Exile on Sesame Street: The terrible glamour of white guilt

As children, most of us were fascinated by storybooks featuring magic. Few kids didn’t fantasize about being able to move objects with their minds or see the future or cast spells that would make their parents blind to a messy room.

It’s probably a power fantasy for young people making their way through a world that seems unfair. Wouldn’t it be great to speak an incantation and make the adults have to obey you?

'Sesame Street' depicted American kids — Asian, Latino, white, black — doing kid things together. And most of my childhood experiences were like that.

But that’s not what magic really is, I’ve learned these past five or 10 years.

Magic words

Magic is real, and spells work. But they’re not “supernatural.” Real magic is words and how we deploy them, when we speak them, who we speak them to, and who we never say them in front of.

Magic is the ability to use mere words to hijack another person’s mind and convince him of falsehoods or compel him to act against his own interest or safety, often happily.

You can see it in the history of the word “glamour.” Today, the term means the kind of beauty or charisma that we expect from rich and famous people. We say of them, of their clothes, of their preternatural good looks, that they are “glamorous.”

But the word started out meaning a specific type of magical spell. This is going to surprise you — the word “glamour” came from old Scots, and it’s a corruption of the word “grammar.”

Yes, it means that people recognized that words are magic, words have power. In the 1600s, you might be said to be suffering under a glamour, a spell cast on you to make you believe an ugly person was beautiful or a simpleton was a genius.

Under a spell

In 2025, we are living in an age of universal magical spells, all from words. We are suffering under a particularly powerful glamour. So powerful is this spell that even people who know it exists will deny that it exists. They will often attack you and say you have malicious intentions if you point to the magical spell.

That spell is white guilt. It’s no use saying “uh-uh” in your mind or objecting and calling your correspondent a “racist” for pointing this out. The spell is real, it has deranged us, and everyone — every single person without exception — knows it. Since at least the 1960s, Americans have become convinced of the following:

• All misfortune experienced by black people is the result of white racial hatred.
• Every “system” — from school to employment to the IRS — is “systemically racist.”
• White people are born with a white-specific original sin called “racism.” White people are born racists, cannot help but be racists, can never not be racists, and must atone publicly and pathetically for their “racism” for the rest of their lives.
• White people alive today must pay for the sins of other dead white people, even those unrelated to them, who may have owned slaves.
• The only reason black America has such appalling rates of illiteracy, crime, fatherlessness, and antisocial, violent behavior is because of white racism.

All of that is a lie.

State savior complex

With the introduction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Program, black well-being has plunged on every measure. As Sam Jacobs writes in "Black America Before LBJ: How the Welfare State Inadvertently Helped Ruin Black Communities":

The biggest problem resulting from the Great Society is the breakdown of the black family. This is a sensitive subject, but one that must be broached to fully understand the devastating impact that the Great Society has had on the black community in the United States.

In 1965, when the Great Society began in earnest following the massive electoral landslide reelection of LBJ, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among the black community was 21 percent. By 2017, this figure had risen to a whopping 77 percent.

All you need to do is look at FBI statistics to see that black Americans, just 13% of the population, commit the majority of violent crimes. “Disparate impact” indeed.

The hate u give

Open racial hatred of whites by blacks has become normal in America, with the help of white Democrats and liberals who applaud the rudeness and physical aggression against other whites.

The glamour has infantilized black people to the point where they genuinely believe they’re being treated with “racism” if they’re expected to obey the same social and legal codes the rest of us are.

Open social media and you are flooded with videos of black people melting down and screaming at store employees, shouting obscenities in restaurants, or pummeling the daylights out of white peers in public school. It’s not just confirmation bias; everyone sees it, and everyone knows it.

Diss not, lest you be dissed

The last time I had to ask young black men to move their car — they had parked in a travel lane, blocking the egress of a line of drivers — they sprang from their vehicle and threatened to show me what “bitches” like me got for dissing them.

The glamour has a built-in mechanism to keep itself in force: telling the truth about bad black behavior only seems to strengthen the spell. Try pointing out behavior from a black person that wouldn’t be tolerated from a white person, and you’ll have both whites and blacks tell you that your very observation itself is racist. It’s literally lunatic; there is no talking to this calcified mindset.

Making a killing

But it is getting harder to deny that we have a problem with black bad behavior and white enabling. On April 2, 2025, 17-year-old black teen Karmelo Anthony allegedly killed 17-year-old white teen Austin Metcalf. Anthony admitted what he did on the spot to the cops. He claimed Metcalf had put his hands on him, but it’s obvious that Anthony felt “dissed” when Metcalf correctly told him he was seated in someone else’s spot.

The very next day, the slain boy’s white father went on local television telling the world he forgave the killer and then went on several tirades against sympathetic onlookers, accusing them of making the killing into a race issue.

Well, it very likely was a race issue.

Soon after, the alleged killer’s family had the gall to hold a press conference about the fundraiser they launched to help their poor, misunderstood, knife-wielding son. Through their new spokesman, Dominique Alexander — a convicted felon whose charges include forgery, theft, assault, and shaking and hitting a 2-year-old — the family accused the Metcalfs of “racism.”

Yes. The family of the boy who allegedly knifed a teen to death in cold blood stood in front of cameras and implied that he and his family had it coming. It was more astonishingly brazen than the October 13, 1995, spectacle of black "Oprah Winfrey Show" audience members cheering as a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend.

N-word salad

A month after the killing of Austin Metcalf, the internet went berserk over a video depicting white Minnesota mother Shiloh Hendrix calling a young Somali immigrant “the N-word” (term used under duress; the magical glamour around that word has made it imprudent to utter it even as reported speech). Hendrix claimed the boy was rifling through her baby bag and stealing.

It's worth noting that the original incident was not caught on camera. The footage we saw was taken immediately afterward. It came from the phone of the child's 30-year-old uncle Sharmake Beyle Omar, also a Somali immigrant.

It's also of interest that Omar had recently been indicted, but not convicted, for a sex crime involving minors. No, you won’t find mention of that in American media, specifically because the man is black and Somali, and we can’t acknowledge that brown people can ever do bad.

While shooting the video, Omar makes his intention clear: to ruin Hendrix's life by getting her to admit to the slur and to repeat it for his camera. He presses her until she does both.

Diminishing returns

No, this was not a nice way for Hendrix to respond; in fact, it was quite rude. But so is stealing. Rude or not, Ms. Hendrix did not hit a child, harm a child, or do anything even near the level of violence of, say, plunging a dagger into someone’s heart because he asked you to move seats.

But she did mount a fundraiser to help with moving expenses because, naturally, she lost her job and was being targeted for violence locally after having her name plastered over the internet.

This made people — mainly white people — insanely angry. White people are supposed to pay and pay and pay, with no limit, for even the mildest transgression against a “person of color.” And by the way, no, there is no good evidence to support outrage-boosting claims that the child in question was 5 years old (he looked closer to 10) or that he was “autistic.”

You wouldn’t know it from the hysterical, over-the-top condemnations from white people online.

Both sides now

Online commentators, black and white, rich and poor, anonymous and famous, went berserk. They acted as if Ms. Hendrix’s verbal bad behavior was worse than physical violence. They equivocated with statements like this:

Black racists crowdfunded for Karmelo Anthony.
White racists crowdfunded for Shiloh Hendrix.
BOTH are WRONG.

Both are wrong, wrong in the same way, wrong to the same degree. Calling a child the “N-word” is as horrible and bad as killing a white boy who asked you to move your seat. And no, you’re not allowed to be frustrated and verbally slip when an unsupervised (where were his parents?) child starts stealing your diapers and purse items. Just as bad as killing, see?

This is madness. It can only be explained by the magical spell, the glamour, that has us as firmly entranced as the spell that put Briar Rose’s palace to sleep for 100 years in "Sleeping Beauty."

Our deification of black people, our endless excusing of a large portion that is antisocial or criminal, and our extreme punishment of white people who notice it and say “stop doing that to me” is indistinguishable from clinical insanity. It is not normal, it is not proportionate, and it is absolutely not moral.

Black people are full humans beings, just like white people. That means they are capable of being as good, or as bad, as any other human being. They do not deserve special passes to get away with illegal or antisocial behavior.

White people are not to blame for their behavior. We are all responsible for our own behavior. Along with rights come obligations, but there is a contingent of Americans today — black and white — who seem to want to exempt black people from any obligations.

'Street' smart

I hated writing this piece. I never thought I would have even contemplated things like this. My generation grew up on 1970s "Sesame Street," when it taught true color blindness as part of life.

It wasn’t heavy-handed, didactic, or preachy. The show simply depicted American kids — Asian, Latino, white, black — doing kid things together. And most of my childhood experiences were like that. My friends had different skin colors, native languages, and home cultures. But they were just my friends.

Everything has changed. To even write something like this will, itself, bring accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy.” That’s the glamour, the spell.

It’s a lie. And it’s a lie we had better stop telling soon or there really will be the race war that hysterical leftists seem determined to conjure.