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2020-

2020-10-14 b
BLACK AND WHITE - II

Michael Brown’s Myth and Counter-Narrative

Shelby Steele and his son confront racial folklore in their radical documentary What Killed Michael Brown?

As the title of the new investigative documentary What Killed Michael Brown? appears on screen, its orange letters startlingly recall the font that was used for Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 neo-Blaxploitation film Jackie Brown. More than coincidence, this reveals the motives of director Eli Steele and his father-collaborator Shelby Steele. Their analysis of the Ferguson, Mo., incidents involving Michael Brown, which sparked the social upheaval perpetrated by Black Lives Matter, goes beyond historical facts to confront their roots in culture. The Steeles’ real subject, like Tarantino’s, is racial narrative.

This inquiry starts with the media’s immediate control of the Michael Brown incidents: Brown’s assault on policeman Darren Wilson; assertions about Brown’s “hands up, don’t shoot” surrender; and officer Wilson’s shooting of him. Rather than searching to find guilt and innocence, the doc follows Shelby Steele as he reflects on his personal experience as a black youth and community organizer in the Seventies. A witness to the history of race politics before Michael Brown was born, he examines what it was that precipitated 18-year-old Michael Brown’s behavior and the circumstances of his death.

“What was more remarkable than the tragedy itself was the explosion of controversy that surrounded it,” Steele observes. “Black militants of every stripe, national black leaders, politicians, mainstream media, cable news, even the president and attorney general of the United States all became players in the Ferguson story.”

Archival video records that story’s almost spontaneous mass responses, followed by the quickly calculated protests. Already in Ferguson, we saw the use of pyrotechnic explosives during riots — a now-familiar tactic of the recent mysteriously organized anarchists. “There was something unconvincing about all these protests,” Steele comments. “The anger seemed ritualized, almost choreographed.”

In the larger narrative that emerges, Michael Brown, Shelby Steele, and the entire U.S. were affected by long-standing, post-civil-rights-era policies. Government involvement had an impact on how Americans perceived themselves, socially and as individuals capable of forging their own destinies — “recruit[ing] people into the welfare system . . . destroy[ing] their equity and creat[ing] a permanent black underclass.” This brings the Steeles to closer scrutiny of the social and spiritual disenfranchisement in the Michael Brown story. (read more)

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