White Guilt Coming Soon

We chose to work with GATHR because we know how important films can be in the culture war.

Dear all,

I hope you’ve been well.

I know some of you have been following the White Guilt documentary journey since my very first Substack post on June 28, 2023, which chronicled how we got robbed in San Francisco during our initial shoot.

Now, after nearly three years, White Guilt is nearly ready to be released to the public. It's already generating serious interest from top thinkers and media platforms across the nation. This isn't just another documentary, but an incisive look at the forces dividing our nation and how we got here. People sense what's at stake.

Here is the first look at the poster:

My father, Shelby Steele, has been fighting the culture wars for decades as both a public intellectual and a writer. In some ways, I was born into this fight because of my family's place in America. When my father wrote White Guilt back in 2006, even he couldn't have predicted how it would evolve through the Black Lives Matter era of the 2010s and grow into the overwhelming force that unleashed massive societal changes after the death of George Floyd. Nothing was left untouched from education to the federal government to how we see ourselves as Americans.

Then October 7th happened and white guilt went international. The attack wasn’t just within America but on a global scale. I made the film Killing America as a precursor to White Guilt, and as a way to understand the changes that were happening.

Now we’ve turned that book into a film. The synopsis: From civil rights warrior and black militant to fearless dissident, Shelby Steele unmasks white guilt as the toxin that poisoned America -- destroying merit, igniting riots, demolishing standards, and now arming global chaos from campus bloodlust to civilizational suicide. When good and evil have been utterly reversed, what happens to those who refuse to surrender?

As my father has warned in his writings: “White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic.”

Here’s what makes this release different: We’re partnering with GATHR to bring White Guilt to theaters in select cities nationwide and on video.

We chose to partner with GATHR because it’s not a traditional distributor or streaming platform. It’s a system designed for films that already have an audience but can’t rely on institutional permission to reach it.

Instead of a top-down release controlled by studios, platforms, or theater chains, GATHR operates bottom-up. If people in a specific city, church, school, or community want to see the film, they can request and organize a screening themselves. When enough demand exists, the infrastructure is there to make it happen, whether in a theater or as a hosted virtual event.

In a culture war where access is often quietly restricted, that distinction matters. It means White Guilt doesn’t rise or fall based on whether it’s deemed “acceptable” by gatekeepers, but on whether people are willing to show up for it.

Those of you who supported the release of What Killed Michael Brown? in October 2020, on the heels of the Summer of George Floyd, will remember how suffocating those times were. When that film came out and turned the narrative of what happened at Ferguson on its head, it broke the dam by giving many people the courage to speak out—from major podcasters to college students who became disenchanted with Black Lives Matter. That film, initially banned by Amazon, became the first major pushback against that George Floyd wave in this never-ending culture war.

We believe White Guilt will serve a similar purpose today as America becomes more tribal than ever and attacks on whites, along with “white-adjacent” asians and jews, seem to never relent.

This is your chance to be part of something bigger than just watching a film. You can bring this conversation to your community. You can make change.

In this world where good is evil and evil is good, what happens to those who refuse to surrender?

Subscribe here for updates.

All my best,

Eli