation through the Shelby Steele Foundation.

If you see any issues with website or have any suggestions, please reply to this email. We appreciate your support as always.

All my best and have a great Labor Day Weekend,

Eli

Yes, White Guilt finally has a release date: October 6. It will stream on Amazon, Apple, and Google Play — barring cancellation attempts.

I have never found it easy to talk about my own films, especially when I’ve just finished one. I live inside them for so long and to step outside is like blinking in the sun. So I am grateful when someone else tells the story well. Christian Toto at Hollywood in Toto has published the exclusive on what he described as the twenty-year journey behind our White Guilt documentary.

Releasing a film is not an easy business, but it is one of the most important skills required of an independent filmmaker. When I graduated from college in the late 1990s and started writing screenplays, the film world operated under the model that you trained to be the best at one aspect of film production and you stuck with it. That mentality still survives in certain parts of Hollywood, but the digital revolution of the 2000s brought massive change by putting high quality and affordable technology in everybody’s hands. It was a marvel going from the 35mm Panavision camera that we used to shoot “What’s Bugging Seth,” a 12 film festival winner, to the $2,500 Canon 5D MK II that I used shoot How Jack Became Black. This shift in technology meant that it was now more affordable than ever to make a quality film, but there was never enough money to hire a full production crew. I had to become an all-in-one filmmaker, I had to learn distribution.

One thing I have had to learn is to trust my instinct. I announced last March that White Guilt would be coming out by May and the film was well received in its first three preview screenings. But something felt off so I pulled it. I’m glad I did because the delay allowed us to sharpen the film’s theme.

I had no way of knowing, but this delay was fortuitous. Over the last several months, we’ve had many white guilt culture war flareups, from the senseless shooting of Jaden Pierre in Queens, to the Southern Poverty Law Center fraud, to Henry Nowak’s Death in the UK, and to the Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge University. Even the release of Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy stirred up debate of whether empathy or white guilt fear or a combination of both was driving our culture’s decline.

The result is that many others have begun to speak about white guilt.

Katharine Birbalsingh hit it off with her incredible speech on white guilt and if you have not heard it, please click on the image below:

Just yesterday, John Papola dropped an entire episode of Dad Saves America on white guilt: “The Jason Arday Scandal Is White Guilt on Steroids.” Papola and I have moved in the same circles but I haven’t had the chance to meet him. I admire him as a filmmaker and even submitted an idea to him for a libertarian-theme short over ten years ago. He responded favorably, but it never went anywhere. Here in his podcast, he features the White Guilt trailer and Shelby Steele at length and calls him one of the most important voices in our discourse. The video is worth a watch and I saved it below to start on my father’s section:

And there is Coleman Hughes. On his podcast, he made the case that Arday became a hero of the left because white guilt is a virus that leads its victims to prioritize their own need for catharsis over the public’s need for truth. It is an interesting take on white guilt and here is the video for your viewing:

All of these incidents and intellectual minds converging around white guilt. My father never took pleasure in the phrase since it defines a profoundly evil force within our society. (You will see why in the film.) He saw the power of white guilt in the 1960s, and no one has developed the psychological and sociological terrain of white guilt as profoundly as he has. Where is a society headed when it collectively assigns permanent guilt to one race for the sins of its fathers?

The one thing I admire about my father is that he took the blows for warning about white guilt when there was no reward for it. There was only a cost. This was in the 1990s and the 2000s, which were brutal, isolating times in the culture wars. CNN and the New York Times and the like iced him out completely. Universities stopped inviting him. If the left could not debate his ideas, they would isolate him to the margins. His books were dropped from bookstores and libraries.

During those years, I remember the conversations he would have with Thomas Sowell over white guilt at our home. Sowell brought the facts in his rapid fire fashion, and my father brought the psychological insights. Sowell suffered no fools, and he knew that my father’s white guilt told a profound truth about our times. I believe it was at one of these dinners that I asked my father why he stuck with white guilt for so long, especially when many people, conservatives included, never took the time to read or understand the idea and told him, “I have no white guilt,” mistaking it for a personal feeling. He just looked at me and said, “Truth.”

I know my father is modest to a fault, but he is happy to see white guilt gaining traction these days. He always says you can never defeat an evil until you name it.

Releasing this film is the next step. I will also release 10 or 12 essays on white guilt that I’ve been working on over the past year to shed more light on this phenomenon. More on that later. I see this film as the spark, not the fire, that will help many see where we stand today. We did that with What Killed Michael Brown? and we hope to do it again with "White Guilt.”

And I’ll let Katharine have the last word:

Enjoy your weekend,

Eli

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation.

The lie never happened.

After six months of nightly riots in the streets and confrontations with law enforcement while the media salivated at the free spectacle, Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice found that there was no evidence that Brown was in the process of surrendering with his hands up. Dorian Johnson’s own account fell apart under scrutiny. The DOJ found he had been hiding behind a vehicle for significant portions of the incident, and concluded it was unclear whether he could even have accurately seen the shooting that he had described to the world. Officer Darren Wilson was also cleared when Holder said there was no evidence of racism.

However, the Obama-Holder White House could not let the opportunity of Ferguson go flat, especially the charge of racism. When Holder traveled to Ferguson he said that he was doing so as the Attorney General of the United States and as a “black man.” The message was sent that the nation’s top lawman was surveying Ferguson through the racial lens, and before any facts were in. After the first report found no racism, the same Justice Department issued a second report that used the tool of disparate impact to claim that the Ferguson police department was guilty of pulling over a disproportionate number of blacks. We detail how the true answer was more complex than this simplistic picture in What Killed Michael Brown? To Holder it didn’t matter how the charge of racism landed as long as it landed on Ferguson somewhere and the report that Ferguson was systemically racist gave new wings to the Hands Up Don’t Shoot lie.

So the lie continues to this day, long after the last fires were put out in Ferguson. But the lie did something far worse than travel. It continues to exist, and by existing it hovers above us as a threat of sorts. I felt this lie directly when I went to Ferguson four years after the shooting in 2018 to begin filming What Killed Michael Brown? People called me and my father brave for daring to go into the town in search of the answer to the question that my father asks in the film, “Why was the truth so hard to see here?” They used the word brave because they knew that the lie had become the correct narrative in America. To question it was to be on the wrong side of history and to be charged with racism. So this lie was not some mere inanimate slogan, but a conditioning force that warned us against questioning the poetic truth that America was a white supremacist and systemically racist nation.

The lie survived because the white guilt machine needs it to survive. What is the Left without the accusation that America is a characterologically evil nation, to borrow another one of my father’s phrases?

That is why many schools and institutions of higher learning continue to teach the lie in the classrooms. I will never forget driving by Pomona College around 2020, six years after the shooting, and seeing the New York Times article about the shooting plastered to the side of the arts building. All the words in the article were blacked out except for “unarmed black teenager” and “white police officer.” Many in academia embraced this lie. Tommy Curry, formerly of Texas A&M and now the Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh, wrote that Michael Brown was executed in broad daylight with his hands up. NYU professor Nicholas Mirzoeff had to conclude that Officer Wilson was justified but chose to title his article with the lie: “The Murder of Michael Brown.” Another NYU course called Before Ferguson taught that policing itself was an instrument of capitalism, racism and state violence. A Georgetown professor named Marcia Chatelain created the Ferguson Syllabus, a crowdsourced set of readings to bring Brown’s death into classrooms across the nation. My research shows no mention that Officer Wilson was found to be justified in his shooting of Michael Brown. This same research led me to an organization called Facing History and Ourselves which supplies lessons to high school teachers and they push the Hands Up Don’t Shoot lie. In their footnotes, they admit their claim is false.

In the United States Congress, several of its members have been advocates of this lie for years. I could name them but that is not the point here. The point is that these lawmakers who are elected to represent us have chosen to push the lie that Brown was executed by a racist cop. The cynical hypocrisy here is that they are going against the very lie that their own government — an Obama led government — discredited with evidence.

In the St. Louis area the lie has granted enormous power to the local politicians and nonprofits. In a new City Journal piece by Jordan Duecker he documented how two hundred million dollars from the federal pandemic relief fund had been routed to local organizations tied to the racial equity agenda. (If you have seen What Killed Michael Brown? then you saw how the aftermath of the shooting birthed many social justice organizations.) At least a hundred and twenty six million dollars of those funds went to other programs pushing the same agenda. The kicker of the article was the Forward Through Ferguson’s 2025 Racial Equity Summit, a nonprofit that grew directly out of the Ferguson Commission. Its executive director told the donors in a boldface move: I need you to stay guilty. Yep. She didn’t even hide it. It was quite the astonishing claim. She wasn’t asking for money on the grounds of betterment or justice but guilt.

Six years after Ferguson, the lie exploded with incredible new strength with the death of George Floyd. By then Americans had been undergoing a conditioning that raised their racial consciousness. Over and over, they heard white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy and they had been told not to question blacks or other minorities and to always put their victimization before facts. That summer of George Floyd changed America profoundly in so many ways and we’re still living in its shadow.

What many did not understand, when October 7 exploded, was that it was not an isolated event in the Middle East. It was part of the lie but on the international scale. Locals in Ferguson and Minneapolis told me that one of the striking things they had witnessed on their streets was the involvement of Palestinian activists. Why were they there? Part of the answer lies in the liberation ideology which believes in uniting all the oppressed people of color against the evil Western empire. That is why in 2021, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, released a statement on Floyd’s death. We included the clip in the upcoming White Guilt documentary and he says, “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians.” The man who had no objection to putting innocent Palestinians in the line of fire to bolster the lies of genocide against Israel was exploiting Floyd’s death for his own aim. He understood something about the West that most of us did not or refused to understand. The lie that began on Canfield Drive, that the body of color is always the victim of the white executioner, had become the lens that many in the West had willingly or unconsciously been conditioned to view the world with.

Mere hours after the West was flooded with videos of beheadings, snatched babies, mangled bodies, and executions the carriers of this lie began pushing their narrative. Israel was so evil that these “freedom fighters” had no choice but to slaughter. Their celebrations in the streets of Gaza with dead bodies of Israelis was not bloodlust but liberation. They knew which bodies were innocent and not and it had nothing to do with truth.

This lie still lives twelve years later. Imagine how many children and students who are taught that Michael Brown was executed in cold blood. There are at least six other documentaries out there that support this lie to some degree. That is why my father and I felt so compelled to make What Killed Michael Brown? We called out the lie and we told the story of the true witnesses who came forward, despite “snitches get stitches” spray painted around town, and told the truth. We must carry on the truth of these witnesses and never back down in the face of the lie.

My best,

Eli

On Wednesday, August 12, FAIR will screen 15 Days, directed by Natalya Murakhver. This will be the last film of their summer series. Since its release 15 Days has received accolades from across the country and has been screened nationwide. It is also the first film to tackle head on the real story of America’s pandemic school closures, especially how the promise of “15 days to flatten the curve” stretched into the longest shutdowns in the developed world. Many of the children were affected negatively in various ways while the bureaucrats often put their own interests before. What Natalya uncovered in 15 Days was not the sanitized narrative of, “we did the best we could with the information we had.” It was something far more ideological and manipulative and the film shows with evidence.

Click here to sign up for the screening and Q & A.

I’ve never invited anyone else to write on my Substack before but I thought it would be great for Natalya to introduce the film to you. Please follow her on her substack: Restore Childhood. Below is her in her own words.

Have a great weekend,

Eli

I’m honored to be writing in this space. Most of you know Eli as the filmmaker. I know him as the person who taught me how to become one.

Eli and I met in 2022. I had just announced on social media that I wanted to make a film about the pandemic school closures. My goal was simple and also ambitious. I wanted to preserve the stories and make sure no one ever forgot the truth, because I knew the teachers’ unions would rewrite it. A mother in Los Angeles saw the post (on what was then Twitter) and told me that if I was serious, I needed to reach out to Eli Steele. I had never watched a single one of his documentaries. I had no idea who he was.

To my surprise and delight, Eli was willing to help right away. He got on Zoom with me. He told me which equipment to buy. He walked me through every step and helped me pick the right crew as I needed it. He connected me with the incredible Hawk Jensen, who joined us as a producer and later cut the film in post, and who turned it into the sharp investigation it became. I owe Eli for his mentorship, for his friendship, and for his films.

Watching What Killed Michael Brown? and How Jack Became Black, and then talking with Eli constantly over the past four years, changed me. My understanding of what we owe one another as members of a society is not what it was. I am a formerly progressive Democrat Jew. I used to believe Jews had a rightful place inside DEI. Eli always said no. It has to be a meritocracy. I agreed with him in principle, especially as a Soviet immigrant, but part of me still hoped my people could somehow be part of the system.

I don’t hope that anymore. I understand now how rotten it all is. It ignores human nature. It rewards entitlement and handouts and kills the drive to build anything great. It produces a stifled, dead society. It’s the kind of place we left behind when my family came here from the Soviet Union in 1977 with almost nothing. Eli helped me see that clearly, and I’m grateful.

So it means a great deal that 15 DAYS is screening at FAIR’s retrospective of Eli’s work as the final film. To be produced by him, to have his name attached to this film, means everything, because Eli Steele stands for integrity, honesty, and substance.

15 DAYS is the only film actually telling the story of what happened during the school closures, and it tells it two ways. First through the interviews. We spoke with nearly 60 people, starting in 2022 as schools were reopening and continuing for about three years. Not every interview made the final cut, of course, and Eli helped me understand we needed to tell a story not just show a series of talking heads. Second, the film looks at what the unions and the politicians were doing while children sat locked out of their classrooms, losing their futures.

We went to the primary sources wherever we could. We interviewed children and parents in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and California. We went all over the country because we needed to show how universal this was. Even the wealthiest families were not spared. The Burns children in Boston, who later moved to Austin, had real means, and still could not all attend remote school at the same time because they didn’t have the bandwidth for it. Some children mattered more than others. That’s how it felt, and the film shows why.

We show Bam Morgan, a Queens high school student who was hoping for a football scholarship. The closures took that from him. He gained weight, lost his shot, and had to repeat his senior year. The scholarship never came. He went on to community college, did tremendously well, and is now headed to Howard University.

We interviewed Jay Bhattacharya just before the Twitter Files broke, which gave us access we would have lost within weeks. We were on the scene, triaging these stories as they happened. That’s why they’re so raw. People tell me the film brings back their own pain, and that they feel they have to sit in it to come out the other side stronger, informed, and finally able to process what was done to them.

I’m proud to present this film. I’m honored to have Eli as part of it and to have it under his wing.

I hope you’ll come see what we’re doing at Restore Childhood. We build toolkits and resources to educate and empower parents, and we tell the stories of what it takes to be great in America right now, whether that’s the doctors who spoke out during COVID or public school mom Maud Maron in my recent Palladium Pictures film Uncancellable. Maud stood up to her school board when they forced DEI down everyone’s throats and ran for Manhattan District Attorney against Alvin Bragg.

Bravery and greatness are right in front of us if we know where to look. Finding it and showing it is how I understand my job, as an American, a filmmaker, a mother, and a citizen.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 12 for the FAIR screening. Register here.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to Eli for including me. If you’d like to follow my work, you’ll find it at the Restore Childhood Substack, where 15 DAYS streams in full alongside everything else we’re building. It’s also on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play.

A journalist wrote an email to a professor at Cambridge University and asked if his doctoral thesis contained sentences that were not his own, and this question resulted in the UK’s Metropolitan Police investigating the journalist.

That is the sentence right there. Everything within this sentence happened and there is no logic to it. The illogic is the point in this age of white guilt, one that reveals the next floor in our society’s decline.

The targeted professor is Jason Arday who was celebrated in 2023 as Cambridge’s youngest black professor ever. He specialized in the sociology of race, inequality, and education and is known — ironically — for his study on how institutions fail black people.

The Times Higher Education journalist, Jack Grove, investigated a claim that Arday’s doctoral thesis contained sentences that were not his own. The inquiry was simple: did you write these words or did someone else? This line of questioning is race-neutral.

It is important to keep in mind that, as of now, the facts of this case remain contested. Cambridge insists that they cleared Arday of any wrongdoing. Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday’s doctorate was granted, says that the thesis stands. Arday himself denies all plagiarism accusations, including the allegation that his 2015 PhD thesis contains over 180 passages identical or near-identical to the 2009 thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers of Brunel University. However, my interest in this story goes beyond the plagiarism question to what happened when a journalist asked a legitimate question.

When Arday received the email from Grove in September of 2025 he was given the customary courtesy to respond. Grove did not get an answer. He got a letter from Carter-Ruck, a law firm retained by Arday, and they told Grove that his inquiry may have been racially motivated. The Times Higher Education killed the story shortly afterward.

This is white guilt. The charge of racism was leverage. The response was to retreat from that stigma out of fear.

Then, in November, the Metropolitan Police received a complaint of harassment against Grove who was never told who made it. The police proceeded to investigate Grove for four months and not once did they interview him. When the police finally called Grove, they told him to cease the harassment and leave the professor alone because his mental health was being affected.

The journalist had asked the professor if he plagiarized sentences and why did the police get involved? The short answer is because the journalist’s inquiry had been converted by the law firm’s letter into an act of harassment on racial grounds. Harassment was the charge here. In a world that even Kafka would have had trouble imagining, Grove stood accused of being a racist.

My father, Shelby Steele, has spent much of his life describing white guilt and the genius of this power is that it never has to argue. It only charges racism. It makes no offer to review and pick apart the evidence — did Carter-Ruck do that? — and it makes the examination of the evidence itself the crime. Arday’s black skin in this culture of victimization gave him the power to flip the script on Grove and the accused became the accuser. And the terror of being seen as a racist strikes fear in the newly accused. Grove had committed the sin of asking the question of a black man who reached not for merit but the charge of racism in response.

It is important to note that Grove and Arday did not act by themselves in a vacuum, but in a world heavily conditioned by white guilt. Cambridge raced to the defense of Arday and called the questions a “vile campaign.” The British police did not interview Grove, likely because his testimony would have complicated the ongoing narrative. These white guilt institutions chose the false innocence that came with the narrative, and they did so at the cost of the university abandoning its pledge to academic excellence and the police abandoning its pledge to justice. They would not challenge a man because his skin is black

This flareup did not happen overnight or come out of nowhere. Arday has been a protected man for a long time. Long before the plagiarism question, Arday’s public profile had reached and even surpassed the kind of status reserved for legends like John Henry and his hammer. He claimed he didn’t learn to read and write until he was 18 years old. He claimed that he had raised 5.5 million pounds for more than seventy charities. He said he ran six hundred miles in six days. To that, he added thirty marathons in thirty five days and claimed he ran the last nine on a broken leg. Also, he claimed that he was on a professional soccer team. In a video that I watched, he claimed that he was in the television series Seven Up, an excellent documentary that followed their subjects every seven years. The problem was that the subjects were born in 1957, three decades before Arday. When these stories came under scrutiny, Arday began to change his answers.

Personally, I couldn’t care less about Arday here. If anything, he’s a kind of a victim here, though one that bears tremendous responsibility for his actions. I say victim, because his stories and the work that he did went without rigorous examination that one would expect of a top school like Cambridge. They did so because Arday is black and to check their diversity poster boy’s story would run the risk of them being charged with racism. The whites wanted their innocence however false it was.

And it is these whites who claim to care about “black excellence,” and that is the cruelty here. When Cambridge shielded Arday from the kind of scrutiny that nearly all professors face, they did not defend the remaining integrity of academia. Instead they only confirmed the ugly stereotypes that is whispered about black scholars — that they cannot do the work and that the bar must be lowered. This is the price that blacks who chose the path of merit must pay for the cowardice of the weak who play the black power—white guilt coin. Arday will likely keep his position and social justice will be served. Grove asked a question, and paid for it. So did every black scholar along with their like-minded peers who earned their place the hard way.

My best,

Eli

Boy George released a new single on X called “We Will Dance Again” and I listened to it. I had never really heard him sing before. My sister listened to him all the time in the 1980s but music was just a garble of notes to my deaf ears. So it was a new experience for me to hit play and read the captions that accompanied the song and hear the following lyrics:

You say genocide, I say war

When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for

Does it get ugly? You bet it does

When I know you wanna kill

Every last one of us…

The song was bold, unflinching, and I was not expecting that. But perhaps I should have. A popular word in the 1980s was nonconformity. Boy George embodied that in lifestyle and dress. I remember seeing the pictures of him back then and asking why he dressed like that and wore lipstick. Beneath all that, he didn’t care about what anyone else thought and perhaps that is what I admired about him. Nonconformity for him was freedom of thought, expression, and artistry. And that spirit still moves within him forty years later:

You never mention October 7

Young girls raped against trees

Murdered brutally

For the crime of dancing

You condemn the Jews, with selective memory

Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep

Propaganda fueled by the Internet feels so weak

In a world full of calculations in the name of preserving and mass-marketing one’s self-image, Boy George clearly didn’t give two f***s. There is no note of apology in his lyrics. Many of us hem and haw as we defend and qualify our positions on Israel. And here comes Boy George with his striking clarity: …if you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.

This song protests and it is a protest song. Protest art has always been a lesser form in my book. James Baldwin wrote in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” that the “failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.” Yet Boy George transcends this limitation by protesting for our greater humanity. Perhaps that shows how deep into tribalism we have sunk that a mere cry for our greater humanity registers as a protest.

I don’t feel brave, I just need to behave like a human

But trust me, we will dance again

We will dance again

We will dance again

Click image below to hear the song:

As I listened to the song several times, a word came to mind: disproportionate. It was a word that we — at least I — heard often after October 7. The fact that Israel’s response in Gaza was so overwhelming and capable is precisely what made her power disproportionate and therefore evil or guilty — so the argument went. Never mind the evil that Hamas did, as if the disproportionate argument wiped the slate clean.

The clarity of Boy George’s song made me realize how the enemies of Israel and the Jews have turned the conflict into an arithmetic claim. In the minds of many, they have created a scale that weighs the number of the dead on one side against the number of the dead on the other side. By this logic, the side that suffers the least casualties is branded genocidal and evil because it simply has suffered fewer deaths.

These enemies pushed this disproportionate claim because they knew that Israel had far superior power and that its defense of its people and borders would result in a higher death count than what happened on October 7. It didn’t matter how many of these deaths were Hamas terrorists.

There were many civilians and children who were killed in Gaza, and I do not ignore or minimize that. Neither does Boy George or any decent person. But — I do have to add a “but” here — this war was started by Hamas and it matters that Hamas chose to fight from beneath its own hospitals, schools, and among the Palestinian people. They did so knowing that when Israel fired the resulting deaths would be counted against Israel, not the men who placed innocents in the line of fire.

This issue of proportionality is a genuine law of war. The core of this law weighs the foreseeable harm to civilians against the military purpose of an act. What was intended and was it justified? That distinction is key. But the enemies of Israel and the West ignored notion of intent and reduced Israel’s actions to one word: impact. What mattered only was the impact of Israel’s actions because they could weaponize the impact of the body count by calling it disproportionate.

In the eyes of many, this is how the burden of evil is shifted to Israel and, by extension, the West. In many streets of America, it is not Hamas that is called evil and genocidal but Israel.

It was into this atmosphere that Boy George released, “We Will Dance Again.” He refuses any equivocation over this argument when he sings, Does it get ugly? You bet it does. Evil must be defeated. And he names that evil plainly: When I know you wanna kill / every last one of us.

My best,

Eli

* As I was looking for the song to post here, it looks like Boy George has suffered yet another cancellation. Yesterday, I paid 15 dollars to download We Will Dance Again from Bandcamp and it looks like it was removed this morning. Click below and you’ll see the message:

A quick note to let you know that FAIR will be hosting a screening of Killing America (38 minutes) tomorrow at 4pm PST / 7pm EST. The panel will feature Diana Blum, the film’s main subject, whose bravery has forced one of the wealthiest school districts in America to confront its own antisemitism. Monica Harris, FAIR’s Executive Director, will host. FAIR has been a huge supporter of this film from the start, and I am grateful to them for keeping the door open.

Click here to register.

By chance, I was looking through my old emails for film-related matters and I came across this email from a Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. It is one example of how many organizations refused to screen this film and help us educate the public. As you can see in the screenshot below, the JCC wanted $10,000 for a two hour booking of an ordinary room with no frills. Even the Fairmont Hotel up the hill wouldn’t charge that much and I’m sure loads of caviar and champagne would be included.

When we followed up and said we would take any date — even 6 months or a year from now, they never responded. Every JCC up and down California, along with many other organizations that claim to fight antisemitism or promote viewpoint diversity, refused to open their doors.

That is why it was so gratifying when Diana and her peers helped local families secure an antisemitism settlement against the Sequoia Union High School District — one of the most comprehensive set of anti-antisemitism reforms ever adopted by a public school district in the United States. It raises a question the institutions should have to answer: What is the point of an organization that claims to fight antisemitism if it will not show up for the film, or even for the families, when it actually matters? And why do so many of these organizations refuse to address the underlying conditions that give permission to antisemitism such as liberated ethnic studies and other similar forms of indoctrination?

I hope you’ll join us for what promises to be a lively, no holds barred discussion.

My best,

Eli

This Wednesday, July 15 at 7pm EST, FAIR For All is screening my film What Killed Michael Brown? After the film, I will do a Q&A. Here is the link to register.

It is hard to believe it has been almost six years since we released this film. Nine years since we started making it. I showed up on Canfield Drive on August 9th, the fourth anniversary of the shooting, not knowing what to expect. What followed over the next two years was one of my favorite film experiences, made with my father, Shelby Steele.

But the older this film gets, the more clear it becomes that we were documenting something bigger than a shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

What happened on that unbearably hot Saturday in August 2014 marked a new direction in America, one guided by the race principle. The charge coming out of Ferguson was that America was so systemically racist that it would, paradoxically, require the entire nation to organize around the race principle in order to defeat this racism.

It is easy to forget now how tightly wounded up the country was during the 2010s. We had just come through Trayvon Martin and, two years later, Eric Garner and then Michael Brown. Every shooting of a black man put America back on trial. Black Lives Matter moved from a mere hashtag to a seat at the White House. Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi were given royal treatment by universities, corporations, and the media. They said absurdities that I never thought I would hear in my lifetime: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And far too much of America lapped it up. Even the United States government twisted the facts on the ground to bolster their systemic racism narrative. Universities taught the lie. Newsrooms repeated it. And a young man’s death was weaponized into a political instrument so powerful that it reshaped the country. Worse was how much people feared speaking out. Even my father’s conservative friends looked at him sideways for saying that the systemic racism charge was a ploy, a mechanism to milk white guilt America into surrendering power to people who had found power in race.

It was all of this that inspired my father and I to make What Killed Michael Brown? My family has always been the outsiders. We were not afraid of the truth and we said we would be the ones to tell it. So we raised money and worked in the dark for the following years — and just as we were about to finish the edit, the tape of George Floyd exploded around the world.

We released What Killed Michael Brown? in the middle of all that chaos. To date, there has been only one film about what happened in Ferguson that dares to tell the truth. There are at least six that tell the opposite.

What makes us most proud is the impact the film had on so many Americans. It gave them the voice and the ability to push back against the narrative. We have many letters from people calling it “freeing” and “liberating.”

One of my favorite memories is of a young college student in Michigan. She told me: “I am part of Black Lives Matter. I marched with Black Lives Matter. I believed what they told me about what happened to Michael Brown. And then I saw your film.” She ended by saying she was going to show it to her friends.

That is why we made it. And it is why I hope you will join us Wednesday night.

It is online. It is free. It is open to all.

What Killed Michael Brown?
Wednesday, July 15 | 7pm EST
Online via Zoom, Q&A to follow
Register here

My best,

Eli

There is a phrase in the Catholic Church for a certain kind of believer, the cradle Catholic. It means one who was born into the faith, baptized before he could speak, and was raised inside the rituals that he never chose. He was not a convert. He did not study his way in or have a come-to-Jesus moment that brought him to the church door as a grown man. The cradle Catholic was simply always there. And the church worries quietly about him, an insecurity, because the thing you are handed in the cradle is the thing you are most likely to take for granted. The convert had to earn his faith and so he knows exactly what it is. But the cradle Catholic risks practicing out of habit a thing he has never once had to defend.

I have come to think there is such a thing as a cradle American, and that many of us now are one. We were born into freedom the way the cradle Catholic was born into the faith. We did not convert to freedom. Most of us under seventy did not serve in the armed forces or march for it or risk our families. We were born into this nation where the rights were already written down and the laws made. And like the cradle Catholic, we are in danger of losing the greatest thing we have ever been given, because a freedom you never had to defend is a freedom you do not know how to defend.

This week America turns two hundred and fifty. For most of my life, I have heard of America talked about as a wound rather than a country, a place haunted by what she did before any of us were born, a place whose every achievement comes stamped with an asterisk. I do not believe this narrative, and the reason I do not believe it is that my own family were not cradle Americans. They were converts. They came to American freedom the way the adult convert comes to the church, by choice, at a cost, and with their eyes open.

My paternal grandfather was born to former slaves at the turn of the last century. He grew up dirt poor in segregation and he educated himself by reading every book he could find. As an adult, he marched in the Civil Rights movement for the full freedom denied to him because of his skin color. My white grandmother gave up a comfortable life in Ohio and when she married my grandfather in Chicago in 1942, she moved to his side of the color line and joined his quest for freedom. My father spent the first twenty years of his life in segregation. My other grandfather spent six years staying alive while Nazis and Ukrainians and Poles and Russians tried to kill him for being a Jew. On the Lower East Side of New York, my mother grew up in a depressed enclave of Holocaust survivors where she was expected to carry on Judaism and marry a Jew. She wanted to be a part of larger America and left the enclave for Iowa where she met my father. Every one of them chose America because she was the guarantor of freedom.

I am the first male on my father’s side to be born free of any government-sanctioned racial oppression, and who knows how far back the line of unfree men runs behind me in America. That is the inheritance my converts left me. I did not earn it. I was the cradle American they made possible. I grew up in freedom but do I and the millions of others like me know what I was given? Or do I only practice it out of habit? What is the value of a freedom that has not been suffered for?

I have had to think much about what freedom itself is, largely because we use the word as if its meaning were obvious and it is not. We talk about freedom as if it were a set of rules or conditions out in the world, something that the government grants us or not, something that can be given to us or taken away. But that is only the outer shell of it. The core of freedom is not out there. I have had the blessing of being surrounded by those who won their freedom while growing up, and one thing that always struck me was that they sought freedom even when their larger society denied it to them. My grandfather, who lived all but ten years of his life in segregation, always said he was a free man. My other grandfather survived the Holocaust because the impulse to be free was so strong within him that it gave him life.

Freedom is the most existential of conditions, and it lives within us. We were born with it, condemned to author our own life or to surrender it to someone else. It is the natural law. No manmade law can grant or take it away. Freedom is what makes us a person, and it is the one possession that cannot be given to you.

I have argued this for years, and it provokes people. I will say that even in the extremity of slavery, a person is not wholly unfree in the deepest sense, and they look at me as though I have lost my mind. Of course, the slave is in bondage. The chains are real, degrading, and often unbreakable. Yet, inside that brutal existence there always remains a choice, no matter how small or cruel it may be. The choice to run or stay, to submit or resist in whatever way one can.

We saw the same terrible truth in the Nazi death camps. The prisoners facing certain murder still had one thing the guards could not take from them. They could choose the manner in which they died. The inmates who rose up at Treblinka, seizing weapons and burning the camp even though almost none would survive, died in an act of freedom, and they knew it.

This does not lessen the evil of oppression. Tearing down the walls of true oppression is among the noblest things a person can do. But that fight itself begins with the freedom within us. My grandfather did not wait to be handed his freedom before he marched in the Civil Rights movement. He already carried it within him, and the marching was that freedom reaching outward toward a world of equality.

The real question, then, has nothing to do with how wide my space happens to be. Mine is the widest that anyone in my family has ever experienced. The real question is whether I will use the freedom within me or not. My grandfather was squeezed on every side by Jim Crow, and he used every inch of freedom that he had. He read every book he could find. He started side businesses, including a pesticide business, and made enough money to buy a car nice enough that he parked it blocks from work so his white boss would never see it. It was because the world tried to deny him freedom that he valued it and refused to surrender it. He exercised freedom in his private quarters and marched for it publicly to have it applied equally to all Americans.

I have never understood the temptation to trade that inheritance for a grievance. Both of my grandfathers, born into poverty and hunted by history, lifted themselves and their families high enough that by the time I was born I enjoyed a middle-class life. The freedom they chose, at an enormous cost to themselves, is what they left me. It wasn’t the box, the tribal game, or a claim on someone else’s guilt. So why would I become the Backward Man and profit off their pain, pain I never suffered? To pick up grievance as my inheritance would be to spit on the actual inheritance they bled for.

This is the deepest evil of white guilt. It cannot admit that this inner freedom is real because if it did, then its profound flaws would be exposed. So it teaches the opposite. It grounds us not in the world of character but in immutable traits. It teaches us that we do not live in a free country at all, that we live in a systemically racist nation in which blacks and other minorities are held down by forces so total that no individual act of will can rise above them. If that is true, then the freedom my grandfathers carried within them through segregation and genocide is a fiction, a fairy tale the powerful tell to excuse themselves.

Real freedom offers no such shelter. To fully embrace it is to be exposed, fully visible, flaws and all, no longer able to pretend that what becomes of you is somebody else’s doing. The inner freedom was always the real thing. But America is the rare country that also tore down the outer walls that stood in its way, which is why to waste the choice here, where nothing stands between us and it, is the deepest betrayal of the freedom my family proved was real even where everything stood against it.

And so the narrative must be pushed, always and everywhere, that America is a prison and its minorities the inmates. The lie is not incidental to white guilt but essential to it, because without it there is nothing to redeem and no reason for any of it to exist. And a lie that large has to be maintained. It needs a permanent class of people whose whole job is to keep the country convinced it is not free. So we raise them with this purpose. We target the young minds, train the most susceptible among them as activists, and tell them the noblest thing they can do is lead the rest of us toward a “freedom” that, by the logic of the ideology itself, can never actually arrive — because if it did, they would no longer be needed. So their cruel fate, if they allow themselves to be seduced by this false innocence of white guilt, is to be condemned to an identity that depends on their country remaining a prison.

And that perhaps has been the strangest thing about my lifetime, that far too many in this country with every freedom written into its laws have spent years insisting they are not free. After the great collisions of the 1960s, the doors were opening to freedom and yet many of us turned back toward race and tribe. The laws were on the books and we still told ourselves that they were shut.

Some of us kept building, pushing the country into the future. But far too many of us became a backward-looking people, the Backward Man, and grievance has become one of our largest industries. A movement rose insisting that blacks and other minorities were not free, and this was during the decades when minorities had more safety and opportunity than at any point in American history. And millions of whites were told that to defend themselves against the charge of racism was itself proof of racism. Many of them went quiet. It was easier than fighting. The few who did speak out often made the news. That was the quiet tragedy of my lifetime — that a free people, handed the widest liberty in human history, grew so frightened of a single accusation that they chose to give the freedom back. A freedom you stop defending is a freedom that you’re no longer able to see, which is why a great city can now elect a mayor promising the very socialism that both of my grandfathers — including my paternal grandfather, who was tempted by its promise of equality during segregation — ultimately rejected, and call it progress.

The past is finished. Going backward is easy. The past asks nothing of you. Going forward means risking failure with no one else to blame. The Backward Man gets to feel righteous and never has to risk a thing to earn it.

And while we looked backward, too many of us fell silent, all because of one word. They feared being called racist more than they feared losing the very freedoms that past Americans sacrificed their lives for.

We have spent sixty years clapping for the man who performs the right feelings in public. The man who quietly does the hard thing and asks for nothing goes unnoticed. My grandparents asked America for nothing but the chance, and out of that chance they made everything. They made it against a world that told them no at every turn, and still they chose to be free. Which is where we cradle Americans come in. We were born into the freedom they had to win. We did not earn it, and it is easy to forget that the one thing we share with every human before us is the very freedom within us. It is our inheritance. It is the hardest inheritance there is.

On the week the country turns two hundred and fifty, we Americans alive today are the freest human beings who have ever walked the earth. Not the freest Americans. The freest people in the whole long story of our species, with more liberty, more safety, and more possibility than any human beings who ever lived. I do not want to be the American who was handed everything and did nothing with it. I want to reach within, to the freedom my grandparents proved was real even in the narrowest of rooms, and actually live in it.

I have not always lived up to their gift. There were times I stayed silent when I should have spoken, and times I found my courage only after the moment for it had passed. I cannot undo the fact that I am a cradle American, and was handed freedom before I understood what I was holding. But the cradle Catholic has one remedy and so do I: to stop inheriting the faith and start choosing it.

My best,

Eli

Years ago, I was told that I would not be allowed to enroll my son at the local public elementary school in Los Angeles because I refused to check a race box.

The LAUSD application wanted his race — a primary race and then a secondary race. I remember staring at that form for a moment. My father is black and my mother is Jewish and I thought which side is the primary race? My son Jack is black, Jewish, white, Native American, and, through his mother, Mexican. There was no honest way to fill this form out. To pick one race for Jack was to deny or demote the others and for what good reason? All these “races” were people who had made him, who had faced tremendous personal obstacles, and who had crossed the color line for love. They were not a “race box.” I filled out the entire application and left the race boxes unchecked. I was then told that his application would not be accepted, despite the California Constitution guaranteeing a free education to every child. I was not willing to cost or delay Jack his education over a box so I checked black. That was how Jack became black.

It was that moment that sent me across the country chasing a question I could not shake. Why does race matter so much? What truth did checking that race box reveal? What justice was being served by these boxes? Why does a nation that calls itself free insist on racially identifying us? I made a film out of what I found. It is called How Jack Became Black, and on this Wednesday, July 1, 7 PM EST, FAIR is screening it to open their Summer Film Series, with a live discussion to follow.

I hope you will join us.

I have spent years asking what that moment revealed. Not just about Los Angeles, or about school enrollment forms, but about where we are right now as a country.

Here is what I found: we have not moved beyond race despite having more freedom and wealth than at any other time in human history. We have doubled down on race. The same impulse that made a bureaucrat reject my son's application — the insistence that a person's race must be named, ranked, and recorded before he can be seen as an individual — is now policy, culture, and moral consensus. We are sorting people by race in hiring, in education, in medicine, in the arts. We’ve even created the class of whites as oppressors. We are told this is justice. What it actually is, is the same old mechanism with a new set of winners and losers.

And here is the part that always bothered me. It is always the weakest and most cynical among us that reach for race as a means to power. They have been doing it for centuries in America. Why do we continue to give them power and at the expense of our greater humanity?

This film is the record of one father trying to keep one boy out of a category, and finding a whole country built on the practice. FAIR has framed the night around the right questions. Will we ever see people as individuals rather than members of groups? Who belongs? How should we think about race?

So join us. Watch the film, then stay for the conversation, where I will be with FAIR Director, , and take your questions. It is online and free.

How Jack Became Black
Wednesday, July 1, 7pm ET / 4pm PT
Online via Zoom, discussion to follow
Register here

I hope to see you there,

Eli

The idea of white guilt has been making the rounds around the UK lately. Last week, I discussed the role of white guilt in the Henry Nowak tragedy as well as the brutal attempted beheading in Belfast with . On Friday, I was sent a video of Katharine Birbalsingh’s speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and I quickly understood why. I have known of her for years as an education reform advocate and the founder and headmistress of Michaela Community School. If you would like to watch her speech without my input — I strongly encourage it — it is here in full:

The woman known as Britain’s strictest headmistress stood in front of a room and said the thing that almost no one will say out loud. She recounted the actions of the police officers during Henry Nowak’s dying moments and said, “this is not cruelty or incompetence. This is white guilt.”

She named the largely invisible force that has been undermining the West for decades. My father, Shelby Steele, has spent his life arguing that white guilt is the most powerful and destructive force in the Western world, precisely because it halts the mechanisms that make the West work. Katharine shows us exactly how. The officers standing over Henry Nowak were, in her words, "terrified of being seen as racist." That terror did not feel like cowardice to them. It felt like conscience. It wore the costume of virtue — the look of a good person refusing to oppress — while a man died at their feet. That is white guilt: fear dressed as morality, powerful enough to override the most basic human duty.

Katharine then reveals how white guilt has transformed the classroom. It was the grease that allowed race-based Marxist ideologies into the classroom, where children are taught to sort the world into “those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors.” History serves only to indict the present. Children are “taught through an oppressor lens,” until, as she says, young people are “unable to see the world in any other terms.” And the emotion that runs the whole machine is the terror of being called a racist. They are “desperate not to be seen as racist.”

No child wants to be on the side of the oppressor. We documented that in the Killing America documentary several years ago. When you think for a second about what is actually taking place in the classroom, the immorality becomes undeniable. Activist teachers, in the name of white guilt morality, are reducing students to skin colors and making them pay for the sins and victimizations of their fathers. And those children grow up. The officers who stood frozen over Henry Nowak, terrified of being seen as racist, were taught to see the world this way decades ago. We have been teaching it for a generation now, and the damage is profound: the people sworn to protect him had been trained to fear the collective white guilt more than they feared failing him.

What makes Katharine’s speech feel like a drink of water during these muddied times is that she is not willing to accept the decline in our society any longer. She also refuses to accept the silence of those around her any longer. A person who surrenders to fear says nothing, does nothing, and so the decline continues. By naming white guilt as the true evil, she lays the burden at our feet. What are we going to do about it?

She demands that we raise children who see themselves as “morally responsible beings with agency, whatever their race, whatever their religion.” The key word here is responsibility.

My father once wrote, “In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism.”

Demanding responsibility from everyone grants them agency and that is at the heart of what makes one an individual. That is the one thing white guilt cannot survive, a free human being. It is exactly what my father chose, decades ago, when he turned away from grievance and toward responsibility. He has been making Katharine’s argument my whole life. My father is very thankful that Katharine exists and only wishes there were more of her.

At the end of her speech she says, “Saving the West ain’t easy.” She then asks her audience to teach their children as if “we’re going to war.” She is right that it is a war and she is right about where the front line is: the classroom.

My best,

Eli

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about what has been unfolding in the UK from the death of Henry Novak, the attempted beheading in Belfast, and the deeper sickness behind both. I wanted do a podcast with an insider’s perspective on what is really going on over there, and that search led me back to a writer I’ve been following for a while: Jenny Holland.

Several weeks ago, Jenny published a Substack piece called “How White Guilt Killed Henry Novak.” She cited some of my own writing on the subject. The real credit, as always, belongs to my father, Shelby Steele, whose work on white guilt remains the clearest lens we have for understanding moments like this one.

I wanted to speak with Jenny for a simple reason. She lives in Belfast and within walking distance from where last week’s attempted beheading took place. Her son plays soccer/football on the very fields bordering this street as well as the migrant hotel that soon found itself at the center of the unrest. This isn’t abstract commentary for her. It’s her neighborhood, her community, her country.

I first heard of Jenny several years ago through Jodi Shaw, who is featured in my forthcoming film “White Guilt.” I’ve been reading Jenny’s smart, incisive takes ever since, and today we finally sat down together. The night before she had asked to watch “White Guilt” — we finally finished the last and final cut this past weekend — and I gave her access. It comes up several times in the podcast.

The result is one of the most insightful conversations I’ve had on this subject — covering Henry Novak, the Belfast attack, the woke capture of the Irish Republican movement, the collapse of British policing, and why white guilt has become, in Jenny’s words, the new state religion.

Below are six quotes from our conversation. If you prefer jumping to the video, it’s here:

1. The reversal no one in power wants to say out loud

“Hat tip to the woke zealots here in the UK — systemic racism is in fact real and is in fact happening. It’s just victimizing white people now, specifically white working class British citizens.”

2. White guilt is a spell — and it has to be broken

“White guilt has cast a spell on white people and white policymakers. It functions the same as a magic spell. It’s time to break the spell by using true words and using them very bluntly. When you say something outside the bounds of what they consider acceptable, you can see them physically recoil. They wince. It’s like you’ve burned them or shocked them with a cattle prod.”

3. The police are no longer policing — they’re enforcing ideology

“The British police are riddled with ideologues, or at least they’re training their officers to police ideologically, not to police legally. The primary goal of the police became: don’t be racist, or don’t be seen to be racist. Never put yourself in a position where you can be accused of being racist. So everyone starts covering their ass.”

4. The woke capture of the IRA

“The Irish Republicans — the IRA-affiliated side, who fought British imperialism — have essentially gone woke. Sinn Féin is a hundred percent woke, a hundred percent globalist orientation, and its policy has been basically to embrace open borders. After that stabbing, they came out very fast and said: no, this is not a problem of immigration, this is a problem of far-right racists.”

5. The young know they’re being sold out

“The younger generation aren’t seeing the benefit of the anti-colonial resistance narrative. In fact, they’re really getting it in the rear, to be crude about it. And they know they are. They know that they’re getting fucked, basically. And they’re like: no, we’re not going to endure this — so that you can pontificate in front of a microphone about how great and good you are, and how migrants are welcome. You’re not doing that off our backs. I think there’s more of that sentiment on the ground than has been reported.”

6. The question that has no good answer

“What will convince them that they are wrong? At this point, I think nothing will. We keep voting against it and we keep getting more of it. So how bad is the fight going to be? That’s the only question left. Because people are just people — they’re eventually going to come out and say, no, I want my old neighborhood back.”

You can subscribe to Jenny at JennyHolland.Substack.com and on her YouTube channel, Saving Culture From Itself.

Please share this podcast and leave a comment here and the YouTube channel as well. It helps.

My best,

Eli

It didn’t begin with Henry Nowak. It didn’t begin with the attempted beheading in Belfast last night. It began long before, when Britain traded its hard discipline for universal values for a racial morality that it no longer knows how to control.

As Britain wound down her empire there was an unease in the air. There were claims of colonial atrocities and that along with the racial strife in America during the 1960s dominated the culture wars. After all, this was also the time of pan-Africanism. In Britain there were people who flinched whenever the Empire was mentioned, the beginnings of collective white guilt.

The 1965 and 1976 Race Relations Acts were attempts to right real wrongs. They said, we will not tolerate open discrimination. But there was the flip side to that same coin. The ruling class began to turn that white guilt into rules, offices, commissions. It became a system.

Then in 1993, Britain faced a reckoning over the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He was 18 and black and an aspiring architect. He was standing at a bus stop, waiting with a friend, when he was murdered in a racist attack. The Metropolitan Police botched the investigation. They treated the pain of the parents as a nuisance. The suspects were known, but it took years to deliver justice. It was a complete miscarriage of justice.

The 1999 Macpherson Report said “never again.” There were seventy recommendations along with the language of “zero tolerance” and “institutional racism.” Nearly every public institution from policing to the justice system was affected. It all sounded like progress and many aspects of the report were sincere. But the report also did something it likely never intended. It detonated the white guilt that had been building for the past half a century. Suddenly, there was a name for the system that failed Stephen Lawrence: institutional racism.

The report defined institutional racism as:

“The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people.”

That word, “unwitting,” changed everything. Racism no longer required intent or demonstrable evidence. Impact was what mattered. Disparate outcomes became sufficient. White became oppressor by default. More Acts followed. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 imposed a race equality duty on public bodies. This was later expanded and consolidated in the Equality Act 2010, which created the Public Sector Equality Duty. White guilt was now encoded in policy, and there was no counterforce in place to stop it.

From that point on, the institutions of Britain lived with a new fear. It was not the fear of doing wrong, but the fear of being seen to have done wrong, and the fear of being seen with the wrong kind of whites. They did what institutions always do when they are burdened with collective guilt: they performed innocence. They wrote policies. They hired consultants. They attended trainings. They engaged in performative acts where if you repeated the right mantras and nodded at the right moments, you could buy your way back into innocence. But this innocence was false.

This is the evil of white guilt that Shelby Steele has warned us about for decades. It has led to the creation of a corrupted culture in the West that tries to pay off its old sins not by deepening its commitment to the individual, but by dividing the world into tribes and managing the guilt between them. Within this world, no one is simply a person. You are a white body, a black body, a brown body. Your skin determines your place in society.

That is why Henry was treated inhumanely by those who have chosen a profession to protect and serve ALL citizens. In the white guilt racial order, the narrative is more powerful than fact. The right accusation, from the right kind of person, can outweigh a dying boy’s words.

We are paying the price for allowing our society to move away from the universal Western insistence that “you are judged as an individual” to the new ideology that says your tribe comes first, your skin comes first, and you must pay for the sins of your father. Far too many of us accepted this out of fear. Far too many whites said, “As a white, I can’t speak up or say this.” Now, here we are.

The tragedy is that this moral order was built in the name of justice. It was supposed to prevent another Stephen Lawrence. Instead, it has produced a world in which a boy like Henry can be treated as expendable because his guilt is assumed before he opened his mouth and asked for an ambulance. It has produced a world where the officer literally said “I know“ when Nowak’s killer claimed he hadn’t been stabbed. It also has produced a world in which a city can watch a man nearly beheaded and hesitate to say what everyone saw, because the truth might be called “racist.”

If we want to change this, we cannot just tinker with policies or swap out slogans. We have to go after the vision itself. When Thomas Sowell reviewed Shelby Steele’s book, “White Guilt,” he wrote:

“Before we turn to facts, we need to understand the vision. This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves—and they are not likely to give it up for anything so mundane as grubby facts.

“For those liberals who lived through the 1960s, that was often also the springtime of their youth, increasingly treasured as a memory, as the grim realities of old age settle down upon them today. It is expecting an awful lot to expect them to consider any alternative vision of the world, especially one that shatters the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society.

But what are the facts?”

A fact is that the white guilt vision offers a very flattering picture to those who live inside it: you are not like those other whites; you are enlightened, allied, on the right side of history. That self‑portrait is more precious than anything. People will cling to it even as boys die in handcuffs and blood runs on city streets.

Breaking this order starts with the self. For too long, we’ve pointed fingers at others as the problem while doing nothing. We love pointing out the hypocrisies of the Left and they are endless, but they only enrich the influencers. If we do not wish to be defined by tribes or condemned because of our skins, then we must accept that we are judged by what we do. That is what it means to be Western. We are judged by our character and actions and that includes protecting and defending the universal Western principles and values for all.

My best,

Eli

Yesterday I published my own piece on Henry Nowak, arguing that white guilt has created a racial double standard in Western justice. Daily Mail then asked me to write about the case for a UK audience, and I took the opportunity. The tragedy here for me is that if race had never been woven into policing practices as a form of social justice, we almost certainly would not be in this position. Instead, years of “anti-racism” training and race‑action plans have raised a deeper question: why would anyone want a society in which race shapes how individuals are treated, especially when it is the state doing the treating? The police officers should have listened to Henry, treated him as the individual he was, and used those critical moments to try to save him, not to handcuff him.

Below is an excerpt from the piece and here is the link to read it in full.

Law enforcement in the UK has become, it seems, racially calibrated.

The rules no longer appear to be neutral. And there are many Brits who now believe that rules are bent to favor those who share the same skin color as historical victims of Western slavery and colonialism.

In this order, whites are treated not as individuals but as a permanent defendant class, bearing a collective guilt that must be continually paid down, with no redemption in sight.

When police appear to instinctively stand with an accuser because he is brown and against a victim because he is white, then the principle of equal justice has already been hollowed out.

This is the moral logic of ‘white guilt’ tribalism.

It is not simply that some officers made bad decisions on a dark street in Southampton. It is that an entire moral order has taught them that accusations of racism carry an almost sacred weight and that to question such an accusation is more detrimental than to doubt the word of a dying boy.

‘White guilt’ was born in America. The UK did not experience the horrors of Jim Crow laws or Selma, Alabama’s ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Its’ racial history was largely colonial and external. It imported ‘diversity’ through immigration from former colonies.

But the moral logic of American ‘white guilt’ flowed across the Atlantic anyway and peaked in Britain with George Floyd’s death. Henry Nowak’s case shows how an American‑born framework was imposed onto British institutions. The UK absorbed critical race ideas – from ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’ to ‘allyship’ –through its elites and institutions and turned these concepts into policy and culture war weapons.

In some ways, the UK has enforced this framework even more aggressively than America.

The US still has, at least in principle, a deeper constitutional and cultural tradition of individual rights and colorblind justice than the UK.

America was founded in the language of individual rights – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness – and, after a reckoning, its civil rights movement forced that principle to be applied across racial lines. Britain’s rights culture grew more slowly out of monarchy, class and parliamentary supremacy.

For all its failures, America built stronger intellectual ‘antibodies’ against the idea that guilt and justice are collective.

Henry Nowak’s death is not merely a UK tragedy. It is a Western one. It shows what happens when a moral deformation that began in America finds especially fertile ground in another country’s institutions.

Best,

Eli

Henry Nowak was 18 years old. He was a Polish‑British boy from Essex, and a few months into his first year of studying accountancy at the University of Southampton. On the night of December 3, 2025, he had been out with his football teammates and was walking home through the Portswood area of the city when he encountered Vickrum Digwa, a 23‑year‑old man carrying a knife. Digwa stabbed Henry five times. The fatal wound pierced his heart. Henry collapsed on the street and died at the scene.

To see full video, click here.

On the 999 call, Digwa told police, “We’ve just been attacked in a racist attack.” When officers arrived, he repeated that Henry had racially abused and assaulted him. The officers believed him. They handcuffed the dying boy on the ground. Bodycam audio later revealed that Henry told officers four times he had been stabbed and nine times that he could not breathe. In response to Henry’s comment about being stabbed, one officer replied, “I don’t think you have, mate.”

The accusation of racism, made by the man who had just killed him, carried more authority with those officers than the words of the boy bleeding in front of them.

Later, a video recovered from Henry’s own phone, found in Digwa’s pocket after the stabbing, revealed that no racial abuse had occurred. The prosecution argued at trial that Digwa had fabricated the allegation to justify the killing. The jury agreed. On May 28, 2026, Digwa was convicted of murder. On June 1, he was sentenced to a minimum of 21 years in prison. Hampshire Police issued a formal apology to the Nowak family.

No one can say with certainty that Henry would have lived had the police treated him as a victim from the moment they arrived. But it is undeniable that they wasted the only thing a boy bleeding from a stab wound to the heart did not have: time.

But this justice was partial because it did not answer the deeper question of why the British police believed the attacker’s unverified accusation of racism over the dying testimony of his victim. What had so distorted their moral instincts that they could stand over a stabbed boy and not believe him?

Why did Digwa know, instinctively, that an accusation of racism would tilt the moral field in his favor, that it would bias the officers against the sight of blood?

And why did the Western world erupt after George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street while the immediate aftermath of Henry Nowak’s death drew no comparable public outpouring? British politicians knelt. Statues were torn down. A man who died in another country was mourned as a national tragedy. Henry, who died on a British street, was treated as a case to be processed, not a symbol to be grieved. The difference was not the death. It was the skin color of the dead.

The answer did not begin with Henry Nowak. It had been building for years. For decades, police and officials across northern England ignored the systematic rape of thousands of young white working‑class girls by grooming gangs largely of Pakistani heritage. Officers and elected officials feared being called racist more than they feared failing the children in front of them.

The same pattern appeared more recently during protests, when police moved swiftly and heavily against small groups of Jewish counter‑demonstrators, while standing by as far larger, mostly brown crowds chanted slogans that any honest person would recognize as calls for violence.

Enforcement had become racially calibrated against whites. The rules were no longer neutral. They bent to favor those who shared the same skin colors as the historical victims of Western slavery and colonialism.

This did not happen in a vacuum. The local police force’s own Race Action Plan explicitly framed George Floyd’s murder as a “pivotal moment” and put “anti‑racism” at the center of its agenda. In 2020, it spent nearly £1 million on compulsory anti‑racism training that focused on “biases, banter, microaggressions, privilege and the importance of being an ally.” National race‑action guidance rejected color‑blind policing, insisting that “equality of policing outcomes” does not mean treating everyone the same or adopting a “color blind” approach. The Independent Office for Police Conduct and the College of Policing told officers to “respond positively” to allegations of racism and warned that looking for “tangible” or “conclusive” evidence could make complainants feel their experiences were not “real or valid.”

Prosecutors later called Digwa’s allegation “a wicked lie about a dying man,” a “trump card” he played to divert suspicion. Digwa understood, even in that moment, that crying “racism” would carry more weight than a white boy’s blood on the pavement.

This is the moral logic of white‑guilt tribalism. It is not simply that some officers made bad decisions on a dark street in Southampton. It is that an entire moral order has taught them that accusations of racism carry an almost sacred weight, and that to question such an accusation is more dangerous than to doubt the word of a dying boy. In this order, whites are treated not as individuals but as a permanent defendant class, bearing a collective guilt that must be continually paid down.

My father, Shelby Steele, has argued for years that white guilt is not merely a feeling but the accusation that whites are collectively guilty for the past racial sins of the West. The fear of this accusation drives whites to dissociate from these past sins by seeking ally-ship with people of color. Everybody is trapped in a script with whites eternally the oppressor, people of color eternally the oppressed.

In such a script, a lie about racism can feel more “true” than a boy’s literal blood on the pavement. Fear of being on the wrong side of that narrative does the rest.

This is why Henry’s case is more than a tragic one‑off. It is a window into a deeper moral deformation. When police instinctively stand with an accuser because he is brown and against a victim because he is white and stigmatized with the West’s past racial sins, then the principle of equal justice has already been hollowed out.

And this hierarchy is precisely what the white guilt racial order demands. The goal is a world where race never stops mattering.

The cost of this order is borne by real people. By Henry.

It exposes a moral order that treats race as the ultimate lens, the very hierarchy “anti‑racism” claims to dismantle. The West pioneered the higher principle that guilt is individual, justice is individual, the son does not inherit the father’s sins. That insight civilized us. White guilt tribalism seeks to undo it.

The way forward demands the courage to affirm that every life matters as an individual life, that evidence outweighs accusations, and that no group carries perpetual racial debt. Henry Nowak’s final moments force the question: will the West be governed by its best principles, or by this corrosive white guilt tribalism?

My best,

Eli

Woke is not dead.

The San Francisco Unified School District recently ran a workshop called “Youth as Knowledge Producers: Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies.”

Yep. “Adult Supremacy.”

This is part of the SFUSD’s ongoing “Liberated Ethnic Studies” project, which has been uncovered and documented by Friends of Lowell. Through it, the district is building an ideological ecosystem that divides the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” trains students to see “systems of power and oppression” everywhere, and urges them to develop a “critical consciousness” and resist.

For years, they have been indoctrinating students to see the world in terms of white oppressors and oppressed people of color. Once you accept that frame, everything else follows. In this recent workshop, the adults, or more accurately, the teachers, were cast as the oppressors and students as the oppressed. Since the moral authority belongs to the “oppressed,” anyone who dares to teach, correct, or even disagree is now accused of doing violence.

For decades, we have heard that academic rigor is “Eurocentric” or just plain “white.” The SFUSD documents sink to a new low by calling it “dehumanizing.” That begs the question: what is “humanizing”? Indoctrinating kids in tribal hatred? Letting them wallow in abject ideological ignorance? We have plenty of horrifying historical examples of what happens when tribalism and ignorance are allowed to fester.

So what is the “good” here that the students are allowed to learn? Whatever the lords of ethnic studies declare to be correct. And “correct,” in this upside-down world, means whatever grows the power of the ideology.

But what makes this shift truly alarming is that it is the adult — the person, not the action — who is now being targeted. Once “adult supremacy” is the crime, the fact that you are older, more experienced, and responsible for maintaining standards becomes the offense. The role of adult, and especially the role of teacher, is redefined as abuse.

It’s worth asking who, exactly, is doing the “right kind” of teaching for clearly they have it figured out. This particular workshop was led by Jennifer Sanchez, a UCLA graduate in Chicano Studies

.

These fields of “studies,” from Chicano Studies, African-American Studies to general Ethnic Studies, organize their entire scholarship around victimization, which is their expertise, their bread and butter.

So when we invite these “specialists” into our schools, what do we think will happen? They know victimization and that is what they will teach our students, these young minds that we fondly call “our future.”

This didn’t appear out of nowhere. White guilt opened the door by conditioning many Americans to see the world as white oppressors versus oppressed people of color. And what child wants to be counted among the racist oppressors?

I know this ideology from the inside. I come from multiple heritages and I was supposed to embrace this ideology and see myself as oppressed. But I always refused for the reason that victimhood is a dead end. It doesn’t build anything. It only consumes and destroys. And now they want to build a school system around it.

Once you assert that any power imbalance is inherently oppressive, every hierarchical relationship becomes suspect: parent and child, doctor and patient, above all, teacher and student. The teacher has authority. The student does not. Therefore the teacher is the oppressor, and the student becomes untouchable. The student’s word, as long as it advances the liberation ideology, now carries more weight than the adult’s.

What began as a racial framework has now mutated into a generational framework. And it will only keep mutating. (I do have to note the irony of this happening in San Francisco, the home of the question-all-authority hippies.)

The teacher represents an invaluable aspect of Western civilization, and that is why adult authority is being targeted now. The teacher is the person entrusted to carry the knowledge of that civilization forward and hand it to the next generation.

To destroy that continuum, you first stigmatize the teacher as an oppressor. Then you equate academic rigor and merit with “Eurocentric” values and “white supremacy culture.” Now teaching itself is framed as a white act, an act of domination, no matter who is doing it.

And here’s the part nobody says out loud: the race of the actual human being at the front of the classroom does not matter. A black teacher who demands excellence or a latino teacher who insists on standards, they are not heroes. They are collaborators. They are race traitors enforcing the master’s tools. A few brave teachers will stand their ground; the rest will seek absolution by allying with the “oppressed” students.

San Francisco parents and taxpayers are funding this ideological project that is transforming education to undermine the Western world. The revolution is not waiting in the streets. It is already embedded in the curriculum, in mandatory ethnic studies courses, in trainings that tell educators to see themselves as oppressors and their students as oppressed activists. And it is being delivered by people whose objective is to teach your child that they are a victim and that the people who try to educate them are their enemies.

My best,

Eli

When I screened Killing America at the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park two years ago, parent Diana Blum and others invited Menlo‑Atherton High School principal Karl Losekoot and the Sequoia Union High School District Board. Nobody came.

Instead, Principal Losekoot blasted out a school‑wide email denouncing the film as “sensational propaganda at its worst” and “completely ridiculous,” a verdict he reached from the trailer alone.

The Menlo‑Atherton High School newspaper then filed multiple copyright claims to kill the trailer’s distribution. YouTube and Vimeo pulled it down. I responded by releasing the film in full, and the same student journalists, who clearly had not been taught about the Fair Use doctrine, filed more bogus claims, shutting the film down.

The forces protecting the ideology I was documenting mobilized faster against a 38‑minute film than they ever had against the antisemitism happening in their own hallways. That tells you almost everything you need to know about the moment we are in.

Now that same district has quietly admitted that something was deeply wrong. When discrimination is inflicted on a particular group, it creates a deficit: all groups are no longer being treated equally. The beauty of the American judicial system is that there are recourses to erase that deficit and restore equal treatment under the law.

Yesterday’s settlement agreement between the Sequoia Union High School District and a group of parents is more than a local school dispute quietly resolved. Led by the law firm, Ropes & Gray, and The Deborah Project, this settlement is one of the clearest acknowledgments yet that antisemitism in our public schools is real, systemic, and can no longer be brushed aside with slogans about “equity” and “inclusion.”

This is a vindication of sorts, especially for the parents. It was beyond unethical how folks like Principal Losekoot and the Board dismissed allegations of antisemitism so casually. If it had been a racially motivated attack against a black or latino student, would the parents of those students been gaslit?

Under the agreement, Sequoia must, for the first time, explicitly name antisemitism as a prohibited form of discrimination in its policies. Those policies must adopt a definition that finally admits what too many educators have pretended not to see: that attacks on the Jewish people, including denying their right to self‑determination or holding Israel to standards demanded of no other nation, can constitute antisemitism.

The settlement goes further. The “Israel‑Palestine Conflict” is now formally designated as a “controversial issue,” meaning that any teacher discussing it must present it impartially, provide adequate factual information, and refrain from turning personal politics into classroom doctrine. Teachers must warn students against drawing conclusions from too little information and are explicitly barred from advocating their own opinions in these discussions.

In plain terms, the burden is put back on students to decide what they think, and the teacher‑activist model is pushed out.

As I documented in Killing America, much of the teaching material on the Israel‑Palestine conflict was inaccurate at best. The settlement seeks to prevent this by requiring all such materials to be submitted for pre‑clearance to a neutral decision‑maker jointly chosen by parents and the district. This same person will resolve disputes over whether a lesson or incident crosses the line into antisemitism.

It is not a perfect solution, but the district made this necessary by dismissing and ignoring antisemitism claims for years. I have seen the documentation of those incidents myself. It was so extensive that I never reached the end.

You can read the full settlement document here for all the details.

This settlement was, in a sense, a forced confession. The families who fought for this deserve their victory. Whether the district means it is another question entirely.

When I first heard the news last night, my first thought was, What about the elephant in the room, ethnic studies?

I am black, jewish, and deaf. By the rules of the diversity industry, I should be the perfect symbol of what their ideology celebrates. (Ironically, it was a nearly all-black crew that made the film.) Instead, my work was treated as a scandal, because it documented something the ideology could not admit: an educational environment in which Jewish students were reduced to their white skin and told that their “whiteness” placed them on the wrong side of history.

This is what happens when you build a school system not around the individual dignity of every student, but around a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. Once you decide that one’s moral standing comes from the group identity rather than the individual character, you do not eliminate injustice, you merely state that justice is tribal.

Ethnic studies, as implemented across California, pushes variations of this oppressor-oppressed model grounded in liberation ideology, and it has given antisemitism its intellectual and moral cover. Within that framework, Jewish students are placed in the “white” box. Their history as a persecuted people is erased. Their ancestral identity is flattened into a racial category of convenience.

But Jews are far from the only ones harmed by this. The American, the individual, is most harmed. Anytime you see the word “studies” — black studies, chicano studies, ethnic studies — you are looking at the institutionalized study of victimization. I have never opposed teaching history more honestly and completely. My work never shies away from the horrors of the past. But I will always oppose any curriculum whose organizing principle is grievance, because the only thing the study of victimization produces is tribalism. And tribalism is the worst lesson to teach young people who live in greater freedom and material comfort than any generation in human history.

The worthy victory of the settlement fixes the district. The parents who brought this case did what the system refused to do on its own. But the ideology still remains in the classroom and in the minds of many. That is the next fight, and it is on us to follow the example of these parents.

Best,

Eli

Yesterday, a friend of mine, Beth Feeley, texted me that Bob Woodson had passed. I had only watched a new video of his the day before and the news shocked me. He was such a vibrant personality that you felt the loss immediately. Last night, a friend of mine at Fox News asked if I would contribute my thoughts on him and his legacy.

Here is the link to the Fox article.

I’ve also pasted it below:

One thing that is often overlooked, or simply not understood, is how hard a fate it was to be born into a segregated America and then come of age just as the country began to reckon with its racial horrors in the 1960s. For centuries, blacks had been slaves and then segregated, always divorced from the full rights promised by American principles. They built a world within America, a parallel civilization of churches, schools, businesses, and communities forged out of necessity and extraordinary will. And then in the 1960s, one civil rights victory after another came. How does an oppressed people come into freedom, one of the hardest yet most rewarding conditions to live in? In that shock of freedom, which path is the right one forward?

That was the fate of Bob Woodson, who passed away on May 19, 2026, at 89 years old. He was born Robert Leon Woodson on April 8, 1937, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of a working-class family that knew both poverty and promise. His father died when he was still a boy, and Bob and his four siblings were raised by their mother in the housing projects of South and then West Philadelphia. He saw up close the damage that broken families, failing institutions, and street violence could do to a young life. At seventeen, he dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force, and began the long journey that would take him to college, graduate school, and the front lines of the civil rights struggle.

Bob marched, organized, and directed community development programs for the NAACP and other organizations. But the harder part may have come after the civil rights victories. It is often said that a victory gets you through the door where the real and hard work begins. Bob knew that better than most. He searched for the right path forward, working with the National Urban League, serving as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, trying one organization after another. He found them all, in one way or another, inadequate. It wasn’t until 1981, armed with little more than a $25,000 grant and two decades of hard-won experience, that he founded what would become his life’s work: the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. It later was renamed the Woodson Center.

What gave Bob his fire, his light, was his unwavering desire to connect every single one of his people to the American Dream. He used that phrase, “his people,” freely and proudly, because he saw clearly what was being done to them. He believed they were being fed the bad ideas of dependency by whites who wanted racial redemption for themselves more than they wanted black development. The liberal welfare politics that followed the Civil Rights movement had, in Bob’s view, trapped millions of low-income blacks in a state of dependency, while enriching the elite class of professionals and politicians who managed their poverty. As he wrote in a 1995 essay in The New York Times, he had “spoken out against a liberal agenda that has trapped millions of low-income blacks in a state of dependency and used the conditions of poor blacks to establish race-based policies that benefit middle- and upper-income blacks.”

At the same time, Bob sought to build bridges with whites, but on the right terms. Not through guilt. Not through dependency. He sought to create that bridge through the American principles that he believed belonged to everyone equally. I attended several events with him over the years, and he had a ritual. He would look out at a room that often contained a smattering of whites and then say with that mischievous wink: “I absolve every one of you. Not one of you is guilty. I absolve all of you of the racial sins of the past.” People would laugh. But underneath that joke was a profound and deliberate act.

Bob knew, as my father Shelby Steele has always argued, that the post-1960s Left had sought power by kept whites on the hook for the sins of the past, not to achieve justice, but to maintain political leverage. In doing so, they had engineered a permanent gap between blacks and whites. By offering the joke of an absolution, Bob was, on one hand, mocking the Left’s efforts to guilt whites, and on the other hand, inviting whites to come down off the hook and join him as equal human beings, fallible, capable, and responsible together for building something better.

Bob Woodson was a unifier in the most practical sense. He refused to allow himself to be corrupted by the racial politics that consumed so much of the post-Civil Rights era. What he wanted above all were solutions — on the ground, in communities, run by the people who lived there. The Woodson Center brought training and support to more than 2,600 leaders of faith-based and community organizations in 39 states, helping them secure more than ten times the funding the Center itself spent. These were not theoretical programs dreamt up by bureaucrats in Washington. They were answers forged by the people closest to the problems. And that was Bob’s secret sauce: help the right people closest to the problem for they know the answer.

My father and Bob go way back to the 1980s. They were on television together several times. It even became a small joke in our house that if one couldn’t make an appearance, the other would fill in. I met Bob for the first time around 2016 through our mutual friend Beth Feeley. One of the first things he told me was that he wanted to do a book or media series on the historical heroes of black America. He wanted to exalt men and women like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Madam C. J. Walker, and Robert Smalls, who had built, thrived, and overcome against impossible odds.

He was sickened by what he saw as a narrative of victimhood that had taken hold of so many young black minds. On one of our early calls he said something I will never forget: “How can you do that to children? It’s abuse.” He was right. A people cut off from their true heritage, a heritage of surviving, overcoming, and thriving, is a people without a compass. The victimhood narrative was false, and it was poison. It benefited only the black elites and white liberals who trafficked in it.

He soon launched that project that became 1776 Unites, and it was launched as a direct counter to The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Where the 1619 Project sought to place slavery at the center of the American story and continue the legacy of racist America, the 1776 Unites project sought to correct the record of America’s founding and it also told the stories of blacks who became millionaires despite oppression, who built institutions, who refused to be defined by the oppression that had been done to them. Bob wanted to plant seeds of possibility in young minds and drive out the curse of fatalism.

My favorite memory of Bob is from Ferguson, Missouri, where we flew him out to be interviewed for “What Killed Michael Brown?” the documentary I made with my father. He met us in the hotel lobby wearing his brown suit and a fedora. His style was old school black. He reminded me of the blacks I saw growing up in San Francisco and Oakland during the 1980s. We took him to Canfield Drive, to the spot where Michael Brown had been shot. Bob paused, removed his fedora, and said a prayer. Then we sat down for the interview. He had no filter. The gems came one after another and I remember thinking, how will I ever edit all of this?

The moment that has stayed with me was when he paused and said that if Michael Brown had valued his life, he would not have risked it, he would not have charged Officer Darren Wilson in a way that put his life in mortal danger. Bob said it with that slight, sad smile of his, a smile that held both the tragedy and the promise. The tragedy that a young man had made choices that put his life at terrible risk. The promise that by naming the truth plainly, Bob was pointing toward something better. He believed the power of truth would force change, that only by seeing the full horror of what had transpired could we begin a turn toward betterment. How do we bring value back to life? That was his question. It was always his question.

Bob Woodson is gone now. He was 89 years old, and he gave every one of those years to the fight. We will never see him and his fedora again. But his work remains unfinished, and it falls to us to carry it on. We must tell the true stories of America, warts and triumphs. We must never turn away from truth, no matter how horrifying. We must strive to show understanding and always reject the politics of dependency and victimhood. We must build on the ground, with the people who live there, and invite everyone, black and white, to work together as equal human beings.

That was Bob’s singular talent, and it is now his challenge to us. May God bless Robert L. Woodson Sr. May we have the strength to carry on his work.

If you wish to learn more about Bob or make a donation, please visit the Woodson Center.

My best,

Eli

There was much debate over my piece on “suicidal empathy” from last Friday:

I received emails from readers sharing their thoughts and I appreciate every one of them. Forgive me if I did not respond due to volume. Debate is one of the bedrock principles that makes this country great. Either your idea wilts or it strengthens. This debate strengthened and deepened my understanding of the white guilt phenomenon. I will likely write and speak more on this debate.

I know I had said we were looking to release White Guilt shortly. However, I had to pull the film about a month ago because my father and I found ways to sharpen the already tight message even more. The pause from the creative process that we had been submerged in for the last three years without break gave us that much needed perspective. All that matters is that the film is even stronger now. And we plan to release in the middle of September.

I believe this film will push many closer to that moment of reckoning, the point where debate gives way to decision. Where we stop asking what went wrong, where we stop betraying our American principles to fear, and start asking what we're willing to do about it. That is ultimately what White Guilt is about. Not just naming the problem, but demanding we face it honestly enough to act. In the film, we see how long my father fought and we need more people to reach that point. This film is for them.

On Sunday morning as the debate continued, I saw this gracious post from Andrew Kolvet who anchors the Charlie Kirk Show:

He then asked me to appear on his show and it was my honor to be invited. It was a great ten minute discussion with him and Blake Neff. I’ve posted two versions:

Below is the version I added captions for those who may have difficulty understanding my deaf accent:

Below is the original YouTube link to the entire show — I didn’t even notice until now that cover has an AI photo of me. We’re in the future now. My segment begins around the 1:35 mark.

I hope you enjoy. And a hearty welcome to all of our new subscribers. We’re glad you’re here.

My best,

Eli

I just heard that Mark Fuhrman died. I wanted to share an excerpt my father wrote about him over twenty years ago, because it was only when I first read it that I understood what was really at play during the Simpson trial.

Back then, I was 18, sitting in a motel in Ashland, Oregon, waiting for the Shakespeare Festival to start, when my sister and I watched the white Bronco cruise down the 405 on TV. That day changed America in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The L.A. riots were only two years in the rearview mirror, and the city was still raw.

By the time the trial got underway, I was in college. I didn’t follow it religiously like everyone else, but Fuhrman’s name kept coming up on cable news and newspaper headlines. Racist cop. N-word. I learned that he had said the N‑word, apparently to a screenwriter several years before the double murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. The media seemed locked in a kind of witch hunt to prove he was racist to the bone. The question hanging over everything was, was his racism so deep that it could contaminate the entire case?

Johnnie Cochran read America perfectly and played the race card like a master. Even if you didn’t like the outcome, you had to admire his craft. It was an epic performance. Cochran is why we still know Mark Fuhrman’s name. What most people don’t know is that Fuhrman had once responded to an earlier domestic dispute years earlier between O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson. He asked Nicole, “Do you want to file a police report?” Nicole said, “No.” Fuhrman told her, “It’s your life.” It became his too.

We feature a 3-4 minute segment on Furhman in the upcoming White Guilt documentary. Below is the excerpt from Shelby Steele’s White Guilt book:

In the O. J. Simpson murder trial, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran used the fact that Detective Mark Fuhrman lied on the witness stand about having ever used the N word to assert that the entire mountain of evidence pointing to Simpson’s guilt was likely contaminated with racism. Here again was the disproportion that global racism always seeks. From a man who lied to conceal an embarrassment, Fuhrman was transformed into someone who could very likely be a craven racist, a person capable of malice aforethought who might prowl Simpson’s property planting evidence against him everywhere. So powerful was global racism in the case that even the possibility that this implausible caricature might be true was given more weight than solid DNA evidence linking Simpson to the murders. The mere suggestion of racism proved the rule of virulent racism. What this meant in this court was that the bar for “reasonable doubt” was completely defined by global racism. And the court itself-like most American institutions in this age of white guilt-was so bereft of moral authority in racial matters that it could not restore proportionality to the proceedings. It could not stop the Fuhrman caricature from carrying the day. Racism was allowed to become a kind of contaminating ether that wafted through and dispelled even the hardest evidence.

Johnnie Cochran succeeded in making the trial a contest between the empirical evidence and global racism, between fact and the reputation of racism for distorting and manipulating fact. What he gambled on was that the court — on television before the world — would have to show itself, above all else, deferential to racism’s distorting power. Though this black lawyer saw racism everywhere, he did not gamble his case on the court’s being racist; he gambled it on the court’s being obsessed with showing its utter freedom from racial bias, its determination to let even a hint of racism disqualify sound evidence. Johnnie Cochran instinctively understood that the court — an American institution in the age of white guilt — was infinitely more concerned with its own moral authority and legitimacy than with the truth. He knew the court would allow global racism to be the standard for “reasonable doubt” not because it was a reasonable standard but because it gave the court— in this trial of a famous black man-much-needed legitimacy where race was concerned. In sum, he knew that the court would essentially forgo the evidence against Simpson simply to prove that it was not biased against Simpson.

Of course, Cochran could not have invented global racism just for use in this trial. It had to have existed already in American culture, and it had to have a self-evident plausibility and power that he could pit against the plausibility of empirical fact. In the age of racism, racism itself had been such a power. White supremacy had been a higher and more sacred law than the law of the courtroom, so that whites who murdered blacks rarely even went to trial or, if they did, walked free no matter the evidence against them.

In 1955 the conviction of the white murderers of Emmet Till (the black teenager famously murdered for looking at a white woman in Mississippi) would have fractured the social order of the segregated South, so the facts in the case meant nothing and the murderers walked. White supremacy had to be served, just as white guilt was served in the Simpson case. Both Till’s killers and Simpson enjoyed a “race card.” Both invoked their race to gain immunity from the law.

Does the historical symmetry of all this amount to historical justice --Simpson’s black race card evening the score with the Till killer’s white race card? I don’t think so. It only makes the point that we have not yet achieved an America in which race cannot suspend the law.

Rest in peace, Mark Fuhrman.

My best,

Eli