Eli Steel: New York Shooting Shows How White Guilt Erases Personal Responsibility

The shooting of Oscar Belgal on Marble Hill, New York, has sparked a national debate over white guilt, individual responsibility and immigrant accountability.

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The school had just opened in Marble Hill, a small area of Manhattan in the Bronx neighborhood. It was a little in the afternoon. on Oct. 8 when Oscar Belgal, 28, picked up his five-year-old son and began backing his Honda CR-V into a parking lot on a busy street.

The police camera noticed what happened next. Two men in plain clothes approached Belgal's SUV with their guns drawn - one on the driver's side and the other on the front. They were ICE officers. More agents were part of the operation, and New York City Mayor Zahran Mamdani later noted that officers surrounding the car were wearing construction vests and masks.

Belgal responded by pulling the SUV forward out of space. As he did so, one of the officers punched and broke the driver's side window, but Belgal managed to get out of the camera's view.

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ICE officers encountered Belgal about a block away. According to ICE officials, Belgal refused orders to exit the vehicle, weaponized his SUV and attacked two government vehicles. Beljal's defense lawyer disagreed, saying that Beljal fled in terror to protect her son from unknown gunmen. Initial NYPD street camera footage did not capture the moment of the shooting, but investigators later determined that a bullet had gone through Belgall's windshield. At least one officer fired seven shots, hitting Belgal in the neck below his left ear. His son, who was sitting in the back seat, was not injured.

The FBI, Homeland Security investigators and the Bronx District Attorney's office have all opened investigations into the shooting.

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But there is a second story here, one that shows where we are as a nation.

A few hours after the shooting, Oscar Belgal was no longer a man, but a person. He became an icon. And the people who turned him into an icon did so by losing what makes a man a man: responsibility for what he does.

First, Belgal was no stranger to the judicial system. In 2023, he was driving with two passengers in the back seat when he turned around, pointed a gun at them and demanded their jewelry, according to a criminal complaint. They complied. Belgal pleaded guilty and received five years probation. In December 2025, he was charged with ten counts of drug distribution. He pleaded not guilty and was released on supervised release. Federal authorities say he is in the country illegally and claim he has ties to the Trinitarios gang. Homeland Security Secretary Marquin Mullin stated that Belgall fled when ICE tried to arrest him earlier in September.

When New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch released that record, the reaction on the left was to measure it. Instead, its leading figures dismissed Belgeal's entire criminal history as irrelevant.

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Darialisa Avila-Chevalier, Democratic Socialist of America candidate for Congress in New York's 13th District, went on Hassan Peeker's stream to talk about the shooting. When Peker asked about Belgal's criminal history, he said, "To me, it doesn't even matter." He then directed his anger at Tish, accusing him of trying to "make Oscar look bad". He demanded his resignation. He then asked the audience to "put yourself in Oscar's shoes." Masked men were coming up to his car and he said, "You run." "I'm sorry, you're protecting your child." He ended with "F--- ICE and repeal it."

What struck me was his moral outrage. He was outraged that telling a man's background matter-of-factly was now tantamount to "owning" him. All that mattered to Chevalier was that he was an immigrant, a Dominican like himself, a member of an oppressed group, and that he was being chased by men with guns who were ICE.

In my new film, "White Guilt," my father, Shelby Steele, author, columnist, and fellow at the Hoover Institution, shows how he created a leftist world where the oppressed can never be held accountable. He explains that he went to a black power rally on the South Side of Chicago to hear comedian and activist Dick Gregory:

"Gregory argued that a racist America has given us responsibility but denied us the freedom to do so much," my father says in the film. Gregory had a Marxist view of racism as a systemic force that made responsibility irrelevant in the fight against oppression.

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Then Lyndon Johnson stood up at Howard University and said, you don't take a man in chains, bring him to the starting line and tell him he's free to run. "By implication, Johnson agreed with Gregory," says my father. "Suddenly, if you were a black person living in this new age of white guilt, you couldn't be expected to have the same responsibilities as everyone else."

The belief that Gregory preached and Johnson blessed, that oppression and responsibility are irrelevant, became one of the central tenets of the white guilt racial order we live under today. White guilt is not the guilt a person feels about what he has done. It's not personal, which is why I'm tired of hearing people say "I have no white guilt."

White guilt is the collective guilt the left attributes to all white people for America's past racial sins. What it produces is not remorse but terror, the terror of being called a racist and losing your moral authority. To escape this horror, the "oppressor" reclaims his innocence by demanding something from the "oppressed" and the "oppressed" gain power as long as they remain victims. This is how responsibility became, as my father called it, "bad morals" and accountability became racism.

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Today, the "tyrannical system" is America itself, and ICE is its face. And what the formula needs most is a symbol.

Activists like Avila Chevalier dehumanize the oppressed by dehumanizing them, then wielding what remains as a cudgel against an oppressive system. When Belgal's record was expunged, all that remained was an immigrant father shot by ICE with his young son in the car. Between them, Avila Chevalier and Mayor Zahran Mamdani called for the abolition of ICE, the resignation of the police commissioner, the release of Belgal and a halt to citywide immigration enforcement. They didn't ask Oscar Belgal for anything.

The DSA often calls itself the People's Party, but listen to the way it talks about the people it claims to defend. Its word for them is almost always the oppressed, the victims and the poor. Their value to the movement is not their individual humanity, but what they collectively symbolize. If the DSA derives its power from these symbols of oppression and milking white guilt, why would it ever surrender this power?

There is one innocent in all of this: the five-year-old boy sitting in the back seat. His mother says he has nightmares and doesn't talk despite being talkative.

The young boy will grow up with two stories from that fateful afternoon. In one version, his father is seen as a victim, nothing more, and the world owes him. In the other story, her father is a person who has made choices, some of them bad, and yet has the chance to improve his life in some way. This is the second story that gives the young boy a real chance at life.

An image from filmmaker Eli Steele's new documentary, "White Guilt," featuring his father, author, columnist, and Hoover Fellow Shelby Steele. This movie was released on October 6, 2026.

Belgal's lawyer said the first thing his client asked was if his son was okay. These details show us that Oscar Belgal is a man with a conscience and a man with a conscience can take responsibility for his choices.

The same lawyer said that "regardless of whether a person has a criminal record or not, shooting the father is not legal and there is nothing wrong with it." An investigation will decide whether the shooting was legal. and due process that protects everyone within this country, including those who are not citizens.

So let the court judge the officer who shot and Oscar Belgal as well. Avila the knight cried that this made him evil. Those who believe in American principles can be said to treat him like a man who is in charge of his own life.

Activists will never allow it. Their power in white America depends on the Belgian Oscar remaining a permanent symbol of oppression.

But what is the benefit of dehumanization?

Eli Steele is a filmmaker. His latest film "White Sin" was released on October 6. His previous film What Killed Michael Brown?

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