Eli Steele and his father, Shelby, filming at the Nat Turner marker in Southampton County, Virginia.
ABOUT THE FILM
A Father’s Argument, a Son’s Film
White Guilt is a documentary essay by Eli Steele, drawn from the lifework of his father, Shelby Steele. It is the story of a man who saw the evil that others could not, or would not, and who named it and refused to back off of it for fifty years.
Dr. Shelby Steele
AUTHOR AND SUBJECT OF THE FILM
Shelby Steele is a renowned author and documentary filmmaker who has long specialized in race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He has written extensively on race in American society and on the unintended consequences of modern social programs.
His 2006 bestseller White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era is now reexamined in the new documentary. In 2020, he released the acclaimed documentary What Killed Michael Brown?, which became a top-ten film on Amazon for four weeks.
His work has earned wide recognition. In 1990, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. His writing for the 1990 PBS documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was honored with an Emmy, a Writers Guild Award, and the San Francisco Film Festival Award. In 2004, President George W. Bush presented him with the National Humanities Medal, and in 2006 he received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America. His other books include Shame, A Dream Deferred, and A Bound Man.
Eli Steele
DIRECTOR
Eli Steele is an award-winning documentary filmmaker known for tackling provocative cultural and social issues. His latest project is White Guilt, made with his father, an adaptation and update of Shelby’s 2006 book on the corrosive effects of white guilt on American life.
A graduate of Claremont McKenna College and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, his notable works include Killing America, on the rise of antisemitism in Bay Area schools, What Killed Michael Brown?, which reached number one on Amazon’s documentary charts, and How Jack Became Black, on identity politics and the rising multiracial population. His narrative feature What’s Bugging Seth won top honors at twelve film festivals, and his MTV Network pilot, Katrina, earned him the Breakthrough Filmmakers Award. He has produced more than twenty short documentaries for FOX, along with the Rooftop Revelations series, and has written for Fox News, Quillette, The Free Press, and Newsweek.