Guilt is a powerful human emotion, and white guilt is what Lewis Steel places at the heart of his autobiographical recounting of his storied career as a civil rights lawyer. Born into a white world of wealth and fame in 1937, Steel has devoted himself to a professional life of civil rights law where his clients often were the victims of the racist, elitist society that delivered to him a privileged personal life. The tension created by this contrast drives Steel’s autobiography and makes for compelling reading for those interested in the intersection between civil rights work and white privilege.
The reader is immediately confronted with the contradictory nature of Steel’s story. For starters, there is the book’s provocative title, “The Butler’s Child,” with a dust cover photo depicting a smiling white boy in a T-shirt and, sitting slightly behind him, a well-dressed African-American man. That man is William Rutherford, whom Steel introduces as “our family butler” and whom he credits with influencing his thinking about race and privilege. The book then opens with the revelation that Steel is the scion of one of the three brothers who formed Warner Bros. Studios, a happenstance of birth that led not only to Steel growing up with a butler but also to an adult life of exclusive comfort. With this introduction, Steel promises a psychological exploration as much as a tour through a lifetime of civil rights work, and he delivers on that promise, though with some results he may not have intended.
