ELI STEELE: California forces companies to mine the past for slavery’s sins
I am a native Californian, and I will never get over the absurdity of seeing California and slavery in the same sentence. I believe I saw it for the first time during the height of the Black Lives Matter unrest. I remembered how I learned in my San Jose elementary school that California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. Yet here we are again, this time with AB 2599, the Truth in Disclosure Act.
On September 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the act into law. "This is a bill that requires large companies that operated before 1965 to search their records for ties to slavery going back to 1849 and then we make it public," Newsom said. "These are insurance policies on enslaved people. Human beings used as collateral, quite literally as collateral for loans."
I first learned about these atrocities as a child, and they made me understand how total the dehumanization of slavery was. This history should be learned, but there is something profoundly different about turning history into a legal obligation, sworn under penalty of perjury. This comes at a time when most California students, including Black students, are underperforming in reading and math. So why does Sacramento want to excavate corporate records from 1849 rather than fix the classrooms today?
California Gov. Gavin Newsom bought his own racial innocence by signing into law the demand that more Black victimization be found. Imagine if Newsom had refused to sign. He would have been blasted as the governor who protected the companies that exploited slaves. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
I believe the point of this investigation is not to discover more history, since we have historians for that, but to unearth confessions that can be commodified as grievances. To see why, you have to understand that White guilt is transactional.
When I mention White guilt, many people tell me they feel none. Of course they don't. You cannot feel guilt for what you have not done. But, that is not White guilt. "White guilt doesn't have anything to do with actual feelings of guilt," my father, Shelby Steele, author, columnist and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, says in our new documentary, "White Guilt." White guilt is the collective guilt that says all Whites must carry the sins of the slave masters and segregationists forever.
An image from filmmaker Eli Steele's new documentary essay, 'White Guilt.' The film was released on Oct. 6, 2026. The filmmaker's father Shelby Steele, author, columnist and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, is pictured above. -->
Activists on the Left have leveraged this accusation for power since the 1960s, and it has produced a terror in many whites, the terror of being tied to this racist past. Those Whites, especially liberal Whites, want innocence most of all, the ability to say, “I am not like those racist whites.”
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Black leaders understood early on, as my father did in the 1960s, that Whites would do anything out of their deep, existential desire for innocence. That is what gives White guilt its transactional nature.
My father has said that White guilt is “quite literally the same thing as Black power.” From Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton to Black Lives Matter, these leaders knew their power was in selling Black victimization. Whites bought innocence with everything from endless programs of dependency to lowered education standards. Both sides of this White guilt — Black power symbiosis get what they want, and that is the trap.
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In order to keep the lucrative White guilt grift alive, Black leaders have to keep Blacks locked into permanent victimhood, and Whites have to remain condemned as eternally guilty. As America continues to make racial progress, this symbiosis has moved further left, and further into the past, in search of more grievances.
Our state is busy chasing the ghost of past crimes while ignoring the very crimes of miseducation taking place today.
Article source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/eli-steele-california-forces-companies-mine-past-slaverys-sins