What Does ‘White Guilt’ Mean in 2025?

WSJ ^ | 11/14/2025 | Tunku Varadarajan

[Sir_Humphrey]

It has been almost 20 years since Shelby Steele published the best-known of his five books on race, “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.” A lot has happened since. In 2006 “we hadn’t had President Obama, Ferguson, Trump, George Floyd, DEI, Black Lives Matter, President Biden,” Mr. Steele says. “We also hadn’t had Oct. 7.”

Mr. Steele, 79, is one of America’s foremost black conservative thinkers, recently retired as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is still hard at work, on a film made by his son, Eli Steele, who describes the project as an “update” of the elder Mr. Steele’s 2006 book.

[ClearCase_guy]

bfl

[Jonty30]

It means the same as it always did, in truth, not much.

[rktman]

Uh, I plead NOT guilty.

[armourenthusiast]

I never had any White guilt and refuse to start now.

[kinsman redeemer]

It means racists are using race to divide the Country and accomplish their Marxist goals.

[Jeff Chandler]

WHITE GUILT

[AndyJackson]

White Guilt is not the problem. Our biggest social problem is the broken social contract. There are a number of causes, but a huge one is the fed conspiring with the financial services industry to monetize everything and turn everything into regulated financial transactions that support a rent-seeking managerialist class taking their cut off of everything while undermining the efficient production of goods and services. The commoditization of education to extract payback over the lifetime of students with debts measured on home mortgage sales is a big part of that. Blackrock buying up residential property to actualize the WEF promise that you will own nothing and be happy is another part of it. It's crony capitalist fascism using communism as its agent.

None of this resembles the Austrian school's version of free market capitalism.

The WSJ is a part of all of that and the last place I would go to understand how to MA and the American People including our future generations great again.

[AndyJackson]

Who comes out on top? Marxists, Muslims or WEF style capitalism? Is there a difference or is it just the Convergence of Nihilism.

[BradyLS]

I’m a sinner but I have no guilt over what the malcontents and race hustlers go on and on about. That innocent whites have been sacrificial lambs for decades is the real problem no one wants to talk about, IMHO.

[butlerweave]

White guilt sounds like more leftest Gibberish

[Bon of Babble]

Where White Guilt gets you:

[Bob434]

White Guily means that everytime i eat white chocolate i feel guilty, because of the calories and such.

[bk1000]

White guilt is a liberal trope. I am gladly not one who suffers from such a malady. To think that people could make anyone feel guilty for “being white” is a testament to the fragility of the liberal mind. Blacks between 14 and 35 committed about 50% of murders and other violent crime. No one suggests they should feel any “black responsibility”. As a matter of fact, some would say one is racist for noticing the statistic. It boils down to the liberals feelings of victimhood, and their boiling society down to victims and oppressors. The former is the altruistic warrior for social justice and equity, while the latter is a fat cigar chomping white conservative keeping others down.

[Licensed-To-Carry]

It doesn’t mean a thing to me.

[FLT-bird]

What "White Guilt" means if you're White is that you are a complete sucker and are a weak person who will allow yourself to be browbeaten, bamboozled, insulted, discriminated against and cheated.

If you're a race hustler, White Guilt is your stock in trade. You have literally nothing of value to offer. Your living depends on grifting from White people and to squeeze them for cash, you need to beat them down psychologically. So you do exactly that 24/7.

[Frank Drebin]

The same as it always has...nothing.

[redangus]

We can say nothing, but for being nothing it has been very effective in destroying western culture and replacing it with DEI and Black ghetto culture in this country and Islam in Europe.

I’m 74 and I do not live in the same country I was born in, and “White Guilt” along with the War on Men are largely to blame. When combined and aimed against White males it has been extremely potent.

[55Ford]

Whoever coined the phrase is an ignorant pansy.

[aquila48]

I ain’t got none!