White Guilt, Black Power And The Legacy Of Ferguson: An Interview With Shelby Steele

A NEW DOCUMENTARY ABOUT FERGUSON began streaming this month, and it’s unlike any other film concerning that troubled St. Louis suburb in the troubled year of 2014.

“What Killed Michael Brown?” is a collaboration by conservative scholar Shelby Steele and his son, filmmaker Eli Steele.

The film made headlines in national media outlets when Amazon initially refused to carry it on its platform, leading to allegations that the streaming giant was trying to suppress the Steeles’ work. Amazon later relented after clearing up an apparent misunderstanding. (The film is also available on Vimeo.)

Shelby Steele, who wrote the script and narrates the documentary, directly challenges several prominent narratives surrounding the death of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

Steele argues that what really killed Brown – and fueled the protests that followed – are the racial politics that came out of the 1960s, and the devastating effects of government programs that he believes have robbed many black Americans of the ability to improve their lives.

Steele has been writing on these topics for decades. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and has written extensively for publications including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990 for his nonfiction book “The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.” His more recent books include 2015’s “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country.”

“What Killed Michael Brown?” includes interviews with the Rev. Al Sharpton, St. Louis NAACP President Adolphus Pruitt, pastor and activist Rev. Traci Blackmon, and several Ferguson residents including the city’s former mayor, James Knowles.

Earlier this week I spoke at length via telephone with Shelby Steele about his latest work. An edited and condensed version of the interview follows.

McPherson: Why did you and your son make this film?

Shelby Steele: I did a documentary back in 1990 about a similar shooting of a black teen [Yusef Hawkins] in Bensonhurst, New York. In both instances, it was an event that captured the themes of America’s racial situation vividly and powerfully. On one level, it was a personal tragedy: a young kid shot and killed.

But the fallout – what happens after – seemed to be very revealing of race in America today. There were some good things that came to be revealed. But there were also corruptions that needed to be looked at. The tragedy of Michael Brown was a good template to work from.

McP: When were you actually in St. Louis working on the documentary?

SS: We were there for a good bit of time in the summer [of 2019] and the summer before that. We got to know people and developed friendships over that time. I know Ferguson well. I think of it fondly.

McP: You lived in East St. Louis for three years while you were teaching in a government education program there. You also got a master’s degree from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville during that time. How did it feel to come back to the St. Louis area?

SS: I was there in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when I was just out of college. East St. Louis always had this sort of unique reputation as a disaster area, and it was really, really bad. It was a precursor of the black underclass that very quickly after the ’60s began to develop everywhere. East St. Louis, Pruitt-Igoe (a now-demolished housing project in North St. Louis) – that’s where things began.

I saw some positive, even heroic things. [But] I began to see a certain kind of corruption that comes out when that much government money comes face to face with that much poverty. The hope, of course, is that the money will alleviate poverty. But that’s not the way it works. And so I lost my innocence about government programs.

In the long run, a small number of people benefited. But these programs – Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Great Society, his school busing programs, his public housing program, the expansion of welfare – they just generated more dependency. They undermined black communities, and their capacities and energies to help themselves.

And so what killed Michael Brown? Our argument is that what killed him is the kind of racial politics that came out of the ‘60s and gave us this government infusion of resources, that robbed people of their self-esteem and their ability to lift themselves up.

McP: You’ve written about different kinds of truth. In the documentary you make a distinction between “poetic truth” and “objective truth.” How do these two types of truth attempt to explain what happened in Ferguson?

SS:  The poetic truth is that Michael Brown was a poor and utterly innocent black teenager who was killed by racist white cop. He was executed. That’s what many whites and blacks want to be the truth.

And so right away, it’s the whole “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” They invent a whole story that is designed to shake down white guilt. If Michael Brown was killed by a white cop who was a racist, just look at all the power that wins for black people. They can now say: ‘My God, it’s 2020 and we’re still victimized by racism. And racism is everywhere.’

And that’s our claim to power in American life: our victimization by racism. So you owe us: you owe us reparations, social programs, jobs, housing, better schools, so forth. You owe, owe, owe. White guilt, black power. Poetic truth is simply the version of events that lets you tap that power in American life.

The objective truth is what really happened: Michael Brown attacked the policeman. His DNA is all over the gun, all over the car window and so forth. He runs away, turns around, he comes back, he charges and he’s going to grab the policeman, take his gun and kill him. Finally, the policeman shoots him. And there we have a tragedy.

I’m sure even today you will find people in Ferguson who believe the poetic truth: that Michael Brown was killed out of white racism. There were two grand jury reports, two Justice Department reports and an FBI report, none of which ever found a single shred of evidence to indicate racism was the motivation.

McP: You’ve drawn parallels with similar situations, such as the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But how significant was the killing of Michael Brown and the aftermath in Ferguson in particular?

SS: The narrative after these events is always the hoopla and so forth. People make all kinds of vows of change. And there was some change in Ferguson: There was a gesture on the part of some national organizations to improve things. They created a boys’ club that had never been there before [the Urban League’s Save Our Sons program]. We talked to some of the people who work in it.

But we wanted to see what the [broader] follow-up was. And there was very, very little. Adolphus Pruitt (of the St. Louis NAACP) made the point that nothing had changed, absolutely nothing.

If anything, Ferguson is in rougher shape now. Half the police force is gone. The crime rate is up. Revenues are down. This is almost always the case in America when there are riots, all the way back to the ’60s. There’s all this violence, this high drama, and then there’s…nothing. They leave the towns decimated. Who’s going to go to Ferguson and take a big risk and open a business? Who’s going to want to buy a house there?

McP: There are some memorable points in the film where the camera pans over the old Pruitt-Igoe project, and others where it pans over the Canfield Green apartments where Michael Brown was killed. What kind of parallels does this suggest?

SS: They’re both in effect government housing: Section 8 in Canfield, and just regular old-fashioned public housing in Pruitt-Igoe. There was this illusion, this dream, you know: ‘We hurt black people. We oppressed them. So now we’re going to build for them a utopia of public housing where everything will be clean and sparkling and their lives will suddenly be happy’ and so forth.

Well, those places [projects like Pruitt-Igoe] became hell. It’s as though you were trying to create a black underclass, where there had not been one before.

I always quote Frederick Douglass, who said after the Civil War, when they asked him what America should do for black people now that there are no longer slaves. And his answer was: ‘Leave us alone.’

It’s unimaginable how much farther along our development would be today if America had just left us alone. We were doing well in the 1950s when I was growing up in America. My father had a third-grade education. He never got a dime from any government or charitable agency. But he found a way to make it. He bought junky, ghetto houses and rebuilt them by hand. And he made a life.

McP: But go back and look at the days of segregation. You had policies of widespread redlining. Blacks were excluded from a lot of jobs and other opportunities. Is it really the case that the United States was simply leaving black people alone?

SS: I know what you mean, but yes, they were being left alone. No one gave a damn about them. There were no government policies to help them out, to help them overcome discrimination. And so blacks took responsibility for their own lives, as all people do. And they began to thrive.

Statistics always fascinate me. In the 1950s, black kids who went to American universities – the ones who could get in, because they wouldn’t let blacks in, right? The ones who got in had slightly lower grade point averages than whites. Four years later they graduated at a higher rate, with higher grade point averages, than whites. They became doctors and lawyers and the first really vital black middle class.

McP: Is there more of a need on the part of whites these days to absolve themselves?

SS: We are the wealthiest society in the world, and we can afford to throw money at our problems. And so whites just say: ‘Throw ’em some money. Then we can say we did something. If they don’t use the money well, that’s on them.’

But whites need the innocence – if they don’t show themselves to be innocent of racism, then they lack moral legitimacy. Their institutions lack moral legitimacy. Universities, corporations, foundations, public schools and so forth all lack it. And so what do they do? They turn around and exploit blacks all over again by giving them racial preferences of one kind or another.

And blacks…take it and think they’re getting something. When they’re getting a ticket to nowhere. Eighty percent of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Eighty percent!

McP: What role do you think the media plays in this?

SS: The media is for the most part run by white people. They’re scared to death when it comes to race. They won’t take the slightest risk. Whatever any black tells them, they believe it’s true. And even if they don’t believe it, they go along with it.

We will never break this symbiotic relationship between whites and blacks in America until white people gain some moral confidence in themselves and feel as though they are truly not racists, and act that way in the world. And treat everyone as citizens, not as racial or ethnic identities. Any time you see that, it’s a corruption.

McP: Let’s say you were called in to be an adviser to the federal government. What policy steps would you suggest to focus on black development?

SS: I would start focusing on the intellectual, even the academic development of black babies when they’re born, [so] the culture shifts its focus from systemic racism to the intellectual development of our children all the way through school to the highest level they can go. You can’t be part of the modern world if you’re not educated.

McP: This year we’ve had the George Floyd killing and more protests, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the election campaign. How much of a turning point has 2020 been?

SS: It’s been an exhausting year. I don’t know if it’s been a turning point. Intellectually, it has been a shallow year. To me it’s been a year of theater and mimicry. Black Lives Matter – they mimic the true civil rights movement. I remember it well; I grew up in it. Those were honorable, noble people. They were not kids. They were humble. If you couldn’t go limp when you got hit by a white man, they would not let you in the demonstration. The idea that you would destroy public property was just completely unheard of.

Well, here we have just a complete breakdown of that. And yet Antifa and Black Lives Matter are trying to steal the thunder of that noble protest. Well, they’re ignoble and nobody believes them. They have nothing to offer. My sense is that liberalism is dying and coming to an end. It doesn’t produce a Martin Luther King civil rights movement. It produces Portland…Seattle…Minneapolis…Louisville…Ferguson. –McP–

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