On Saturday, September 12, the University of Texas football team, led by Arch Manning, erased a twenty-point deficit in the fourth quarter and beat top-ranked Ohio State. In the stands by the end zone, someone recorded a video of the triumphant go-ahead score, and the camera whips from the field to the stands, where the student body erupts in a frenzied celebration. The next day, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, looked at a screen grab that was taken from that video and what he saw was not a cluster of celebrating students but faces that happened to be of South Asian descent. He posted on X: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
I saw French’s post on my X feed, and I looked at the photo. I did not see what he saw. I’m a huge sports fan, and what I saw were Americans wearing the colors of their university, dressed in cowboy hats, and their faces showed the exhilaration of having seen what looked like an inevitable defeat turned into an improbable victory. French looked at the same photo and decided that these students were the problem. Based on what information other than skin color? I posted: “This is straight up racism.”
French doubled down. On the radio the next day, he dismissed the people who objected to his post as “less conservative” than him. A year ago, he called the day that SNAP benefits were set to lapse, “National Chimp Out Day.” His slur was aimed at blacks, as if food assistance was solely a black problem. Whites make up 35% of recipients. Blacks make up 26%; they do use the program at a higher rate than their share of the population. But French reached for the slur instead of making a valid argument.
To be fair, French has not always doubled down. When he was still chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, he posted an X poll asking his followers who was a bigger threat to America, Jews or Muslims. After an outcry, he deleted the post. This man also called Afghan refugees and Muslims third-world savages and floated the deportation of Native Americans. There is a pattern here, and the pattern is a man who mistakes cruelty for courage.
I have never shied away from debate about the key issues affecting our nation and I believe our nation has the right to debate issues from open borders to admissions policies at our universities. But there is a difference between arguing these issues and judging brown faces in a crowd.
Sean Davis, the head of the Federalist, defended French. Davis wrote that white male enrollment had fallen from 28% in 2005 to 12% today while the international student enrollment rose from 4% to over 30. A debate over these numbers is valid and welcomed in most circles. But then Davis slides from policy to race when he points out that entire Texas cities from Frisco to Coppell look more like New Delhi than old Texas and calls it the systemic displacement and replacement of Americans, specifically white men, by foreigners. At that point the argument is no longer about admissions policy or visa reform but about who belongs. And the answer that Davis implies is written in skin. (I saw X posts where at least two faces in that infamous photo have identified themselves as American born.)
My father is no stranger to this world. He was once that face in the crowd. Whites in the 1960s warned against letting blacks like him advance in society. They worried that letting my grandfather into the Chicago unions would deny whites their jobs. My father has navigated this world and held no grudges and never sought revenge despite being a victim of individual white racism and state racism. He was told he could never be an American like the whites.
But my father understood better than those so-called Americans that the American identity was not racial. It belonged to those who seized it. It belonged to those who chose to discipline their lives in order to live by its principles. There are many who call themselves Americans because of their whiteness, but that is blood and soil thinking; that is tribalism, and America is the land of the individual.
My father seized America for himself. He made himself her student. He chose to live by her values and principles and none other. He paid the price for that because he chose to live by America at a time of entrenched and brutal identity politics. The Left mercilessly forced Americans into race boxes, and each box came with an assigned politics. Anyone who went against the politics of that race box was cast out as a race traitor. So my father became a race traitor, but he was still an American.
It is precisely because of his ruthless devotion to America that he began speaking the truth about race at a time when so much of the nation ran for cover or silenced themselves. Since the 1980s, my father has stuck his neck out and said it was wrong for the Left to condemn all whites with collective guilt for America’s past racial sins. Over and over, he said it was morally wrong for the son to pay for the sins of the father. He decried policies that sought to racially engineer diversity because he knew it came at the expense of other skin colors. He demanded that we move from racial engineering to development as the solution to inequities in our society. Most of all, he argued that we are a nation of individuals, and with that comes the burden of freedom and all of its responsibilities.
That is the difference between my father and French. My father attacked the idea. French attacks the people. My father has spent his entire life arguing that a human being should never be reduced to his skin. French reduced a snapshot of students to race and deluded himself into thinking it was a stand.
Where was French all these years? He was on the sidelines. He admits it in his post. He found his voice only once the culture shifted far enough that claims grounded in blood looked like courage. He represents a rising element on the Right that believes conservatives are spineless losers who stand for nothing. There is truth to this. My father has seen conservatives give in to white guilt over and over. Countless times he has seen them talk tough on policies only to fold or compromise. Perhaps the most famous example was when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ruling on Affirmative Action in the Grutter case, said we need it for 25 more years until the country is in a better place. Well, the country didn’t get better. So understandable frustration is warranted with the often spineless Right.
But it is a profound mistake to call allegiance to the American individual the act of surrender. It is a mistake to call the slide into tribalism an act of courage. Picking up the tool of race requires no intellect or discipline whatsoever. It is the tool of the weak, and it always will be.
Not everyone on the Right lost their American discipline. Ben Shapiro saw the same photo and said: “Wait, why are we supposed to be upset that some kids of Indian ethnicity were cheering the UT football team on Saturday? WTF?” This was the reflex of a man who sees individuals before race boxes. Another writer from Texas, going by Political Sock, wrote: “You know what people should be smart enough to figure out? That each one of these INDIVIDUALS has a unique story.” Seeing the individual is not weakness. It is the entire moral achievement of the West, and it is the thing my father gave his entire life to defend.
My father fought his battles largely alone, the loneliness of the black conservative. Whites knew something had gone off the rails with identity politics all these years and they felt that charge of racism being weaponized against them and couldn’t articulate why. Even after my father wrote the problem into reality, far too many whites chose to stay silent and let him carry the argument alone. Only a few, like Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson, stood strong. The silence of those who agreed but said nothing created the vacuum that men like French are rushing to fill. These men have concluded that because the principled argument was made quietly, it must have failed. So they have reached for the Left’s own weapon, tribalism, and called it courage. They have only made themselves its mirror.
Some will say that my father’s conservatism failed, but that’s the argument of the weak who wish to descend into tribalism. Decades ago, my father articulated the evil of white guilt and warned that it would lead to the ugly tribalism of today. He warned for decades that the racism of the Left would lead to the weak people on the Right picking it up in return. The reason why the Left marched so far through the institutions and the tribal Right is now ascendant is because too many of us remain silent. Too many of us doubt ourselves. Too many of us wait for that Superman to ride to our rescue. But nobody’s coming. America has always been about us and that is the burden upon every one of our shoulders.
French is counting on our cowardice. My father spent fifty years proving that the American individual was worth defending, at personal cost, when it wasn’t popular, when no one stood with him. That is what courage looks like. Bo French is its counterfeit.
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Eli Steele is a filmmaker and his newest film, White Guilt, releases on October 6.
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