The first time Shelby Steele used the word “equity” in one of his books—“White Guilt,” published in 2006—he was referring to the value his father had accrued in restoring “three ramshackle homes to neat lower-middle-class acceptability.” This was in 1950s Chicago, a city the author describes as “virulently segregated.” Shelby Steele Sr., a Southern-born black truck driver who’d left school in third grade to work the fields, concealed his homeownership from his white employer. He was afraid he’d be fired for “getting above himself.” No bank would loan the elder Steele money, so he used bricks, discarded lumber, and cast-off...