Editors Note: You may be interested in listening to The Chicago Way Podcast featuring a discussion of “White Guilt” with guest Dr. Mendoza.

 

By Pastor Corey Brooks

October 21^st, 2026

On November 5th, I will load up a bus with neighbors from my Woodlawn community on Chicago’s South Side and drive north to New Trier High School to see a documentary called “White Guilt,” being hosted by community group New Trier Neighbors. I am a pastor and community organizer. I run Project H.O.O.D., a community center in one of Chicago’s most challenged neighborhoods. I appear in the film. And I cannot wait to see it with my neighbors, and this includes the North Shore families who have been told not to go.

That’s right. I have heard that there are people in this community who have said they will protest this screening. Which brings me to what white guilt actually is, because I think most people misunderstand it.

White guilt is not the feeling you get when you do something wrong. It is not personal. Almost no white person alive today owned slaves or enforced segregation. You cannot feel guilty for what you did not do.

White guilt is something entirely different. It is the collective accusation placed on all white people for the racial sins of America’s past. That is why the word “white” is placed before “guilt.” White guilt is the terror of being seen as racist, of being seen as part of that racist past. And to escape that terror, people perform their innocence. They protest. They condemn. They dissociate from America herself. They call films dangerous without watching them. They sort everyone around them into the righteous and the racist. This performance is white guilt. And its purpose is not to help anyone. Its purpose is to make the performer feel innocent.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

When well-meaning people from the North Shore come down to my community center in Woodlawn, they tell me how much they care and want to help. Then, they talk about DEI programs and systemic racism and redlining. It is true that we’ve had all that, but isn’t it curious that they conveniently ignore the post-60s liberalism that devastated our communities with programs of dependency? When I tell them that I urgently need to get a fifteen-year-old boy a good education and a job so he can stay away from the gangs, they never have much to say. There’s often an awkward silence. Then they go back to the racial justice stuff they learned in books, ignoring the realities right in front of their eyes.

They came to feel good about themselves. Nothing in Woodlawn changed because of them. White guilt expends enormous energy and produces very little. It treats the people it claims to help as permanent victims who need to be rescued rather than as individuals who need opportunity and the chance to build their own lives.

I saw this firsthand at New Trier High School in 2017. I attended a school board meeting for a controversial day of programming. The entire day was built around one side of the racial argument, the side that says America is irredeemably racist and that the only response is collective guilt and collective action. I suggested they include conservative voices like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Bob Woodson, because the ideas of personal responsibility and individual agency were completely absent. For saying that, I was snapped at and hissed at. I was a black man who had strayed from where they thought I belonged.

That is the trap white guilt sets. It decides in advance what a black person is allowed to think. If you agree with the program, you are a symbol of the oppressed. If you don’t, you are a race-traitor. Either way, you are not a person. You are a role in someone else’s story.

The filmmaker of “White Guilt,” Eli Steele, knows this trap well. Though he never advertises it, he is black, Jewish, Native American and deaf. For this film, he spent three years traveling the country, listening to people’s stories and putting them on the screen. The people who want to protest this screening have not watched a single minute of his film. Think about that. They only have optics to go off. All they’re doing is projecting. They announced their verdict and they quoted their racial justice authorities. They protected their own innocence by demonizing the rest of us as vile and that was their objective all along.

That is how white guilt works. It does not require evidence. The accusation is the verdict.

America makes progress when it chooses open debate over approved conclusions. The opposition to this screening is not about protecting anyone. It is about maintaining the moral order that white guilt requires, an order in which certain ideas cannot be heard because hearing them might disturb the performance of innocence.

I want people to see this film because it names something that has genuinely hurt my community. The politics of white guilt have taught a generation of young people in Woodlawn that they are permanent victims of an irredeemable system. That story robs them of agency. It tells them that nothing they do matters as much as the color of their skin and the history attached to it.

I have watched that story take root in young people who have the talent and the drive to build remarkable lives. And I have watched white guilt — performed by people who mean well and change nothing — give them the opposite of what they need.

What my neighborhood needs is not more of this collective, performative guilt with real world consequences. It needs more people willing to treat every young person who walks through our doors as an individual with a future worth fighting for.

Come to New Trier on November 5th. Get tickets here. See the film. Think for yourself. I will be there with a busload of neighbors from the South Side who rarely get to visit up that way. We would love to meet you and discuss the film. In other words, “Be an American,” as the film trailer says.

-30-

Pastor Corey Brooks, known as the “Rooftop Pastor,” is the founder and Senior Pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago and the CEO of Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny), the church’s local mission. He gained national attention for his 94-day and 343-day rooftop vigils to transform the notorious “O-Block,” once known as Chicago’s most dangerous block, into #OpportunityBlock. Learn more at ProjectHOOD.org (https://projecthood.org/).