What Killed Michael Brown? is a new documentary from director Eli Steele, the son of black conservative author Shelby Steele. It poses a much bigger question than “who” killed Michael Brown, the black teenager whose death in Ferguson, Missouri, helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement.
We know the answer to the latter question: Police Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown dead on Aug. 9, 2014. The shooting provoked national outrage after claims circulated that Brown had been holding his hands up and yelling “Don’t shoot!” at the time of his death.
After a series of investigations by federal officials, that narrative fell apart. Eventually, former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that Wilson shot Brown in self-defense after Brown attacked him and reached for his gun.
But narratives are rarely based on facts alone. Even today, many liberal-leaning people believe that Brown was an innocent black teenager unjustly killed by a racist, white police officer. In 2019, senators such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren were still proclaiming that Brown was murdered.
This documentary, narrated by Shelby Steele, does not dwell too much on the facts surrounding the shooting itself. Instead, it critically examines the national narrative that sprung up in its aftermath: that the lives of minorities are almost wholly determined by white racism.
Shelby Steele is hardly an inflexible ideologue. He was born into a segregated suburb of Chicago in the mid-1940s, the son of a black father and white mother. His parents were involved with the Congress of Racial Equality, and Steele himself would later participate in the civil rights movement. He joined the Black Power movement in college, and in the late 1960s, he worked administering Great Society anti-poverty programs in East St. Louis, Illinois.
But his experience with these programs, which he saw as plagued by waste and mismanagement, led him to doubt that liberal policies alone could eliminate black poverty. Steele grew considerably more conservative and eventually became a vocal critic of the civil rights movement as it evolved from the 1970s. Today, he’s a fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution.
But you can tell by the way he speaks in the film that he’s anything but dogmatic. Steele has a deep conviction in the ideas of the civil rights movement he was born into — he just questions the idea that the barriers facing minorities today are identical to the ones under Jim Crow, as we are so often led to believe.
“That Michael Brown was ‘executed’ is a poetic truth,” he tells viewers. “Poetic truth always conflates the present with the past. It overlays the present with the imagery of past racial persecution.”
The film showcases or interviews numerous purveyors of this poetic truth. The Rev. Traci Blackmon, a fixture of Ferguson’s protests, says that...
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