What Killed Michael Brown? by Shelby Steele
By Molly Sechrest
Produced & Directed by Eli Steele
Written & Narrated by Shelby Steele
Duration: 109 minutes
Release date: October 16, 2020
Since the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed, new training courses in “antiracism” have been introduced in countless institutions in the United States, from boardrooms to classrooms. But regarding the now common sentiment that “whites are racists and blacks are victims,” author Shelby Steele calmly and persuasively dissents.
Steele and his son Eli have created a documentary that weaves the author’s mastery of storytelling with penetrating analysis. Amazon, which was scheduled to stream the film, shelved it for “editorial review,” presumably for its ideological content, but op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and other pressures led the company to offer it.1
For decades, Steele has brought a unique perspective to the discussion of race. He points to moral arguments as the key agent of historical change. Steele is unsurpassed in speaking to the undeniable role of individual choice in determining one’s life.
The film asks the question “Did racism kill Michael Brown?” To find the answer, the documentary takes a deep dive into the history of American attitudes and policies toward race since the 1960s.
As in the cases of George Floyd and others, the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to nationwide outcries of racism and police brutality. However, as the film reports, not a “shred of evidence” linked Brown’s shooting to racism or murder. The white police officer, Darren Wilson, was afraid for his life when black teen Michael Brown charged him. Later accounts of the incident imagined a black teen falling to his knees, hands up, shouting, “Don’t shoot.”
In Steele’s words, “the Ferguson dispute was between poetic truth and objective truth.” Poetic truth, he explains, seeks to distort the facts to “sue for power and leverage in the world.” It conflates encounters between blacks and whites in the present with America’s racist past of slavery, lynching, and bigotry. With its message of black victimization, the purpose of “poetic truth” is to exploit “white guilt.”
White Guilt, the title of Steele’s most widely read book, is a phrase Steele uses to describe “not actual guilt” but a desperate attempt on the part of whites to escape the accusation of racism and thereby regain moral legitimacy. Against a backdrop of news footage of civil rights marches, Steele explains that in the 1960s, America finally “confessed to the evil of its racist past” and rid itself of segregation and the Jim Crow laws. But this left the nation’s political institutions in moral tatters. How could Americans, particularly blacks, have confidence in a system that had allowed so much injustice to persist for so long?
At a critical moment in history, when the nation removed the last vestiges of legally enforced white supremacy, it could have taken a new path toward opportunity and flourishing for blacks. Instead, according to Steele, the nation took a turn for the worse. White left-leaning “liberals” and emerging black intellectuals struck a Faustian bargain.
As Steele presents it, the deal was this: Whites would assume responsibility for the improvement of black lives. For their part, blacks would identify with victimhood; nothing else would be asked of them. There was a certain logic in this: Racist policies had caused blacks to lag in skills, income, and education. But the catch was this: These policies promoted dependency and undermined personal efficacy, particularly among inner-city blacks. As Steele sees it, “Perhaps the most insidious feature of liberalism after the sixties is that it dismisses individual responsibility as an agent of black uplift.”2
Steele says:
This desperation among whites for innocence of racism . . . fueled the liberalism of . . . the War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, diversity this and diversity that. These programs give white America moral legitimacy or at least the illusion of it, even as they utterly fail to help the black underclass.
As the camera pans the streets of East St. Louis, Steele observes that neighborhoods where blacks once enjoyed significant home ownership, high employment rates, and strong families were bulldozed and replaced by government housing. These neighborhoods became the seat of gangland activity and high rates of drug addiction, black-on-black crime, school dropouts, and single parenthood. They are now home to men who do not possess enough self-regard to take caution when confronted by armed police, whether by the likes of a calm Darren Wilson or a brutal Derek Chauvin.
Steele’s narrative is bolstered by archival news footage and commentary from a wide variety of sources, gradually building an answer to its opening question. In neighborhoods built by governments and plagued by ubiquitous welfarism, a breakdown in parental authority breeds chaos and violence. With the constant hammering of “you are oppressed” and the resulting evisceration of self-reliance, many black youths give up before they get started.
As to the takeover of black neighborhoods, Steele says, “Effectively, it was an act of white supremacy; it was colonialism.” Further,
The liberalism that came out of the sixties has proven to be a more insidious oppression than either slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Those oppressions confined your person; liberalism wants your very soul. It wants you to be a grateful and mindless captive, but a captive, nonetheless.
With this film, Shelby Steele clarifies key issues in the discussion on race. He shows how leftists grabbed power by claiming the moral high ground, despite their abysmal disregard for those whose lives are destroyed by their policies. What’s more, Steele speaks from personal experience. American race relations have, of course, impacted his life and family. Steele grew up in segregated Chicago and was inspired by a black militant whose speech he attended. But he soon came to see that many proposed “solutions” to racial problems only made things worse. He also learned about individualism from his father, the grandson of slaves and the son of a sharecropper with a third-grade education who, at age fourteen, migrated alone to the North. Through dauntless effort, his father succeeded in making a meaningful life for himself while providing an admirable role model for his children. “My father was a civil rights activist all of his adult life; but he was never a captive of liberalism. . . . He favored character over race as a means to power.”
And therein lies the hope. Steele’s insight is as profound as it is simple: The way to improve the lives of black people is to encourage individual responsibility. Steele does not absolve white racism—past or present; but he recognizes human aspiration for a better life as the central motivating force for achieving positive outcomes.
His specific hope is that whites will stop trying to rob blacks of their own agency; that blacks will stop taking advantage of “white guilt” to extract money and influence; and that, step by step, individuals will choose to see themselves and not others as the source of their own empowerment.