We live in a White guilt America. For over 60 years, we have held Blacks to a different criterion. We have compromised expectations, lowered our standards, and excused even the most horrific 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. Around 300 teenagers showed up for what was supposed to be a spring afternoon of innocent fun.

Jaden’s father reportedly dropped him off with the words, “I’ll pick you up in three hours.” Less than three hours later, Jaden was dead. A viral video showed him being cornered and beaten by multiple teens as dozens of bystanders filmed. No one intervened. Then he was shot in the chest at point-blank range. The boy who organized the fun never made it home.

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The water balloon fight became what authorities call a “teen takeover,” when gatherings organized by social media spiral into violence. Police say 18-year-old Zahir Davis, an alleged BG4 gang member with a prior 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 get him killed?

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 being killed there.

 In the White guilt racial order, Jaden’s death went mostly unnoticed, like the deaths of many Black youths 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 18-year-old gang members should not roam free with weapons near minors. We know violence demands hard consequences and jail time, not excuses. We know 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 account for about 55% of homicide victims and offenders. Nearly 70% of Black children are born to unmarried mothers or raised in single-parent homes. These numbers exploded from the 1960s, tracking with the rise of White guilt in America.

A woman and boy embrace near a makeshift memorial for 15-year-old Jaden Pierre, who was fatally shot last Thursday night, during a prayer vigil near the area of the fatal shooting at the 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 reject by saying, “I never owned slaves.” But you cannot feel actual guilt for sins you did not commit. White guilt is not an emotion. It is the fear of being called a racist. It is the accusation that America is eternally 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 to the evil of slavery and segregation in the 1960s, laws changed and doors opened. But many Whites also lost the confidence to apply American principles of personal responsibility, equality, and justice to Blacks, especially children.

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If you are White and feel historical guilt, what gives you the right to enforce those same American standards upon Blacks, principles that Whites denied Blacks for centuries?

NYPD-released photos of a suspect in the murder of 15-year-old Jaden Pierre. Photo courtesy of NYPD (New York Police Department)

Out of that loss came a hunger to recover innocence through dissociation from America’s racist past. They could prove they were not racist by turning on America itself. The more aggressively they indicted America, the closer they stood to its morally virtuous victims.

This is how White guilt became policy. Diversity initiatives morphed into DEI departments. Standards were called racist. Discipline became suspect. The driving force was not love for Blacks. It was the moral redemption of Whites. Anyone who dissented was stigmatized as racist. White guilt ruled by fear.

The teen gang members who beat and shot Jaden grew up inside this moral vacuum.

But in the White guilt racial order, Jaden’s death went mostly unnoticed, like the deaths of many Black youths across America. Why? The trigger finger was Black.

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When the White officer killed the Black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, White guilt saw its opportunity and the nation exploded. The same happened with George Floyd. Black Lives Matter put “systemic racism” on repeat and watched the White guilt money pour in, with billions in corporate pledges and riots justified as protest.

But when the shooter is Black and the victim is Black, there is no White guilt to be had. There are no White villains to denounce. Instead, clichéd solutions are offered and the real problems are swept under the rug.

To truly address the problems 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 last 60 years. The White guilt crowd will never admit their wrongness. Instead, they move further left.

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None of them stood with Jaden’s father at the vigil where he wept, “I love you, Jaden… with everything in me.” His mother collapsed in grief.

Human beings, whatever their color, need the same basic things: family, meaning, purpose, standards, consequences, and hope. When those are present, violence goes down. When they are absent, violence rises. Race does not change that equation.

When you treat Black boys as an entitled category with lowered standards, you are denying their full humanity. You are saying, quietly, that they are too fragile for the same expectations, the same accountability, the same hard truths that other kids receive.

That is why building solutions around race and guilt is so poisonous. As long as policy begins with “What do we owe this group?” instead of “What do human beings need to thrive?” we will have more Jadens.

When you treat Black boys as an entitled category with lowered standards, you are denying their full humanity. You are saying, quietly, that they are too fragile for the same expectations, the same accountability, the same hard truths that other kids receive.

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White guilt killed Jaden Pierre. Not because a White person pulled the trigger, but because the White guilt racial order dismantled moral authority, lowered standards, and replaced real justice with theater. 

Within this order, a life like Jaden’s offers no currency for power, and his death has no audience beyond his grieving family and his block. But Jaden was not a symbol of someone else’s innocence. He was a 15-year-old boy who was looking forward to his first summer job.

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