White guilt is an attempt by today’s Progressives to regain the sense of moral authority they once had during the desegregation protests of the 1960s. This is the gist of Shelby Steele’s psychologically insightful 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. The guilt, writes Steele, is a secular version of original sin—cloaked variously