We live in a white guilt America. For more than sixty years, we have held blacks to a different standard. We have compromised expectations, lowered our standards, and excused even the most heinous acts of violence because we fear being called racist. It is black children like Jaden Pierre who often pay the price.
On April 16, 2026, fifteen-year-old Jaden Pierre helped organize a water balloon fight at Roy Wilkins Park in Queens. He promoted it on social media. About 300 teens showed up for what was supposed to be a spring afternoon of innocent fun.
Jaden’s father reportedly dropped him off, saying, “I’ll pick you up in three hours.” Less than three hours later, Jaden was dead. A viral video showed him being cornered and punched by several teenagers as dozens of bystanders filmed. No one intervened. He was then shot in the chest at close range. The boy who organized the fun never came home.
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The water balloon fight became what authorities are calling a “teenage takeover” when social media-organized rallies turned into violence. Police say 18-year-old Zahir Davis, an alleged BG4 gang member with a previous feud against Jaden, was pistol-whipping him when the gun went off.
How was a 15-year-old supposed to know that organizing a water balloon fight would cost him his life?
Community leaders blamed gun violence and called for more after-school programs. Roy Wilkins Park already had after-school programs. It didn’t stop Jaden from getting killed there.
In the white racial guilt order, Jaden’s death went largely unnoticed, as did the deaths of many black youth across America. Why? The trigger finger was black.
The evil of white guilt is that it can never look the real problems in the eye. We know that 18-year-old gang members are not allowed to roam freely with weapons around minors. We know that violence requires harsh consequences and prison time, not excuses. We know that children need fathers, mothers, discipline and standards. Yet we keep missing the problem.
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Blacks make up roughly 13% of the population and are responsible for approximately 55% of homicide victims and perpetrators. Nearly 70% of black children are born to unmarried mothers or grow up in single-parent homes. These numbers exploded starting in the 1960s, following along with the rise of white guilt in America.
A woman and a boy embrace at a makeshift memorial for 15-year-old Jaden Pierre, who was fatally shot last Thursday evening, during a prayer vigil near the area of the fatal shooting in Roy Wilkins Park in the Queens borough of New York City, U.S., April 20, 2026. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)
When some hear “white guilt,” they imagine personal shame, something they can dismiss by saying, “I never owned slaves.” But you cannot actually feel guilty for sins you have not committed. White guilt is not an emotion. It is the fear of being called a racist. It is the accusation that America is perpetually racist at its core.
When my father, the author, columnist, documentary filmmaker and former Hoover Institution Fellow Shelby Steele, first wrote about white guilt in the 1980s, he was describing what happened to America’s moral backbone after the civil rights era. When White America finally admitted the evils of slavery and segregation in the 1960s, the laws changed and doors opened. But many whites also lost the confidence to apply America’s principles of personal responsibility, equality, and justice to blacks, especially children.
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If you are white and feel historically guilty, what gives you the right to impose those same American norms on blacks, principles that whites have denied blacks for centuries?
NYPD has released photos of a suspect in the murder of 15-year-old Jaden Pierre. Photo courtesy of NYPD (New York Police Department)
From that loss came a hunger to restore innocence by distancing ourselves from America’s racist past. They could prove they weren’t racist by turning against America itself. The more aggressively they denounced America, the closer they were to the morally virtuous victims.
This is how white guilt became policy. Diversity initiatives turned into DEI departments. Norms were called racist. Discipline became suspect. The driving force was not love for blacks. It was the moral redemption of the whites. Anyone who disagreed was stigmatized as racist. White guilt ruled by fear.
The teenage gang members who beat and shot Jaden grew up in this moral vacuum.
But in the white racial guilt order, Jaden’s death went largely unnoticed, as did the deaths of many black youth across America. Why? The trigger finger was black.
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When the white officer killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, white guilt saw its opportunity and the nation exploded. The same thing happened to George Floyd. Black Lives Matter put “systemic racism” on repeat and watched white debt money pour in, with billions in corporate pledges and riots justified as protest.
But if the shooter is black and the victim is black, there is no white guilt. There are no white villains to condemn. Instead, clichéd solutions are offered and the real problems are swept under the rug.
To truly address the issues that led Jaden to his death would require a real reckoning with the path of destruction that white guilt has left in its wake over the past sixty years. The white guilty crowd will never admit they are wrong. Instead, they continue to the left.
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None of them stood with Jaden’s father at the wake, where he cried, “I love you, Jaden… with everything in me.” His mother collapsed in grief.
People, regardless of skin color, need the same basic things: family, meaning, purpose, norms, consequences, and hope. When these are present, violence decreases. When they are absent, violence increases. Race doesn’t change that equation.
When you treat black boys as an entitled category with lower standards, you deny their full humanity. You quietly say that they are too vulnerable to the same expectations, the same responsibility, the same hard truths that other children receive.
That’s why building solutions around race and guilt is so toxic. As long as the policy starts with: ‘What do we owe this group?’ instead of, “What do people need to thrive?” we will have more Jadens.
When you treat black boys as an entitled category with lower standards, you deny their full humanity. You quietly say that they are too vulnerable to the same expectations, the same responsibility, the same hard truths that other children receive.
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White guilt killed Jaden Pierre. Not because a white man pulled the trigger, but because the white racial guilt order dismantled moral authority, lowered standards, and replaced real justice with theater.
Within this order, a life like Jaden’s offers no money for power, and his death has no audience outside his grieving family and his bloc. But Jaden wasn’t a symbol of someone else’s innocence. He was a 15-year-old boy looking forward to his first summer job.
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