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What Killed Michael Brown? is a history lesson as much as the ’68 Watts riots and the LA riots of ’92 were. Steele does a great job of recounting the events from an objective eye, and whether you agree with him or not, it’s hard to argue with a lot of the facts he presented.
One consistent throughout the history of this country, says Steele, is that various forces and factions “only use race as a means to power.” The film’s development of that point – as an academic concept, and as the reality of many a city street – alone justifies making What Killed Michael Brown? a film that educates. Its insights are many and profound. The Steeles have created something that should demand the attention of every American regardless of race, creed, or partisan affiliation.
— NRO
Throughout history we find deceptions that have lulled us into thinking they were true. All that is required is a Pied Piper with a fanciful narrative and gullible listeners.
The Soviet Potemkin Villages were constructed in the early 1930s to put a false face on the famine of Ukrainians. The New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for buying into the Soviet deception. The New York Times offered an apology in 2003.
The Nazis misled the International Red Cross in beautifying the Terezin concentration camp (Theresienstadt Ghetto) in 1944. Once the Red Cross observers left this mirage, the Germans returned to deportations to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka.
Rigoberta Menchú, a Quiche Guatemalan, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992Opinion logo for advocating for the rights of the indigenous. When her “facts” about the conflicts she described proved to be significantly inaccurate, the Nobel Prize committee, nevertheless, declined to void the prize. After all, she was a human rights activist waging the war for social justice. Those in her defense argued that the narrative of oppression was more important than the facts of oppression.
And perhaps the most pernicious of all, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This fabrication by Russian state police in the 1890s served as a catalyst for antisemitism. The London Times exposed The Protocols in 1921 as plagiarizing a French political satire, “Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.” The original 1864 satire never mentioned Jews, but the Russian deception persuaded the gullible for many decades, joining a series of long-lived anti-semitic tropes.
And now, the movie “What Killed Michael Brown?” explores a deception hypnotizing many who protest. This deception takes race relations in America in the wrong direction. That deception is “hands up, don’t shoot.” The Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios in its fact-checking.
Shelby Steele is experiencing a revival. For over 30 years, the controversial black American essayist and culture critic has consistently produced some of the most original insights to be found on the precarious issue of race in America and has been met with reactions that range from reverence to revulsion. Usually, it’s one reaction or the other. To his critics, Steele is a race traitor, a contrarian black conservative who makes a living assuaging the guilty consciences of whites at the expense of his own people. To his admirers, he is a lone voice of clarity in the chaos of America’s racial discourse who, at 74 years of age, continues to speak uncomfortable and disconcerting truths to power. But his greatest strength may turn out to be a knack for anticipation. As the social upheavals inspired by America’s “racial reckoning” rage on, Steele’s work now looks prescient—it identified the underlying forces that would eventually shape our explosive cultural moment, and offers a more honest accounting of our past and present.
AM560 with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson
