Race scholar Shelby Steele joins to talk about his new documentary: “What Killed Michael Brown?” The film, released last month and is available on Amazon.com, details the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 and how the response has impacted race relations in 2020. Mr Steele argues that systemic racism is less about objective truth and is more “poetic truth.”
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. In 2006, Mr. Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions and he has written extensively on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs for major publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s magazine where he is a contributing editor.
Transcript
Beverly:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, race scholar, Shelby Steele joins us to talk about his new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown? This film, which was released last month and is available on amazon.com, you should go and buy it, details the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 and how the response has impacted race relations in 2020. Mr. Steele argues that systemic racism is less about objective truth and is more about “poetic truth”. And before we bring him on a little bit more about Shelby Steele, he is the Robert J and Marion E Oster senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. In 2006, Mr. Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions, and he has written extensively on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs for major publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Harper’s magazine, where he is a contributing editor. Mr. Steele, it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Shelby:
Well, happy to be here. Thank you.
Beverly:
So, your new documentary, which once again is called, What Killed Michael Brown? is available. It came out last month. The first question I have for you is, why did you decide to make this documentary, and was that decision made before the death of George Floyd and the race relation issues that we’re seeing in 2020?
Shelby:
Yes, I think it was probably two, two and a half years before George Floyd that we decided to do it. So we were actually done with the major part of our shooting when the George Floyd incident took place. We just thought, again, there have been several such incidents, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, at this point, a rather than a long list. And we thought they revealed something about race relations in America. And so that’s what initially interested us in the Michael Brown story, which I thought was probably the most explored one, where the media really sort of focused its gaze. And it seemed to highlight the themes we wanted to get to better than some of the other incidents.
Beverly:
Well, let’s go back to the killing of Michael Brown. So that took place six years ago, August made, I guess it was the sixth anniversary of the shooting and killing of Michael Brown. Take us back to Ferguson, Missouri. What took place? What have investigations shown us? He was shot by a white cop, where is that white cop today. And how is the city of Ferguson doing considering there were riots that ensued for days on end after his killing.
Shelby:
Okay, well, what happened was that Michael Brown was an 18-year-old black kid from Ferguson, Missouri, and lived in section eight housing, it’s a little suburb of St. Louis. He was hanging out with a friend, they robbed some cigarillos from a convenience store, Ferguson Market, on this particular Saturday afternoon, they then were walking down the very middle of Canfield Drive, which is a major artery in Ferguson. And it was at that point that Officer Darren Wilson noticed them. And so he pulled his police car around and asked them if they wouldn’t please get on the sidewalk and walk on the sidewalk rather than the street. Well, that’s what started the incident. Michael apparently lost his temper. He approached the police car. He hit the policeman in the side of his face with his fist. Michael is, it’s important to know, an over the 300-pound young man. They then begin to wrestle for the gun, for the policeman’s gun.
It’s unclear where a shot came from, but there was a shot. Michael turned him around and seemed to be running away, but then got to a place where he stopped and turned back around, faced the policemen and continued to march toward him even though the policeman, Darren Wilson, was asking him to stop and get down, stop and get down. And he didn’t. He got within eight feet of the policeman and the policeman opened fire. And I guess in total, it came out to seven different shots were fired all through the front, he was hit in the front, all of them trying to stop his approach to the policeman. And so it was at that point when Michael died and that was the end of that.
They, the city of Ferguson, for various reasons allowed the body to lay in the street for four and a half hours on a hot Saturday afternoon in broad daylight around a little afternoon. And again, the crowds began to form. And pretty soon the whole incident really reached around the world. It was covered in Europe as an important event. And thousands of people descended on Ferguson. And again, the ideas that were in contention at that point, what we call the poetic truth, the truth that serves one’s politics, one’s ideology, one’s perspective on things. The poetic truth was that Michael Brown was murdered by a racist white cop.
Well, the reality, of course, is that that’s not the way it happened. Ultimately there were two grand jury investigations, two different Justice Department investigations, even an FBI investigation and none of them turned up a single shred of evidence that would suggest that racism played a role in Michael Brown’s death. It was obviously a tragedy. Anytime, someone that young is shot and killed, it’s a tragedy, but it had nothing to do with race. There’s nothing to prove that, to indicate that. Well right away, this poetic truth of black being murdered by a racist cop, just grabbed a hold of many, many, many people, and quickly it turns from an event having to do with, well, quickly, it became a sort of referendum on whether or not America was suffering from systemic racism. And systemic racism really became the issue because as we try to examine in the film that the main … what was so compelling about the Brown case is that it was, in a sense, an opportunity for power. People who began to unfold this poetic truth were really in a sense, exploiting the incident for the sake of power.
Beverly:
Let me jump in right here. When do you say these people were exploiting this for poetic truth, who were these people, who were using this for their own advantage?
Shelby:
Pretty much the entire left in America used the Michael Brown incident to establish the argument or make the argument that America was a systemically racist society. Why did they want to make that argument? Because there was in fact, enormous moral power in this incident, which duplicated, echoed America’s history of racism. And the fact that we had four centuries of white on black oppression, lynching, so forth and so on, and an incident like this evoked, all of that. And so suddenly America today in 2014 became accountable, not just for this event, but for all of this history. And if you could prove that this was somehow systemic racism, that the history was still alive, then that became a power. It became black power. It gave blacks power. It gave the American left power, which is based on the idea of black victimization as a source of moral authority, moral power. So that’s, in a sense, how it worked.
And so, the exploitation was, yes, we’re going to make this into an event that grants us power. And this is no small power. It’s a power that has begun to transform universities in America, institutions in America, corporate America responds to this idea, this poetic truth, that blacks are still the victims of systemic racism, and America still must make its amends to correct that. And so when I approach a corporation and I demand that you support Black Lives Matter or whatever, and corporations happily do so to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. So we’re talking real power here. Power to transform the curriculum of public education in America, to focus it on the victimization of black people.
The cultural impact of an event like this is enormous, way beyond, because the same year in Chicago, on the south side of Chicago, about 3000 black boys were shot. About 700 of them were killed in one year. No attention, no presidential involvement. With Michael Brown, the president of the United States became involved. He sent his attorney general of the United States to Ferguson and so forth. They took it over because they sensed the power there. If they could show that blacks were victims, then this constituted liberal power, black power. You could have all the boys on the south side killed that you want, thousands, and there’s no power there because the trigger finger was black and not white.
Beverly:
And I want to talk it.
Shelby:
Go ahead. I’m sorry.
Beverly:
No, it’s okay. Yeah. There’s a focus on one over the other because it comes back to like you were saying, power and power people want to have. What I want to know is when people believe systemic racism, that America is systemic racism, not what does that do to America as a whole, and we could get into that. What does that do to black Americans, when they’re thought of as victims? What is the danger to them, if this is the pervasive thought in American society today?
Shelby:
Well, this thought that you mentioned, the idea of what I call black victim-focused identity is the new oppression of black people, to think of yourself. As, do I live in a society that is systemically biased against me and is determined to keep me down and I’m a victim of this, is the worst sort of psychological framework imaginable, because it means that you’re just a passive victim of forces that are infinitely more powerful than you. And you have no chance. There’s no sense in trying. And since black America has begun to make this argument, that racism is systemic and so forth, black America has declined.
We are farther behind whites today than we were in the 1950s by almost every single socioeconomic measure. We are vastly behind whites, educational measures, economy, so forth. So it is an identity that’s really the kiss of death. It’s destroying, it’s crippling black America and preventing us from, because if you are a victim, then you never understand the importance of taking responsibility for your own advancement. Why take responsibility for your own advancement, if you’re going to just be victimized by racism? You’re going to be undermined by racism. And so it defeats the will. It cuts blacks off at the pass. And we’ve been mired in this sort of victim-focused identity since the sixties, for about 60 years now. And again, we have just precipitously declined in that time.
So it is this identity, this notion that there’s racism everywhere is killing us. It just stops us cold. We don’t know to grow because we don’t take any … We blame the larger society constantly. And of course, that then gets into this whole thing I’ve written about maybe too much, white guilt. When we complain we’re victims, whites, then jump in and want to prove that they’re not racist by giving us all kinds of, for the most part, worthless programs, affirmative action, diversity, war on poverty, school busing, public housing, on welfare, on and on, that have the effect of simply making us dependent on a society that we claim is systemically racist. So it’s a sick, sad, symbiotic relationship that we have a very difficult time breaking because whites are not going to say, Hey, even though you suffered, it’s important. You can’t really move ahead if you don’t take responsibility for your development. Whites are simply not going to say that to black people, because then they will be labeled as racist and they will pay a price. And blacks are not going to say to their own people, we can’t get ahead if we don’t take responsibility for it ourselves, because then they will be called Uncle Tom’s.
And so here we sit, everybody’s frozen and no one can tell the truth. The truth is this, black America got a raw deal. Anybody who’s been oppressed for four centuries got a raw deal. And so it’s understandable that we come out of that in the sixties with civil rights legislation, we come out of that into freedom, but we’re weary. We’re afraid to really, really throw in our lot with this larger society. And so again, nobody gets anywhere. Nothing changing and that sadly is still where we’re at. So now we’re having this argument about systemic racism in American life. Well, why did that come up? Systemic racism is a concept that does nothing but expands my victimization, so I have a larger claim on black power in American life. The real problem in black America is of course, under development. If you come from a people that have been sat upon and oppressed for four centuries, you’re going to be underdeveloped. And the only way to real equality is to overcome that and develop.
Beverly:
And I know that’s something that-
Shelby:
We won’t do that.
Beverly:
I know that’s something you even touch on in this film, which is talking to people who are working in these underdeveloped areas and really helping black Americans achieve their full potential and occupation and with education and all these different areas that are so important in everybody’s lives. What are you seeing as ways to come out of the problem that has been decades in the making and thinking that this victimization is occurring still today? And like you said, it keeps people frozen. Where have you seen some of those strongholds been broken?
Shelby:
Well, we try to, in the film, you’re right. We tried to find people who really were outside of this symbiotic sort of connection. And we did, and they all have one thing in common. I’ve found this really to be true in race relations. I grew up in the civil rights era and so forth and things really usually only change in race relations when people find real courage because you’re going to pay a price for doing good work. The people that we interviewed, we find that really transform lives, all catch hell for it. And they are called every name in the book. These are people who have devoted their lives to young black kids. Most black kids born today in black America have no father. Between 75 and 80% are fatherless at birth, need every kind of attention, and then of course get into all sorts of difficulties because they don’t get it. Well, the people we interviewed are about the business of helping people in this situation. So reconstruct themselves, reconstruct their lives as free, independent people. It’s the hardest work imaginable and they are selfless. And most of all, they are courageous because they do it even in the face of all sorts of judgmentalism and negativity and so forth.
That’s what it takes. That’s what it takes. I’m going to tell you, there’s no government program. There’s no sort of everything that has been tried. The government has done everything. And of course the more the government does, the worse it gets, the more victimized people feel.
Beverly:
And it’s about, I think, neighbor helping neighbor and working in our communities and helping each other. And the question I have now is just what we’ve seen in 2020 and after the killing of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, which as you know, has gained tons of traction. I think the question is, is this something that has gotten to a point where just the pervasive thought of most Americans is that America is systemic racist. And if that is the thought of the majority, where do we go from here?
Shelby:
I think the answer is somehow, the true answer is difficult to hear. It seems like not much of an answer, but I think the answer is real courage. And I mean this in a broad sense, we talked to individuals who showed this courage, but at this point, white America has so lost its moral confidence around the matter of race that they have no way to reinforce, no moral authority to reinforce the kind of values and principles that may have made America great, made us the greatest country in history. And so what they are busy doing white America, is showing deference constantly to black America. They’re deferential. Deference is the sort of activism of white guilt. You have the mayor of Minneapolis in the George Floyd riots giving the police department to the crowd to burn down.
As if they’re some sort of moral imperative there at work. Well, that’s what you call deference. Affirmative action, we’ll differ, we’ll lower test scores for blacks in order to get them in. We’ll defer to their weakness rather than demand their strength. And so my point is, that when whites finally get tired of this and stand up and put themselves at risk of being called racist, America can be redeemed and come back into itself. But until that kind of courage comes into play where we’re going to be in the hands of the sort of, again, the people who morally sort of blackmail us into guilt and we treat every problem with more deference, more guilt, rather than understanding that the problem can only be treated by asking people to be more responsible, not by giving. You can’t give people equality and freedom, they have to make it for themselves. And we have to ask that they do so.
But we don’t ask anything. What’s ruined black America for 60 years now is the whites don’t have the moral authority to ask anything. We give you welfare. We give you public housing. We give you the school busing. We give you, you name it, but we don’t ask anything from you in return. And so blacks just decline, become more and more reliant on a politics that basically says the only way to be fair to black people is to give them deference, to indulge their weaknesses, to excuse their weaknesses.
Beverly:
Yeah, I think that’s where it is today. And those are wise words. You’re somebody who definitely has had the courage in speaking out. I do think that courage begins with people understanding what’s really taken place, where things are. And so that’s why people should go out and buy the documentary. It’s on amazon.com. It is once again called, What Killed Michael Brown? The more informed we are, the better we can respond to our neighbors, to our friends and family, and also in our communities and our country. So, Mr. Steele, we thank you so much, not only for coming on and talking about your documentary today, but all your work on a really hard issue, and I’m sure you have faced your own critics over the years, and we appreciate your courage in speaking out.
Shelby:
Well, thank you so much for having me, appreciate it.
Beverly:
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