Director Eli Steele asks the questions 98 percent of his fellow filmmakers won’t.
His 2018 film “How Jack Became Black” drilled down on the early stages of Identity Politics. His 2020 expose “What Killed Michael Brown?” crushed media narratives surrounding the Missouri teen’s 2014 death.
(Amazon briefly tried to bury “Brown,” but a media blowback coaxed the mega-company to backpedal.)
Steele’s latest film, “White Guilt,” arrives this Fall to battle not just DEI but Marxism, antisemitism and what some have dubbed “suicidal empathy.”
Here’s the official synopsis:
After the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, white America didn’t just feel guilt. It surrendered. That surrender became a weapon. Merit collapsed. Standards fell. Individual responsibility gave way to grievance as power. And the institutions meant to lift people up were quietly repurposed to keep them down.
Shelby Steele, once a black militant who embraced liberation movements across the third world, spent a lifetime watching white guilt metastasize from a campus bargain into a civilizational crisis. Now, after October 7th, he sees the endpoint: a West so disarmed by its own guilt that Hamas’s massacre of a thousand people is called resistance, campus antisemitism goes unpunished, and anti-Western tribalism marches openly in the streets.
What’s at stake is nothing less than America’s greatest gift to the world: the individual. The radical idea that every human being stands equal under the law, fully accountable for his own life, free to rise or fall on his own terms. White guilt doesn’t just undermine that princi-ple. It destroys it, replacing the individual with the tribe, and freedom with the scramble for victim status.
Featuring David Mamet, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Pastor Corey Brooks, Jodi Shaw, Paul Rossi, Jason Riley, Rafael Mangual, Andrew Gutmann, and others who refused to kneel — and paid for it.
White guilt didn’t end racism. It reversed good and evil. The answer isn’t more guilt. It’s the oldest American idea there is: be an individual. Be an American.
Steele shared a director’s statement on the project exclusively to HiT.
“When my father, Shelby Steele, published ‘White Guilt’ in 2006, I thought it should be a film. We even talked about it. But for some reason, fate would not allow it. I wasn’t ready yet,” he writes.
Steele worked extensively in the documentary format over the years, but the issues brought forth by his father didn’t fade. They grew into a “worldwide behemoth” and an “operating system of American life.”
Still, his new project struggled to find its purpose initially. The galling response in many circles to the Oct. 7 terror attacks helped give it focus.
“After watching many in the West embrace Hamas as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. I realized my father’s entire life had tracked the very same arc of this liberation ideology that had only grown more sophisticated, more global, and more dangerous with each passing decade,” he writes.
“Many people today believe it is Marxism, or suicidal empathy, or woke ideology that is undermining the West … those are symptoms. White guilt is the grease that makes all of it possible … Marxism, liberation ideology. DEl, the global embrace of Hamas — none of it travels without white guilt clearing the path. Until we name it clearly and honestly, we have no chance of reversing it.”
“White Guilt” drops Oct. 6 on Amazon, Apple and Google Play.
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