WHY THIS FILM, WHY NOW

Director’s statement

When my father, Shelby Steele, published White Guilt in 2006, I thought it should be a film. We even talked about it. But fate would not allow it. I wasn't ready yet.

Since my father understood white guilt for the first time in the 1960s, it has only grown, and since the publication of the book, it metastasized into a worldwide behemoth. Many Americans believed the Obama presidency heralded a post-racial America. Instead, we had the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the climactic summer of George Floyd. From kindergarten classrooms to corporate boardrooms, nearly every American institution rushed to shield themselves from the white guilt accusation of racism by embracing race and equity as their organizing principle.

The ideas my father had written about in 2006 were no longer a diagnosis. They had become the operating system of American life.

So I quit my job at FOX, and my father and I dove into the film. Then October 7 erupted. When I watched the West embrace Hamas as freedom fighters, I realized that the murder of over a thousand people in southern Israel was being made justifiable by the very white guilt my father had spent his life exposing. White guilt had gone global.

We rebuilt the film from the ground up, working together every day. Our partnership was a joy. What we’ve created is a documentary that is at once historical, contemporary, philosophical, factual, and, at the same time, a frightening update to the 2006 book that reveals just how dangerously tribal the world has become.

Our redemption does not lie in more collective guilt. It lies in the timeless American principles my father's parents marched for: individual dignity, equal accountability under the law, and the radical idea that every human being is capable of freedom. That is why we dedicated this film to America on her 250th birthday.

— Eli Steele, Director