ELI STEELE: SPLC's ‘Hate Map’ helped banks weaponize and exploit White guilt

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."

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On 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 damning than the summary. WePay, a subsidiary of JPMorgan, screened customers against a list of terms that included "MAGA," "America First" and the names of SPLC-designated "hate groups." In July 2021, WePay closed an account that was raising money for a "devout Christian's" legal challenge to anti-discrimination laws.

In another case, PNC refused a line of credit to a media company because one owner's foundation "has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center." A PNC employee explained, "I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values."

What struck me was that none of these banks checked whether what the SPLC alleged was true. The regulators found that "mere allegations, negative press or negative reviews contributed to some banks declining to serve average Americans, even in the absence of any validation of the underlying facts or concerns."

It is hard to be shocked these days, but we must recover that ability. Why would a bank let an advocacy group decide who gets an account, without verification of any sort?

It wasn't long before I found the answer in the report: "Fear of being on the wrong side of public opinion led at least one bank to distance itself from certain customer affiliations that could possibly be viewed as partisan." The banks had labeled them a "reputation risk."

My father, Shelby Steele, has a better name for it: White guilt. He has spent forty years on this question. To paraphrase him, White guilt is the eternal drive by many Whites, especially those on the left, to prove their innocence of racism, to show over and over that they are not complicit in America's historical racial sins.

It is this drive that gives White guilt its transactional nature. In order to be able to buy innocence, someone has to have the innocence to sell. And to sell innocence, you need to possess moral authority when it comes to racial matters. The SPLC earned this moral authority in the deep south when it helped integrate the Alabama state troopers and sued the Klan after violent attacks.

But the White guilt machine needs a never-ending supply of hate. If racism begins to fade, then what innocence is there to sell?

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And the Klan ranks had been thinning for years. By the SPLC's own count, the number of Klan groups fell from 130 in 2016 to 72 a year later. The SPLC’s director of its Intelligence Project said they seemed to be "collapsing."

As the Klan shrank, the SPLC knew that it had to manufacture racism, and it did this by widening the definition of what could be counted as hateful and racist. It created the "Hate Map", which put mainstream Christian groups like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom alongside the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood. In 2021, it counted 733 "hate groups." In 2022, it counted 1,225 "hate and antigovernment extremist groups," many of them parents' groups focused on education. Today the list includes Moms for Liberty, PragerU and Turning Point USA.

Every bank knew it was the kiss of death to be seen doing business with the Klan. And when these bankers saw the Christian and conservative groups in the same category as the Klan, they took these accusations on faith. They cut off the customers the SPLC named. In return, they got their innocence. Their banks were cleansed of racists.

JPMorgan may have been the most savvy of them all. It donated to the SPLC and then its own subsidiary used the SPLC’s labels to close accounts it had flagged as racist. It bought innocence and, simultaneously, used it as a weapon.

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The power of White guilt is that it leverages the charge of racism mercilessly. It never has to prove the charge — the charge itself is enough. That has been the power of SPLC all along and it is a most lucrative one. The ones who paid were those who were accused of being Christians who hold the same views as millions of Americans. They were put into the race box and charged accordingly.

The gun that Morris Dees wore to my college turned out to be theater. We believed that it meant that racism was a living threat that might erupt any day now. Decades later, as I have followed the SPLC’s record, I have come to understand that the "Hate Map" is part of the same theater. The banks believed it because it was cheaper than challenging the methodologies of the SPLC and risking their judgement, the racist charge included.

This is the White guilt transaction that my father has long described and warned us against. The gift of this OCC report is that it reveals the truth that many of us have long suspected but could never answer. This report details what happened. But the harder question still remains: what do these banks, the SPLC and everyone who profited from this White guilt machine owe the people that they falsely put on that list?

That gun never had to be fired. Neither did the Hate Map. The power was always in the accusation.