Katharine Birbalsingh's White Guilt Speech

Hi all,

The idea of white guilt has been making the rounds around the UK lately. Last week, I discussed the role of white guilt in the Henry Nowak tragedy as well as the brutal attempted beheading in Belfast with Jenny Holland. On Friday, I was sent a video of Katharine Birbalsingh’s speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and I quickly understood why. I have known of her for years as an education reform advocate and the founder and headmistress of Michaela Community School. If you would like to watch her speech without my input — I strongly encourage it — it is here in full:

The woman known as Britain’s strictest headmistress stood in front of a room and said the thing that almost no one will say out loud. She recounted the actions of the police officers during Henry Nowak’s dying moments and said, “this is not cruelty or incompetence. This is white guilt.”

She named the largely invisible force that has been undermining the West for decades. My father, Shelby Steele, has spent his life arguing that white guilt is the most powerful and destructive force in the Western world, precisely because it halts the mechanisms that make the West work. Katharine shows us exactly how. The officers standing over Henry Nowak were, in her words, "terrified of being seen as racist." That terror did not feel like cowardice to them. It felt like conscience. It wore the costume of virtue — the look of a good person refusing to oppress — while a man died at their feet. That is white guilt: fear dressed as morality, powerful enough to override the most basic human duty.

Katharine then reveals how white guilt has transformed the classroom. It was the grease that allowed race-based Marxist ideologies into the classroom, where children are taught to sort the world into “those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors.” History serves only to indict the present. Children are “taught through an oppressor lens,” until, as she says, young people are “unable to see the world in any other terms.” And the emotion that runs the whole machine is the terror of being called a racist. They are “desperate not to be seen as racist.”

No child wants to be on the side of the oppressor. We documented that in the Killing America documentary several years ago. When you think for a second about what is actually taking place in the classroom, the immorality becomes undeniable. Activist teachers, in the name of white guilt morality, are reducing students to skin colors and making them pay for the sins and victimizations of their fathers. And those children grow up. The officers who stood frozen over Henry Nowak, terrified of being seen as racist, were taught to see the world this way decades ago. We have been teaching it for a generation now, and the damage is profound: the people sworn to protect him had been trained to fear the collective white guilt more than they feared failing him.

What makes Katharine’s speech feel like a drink of water during these muddied times is that she is not willing to accept the decline in our society any longer. She also refuses to accept the silence of those around her any longer. A person who surrenders to fear says nothing, does nothing, and so the decline continues. By naming white guilt as the true evil, she lays the burden at our feet. What are we going to do about it?

She demands that we raise children who see themselves as “morally responsible beings with agency, whatever their race, whatever their religion.” The key word here is responsibility.

My father once wrote, “In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism.”

Demanding responsibility from everyone grants them agency and that is at the heart of what makes one an individual. That is the one thing white guilt cannot survive, a free human being. It is exactly what my father chose, decades ago, when he turned away from grievance and toward responsibility. He has been making Katharine’s argument my whole life. My father is very thankful that Katharine exists and only wishes there were more of her.

At the end of her speech she says, “Saving the West ain’t easy.” She then asks her audience to teach their children as if “we’re going to war.” She is right that it is a war and she is right about where the front line is: the classroom.

My best,

Eli