Editor's note: This op-ed is part of a series by Eli Steele exploring White guilt in America and the West.Steele is the director of the newly released documentary essay, "White Guilt." See the film at WhiteGuiltFilm.com.When I was a student at Claremont McKenna College in the 1990s, Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, came to speak.
Over the years, I have forgotten what he spoke about, but what I do remember is seeing his gun when he adjusted his sports coat.It was the kind of gun that Clint Eastwood carried in "Dirty Harry," only Dees's was burnished silver, with the deep grooves of a six-shooter.
Before the speech, he was billed as the man who took on the Ku Klux Klan, and the gun made the legend real.But to those of us in that room, the gun said something more.
It told us that racism was alive and thriving, and that Dees needed that gun as a hedge against an evil that might attack at any moment.Now we have learned that the legend Dees and the SPLC crafted and protected over the years has cost certain Americans their bank accounts.In August 2024, the SPLC published an article that dismissed complaints from several Christian groups about debanking.The SPLC writer, R.G.
Cravens, struck an accusatory tone against the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom and said it "perpetuated a false conspiracy theory that claims big government and big corporations are victimizing conservative Christians."SPLC SCANDAL UNDERSCORES HOW THE DEMAND FOR RACISM OUTSTRIPS THE SUPPLY | BOBBY BURACKOn Oct.14, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a 47-page report on debanking at the nine largest banks it supervises.
Regulators reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints and approximately 420,000 pages of bank records.The report found that four of those banks, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC and TD Bank, referenced the SPLC while closing accounts or denying loans to conservative and religious customers.The report's details are far more d...