Suppressing Inconvenient Truths

For anyone who digs a little to find the facts, the truth about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is not hard to find. The case was investigated by the Civil Rights Division of the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice. That was a group whose bias ran against the police, not in favor of them. Even so, they concluded that the evidence showed that the “hands up” story was a lie. Michael Brown was shot when he attacked Officer Wilson for no good reason. See this post from last year.

But most people don’t read government reports. The truth will only be widely known when it is disseminated in mass media. The good news is that there is a movie, written and narrated by Shelby Steele and directed by his son Eli, scheduled for release on Amazon. The bad news is that Amazon has placed the movie on “content review.” Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ on the controversy.

Steele and Son, also known as Man of Steele Productions, have this site on the film, What Killed Michael Brown? The subheads are “From Michael Brown to George Floyd, the real victimization of black America,” and “When truth becomes a lie & a lie becomes the truth.”

The trailer is here. The film will be released on an alternate streaming service October 16, this Friday.

Among the most pernicious secondary effects of the false narrative is that blaming the incident on “systemic racism” etc. preempts diagnosis of the real cause and the search for a real cure. Michael Brown made a series of decisions leading to his death that day, every one of them wrong. Why did he steal his smokes when he could have paid for them? Why did he use force against the store clerk who tried to stop him, changing a petty theft into a robbery? When Officer Wilson told him to stop walking down the middle of the street and move to the sidewalk where pedestrians should be, why didn’t he just do so? Why did he attack Officer Wilson and try to grab his gun, a move that surely would have ultimately landed him in far more trouble than he already was, regardless of whether he succeeded?

Most of all, what influences on Michael Brown as he grew up caused him to internalize values that led to these decisions? America does not have a school-to-prison pipeline; it has an attitude-to-prison pipeline. The long-term way to reduce both crime rates and incarceration rates is to change those influences so that young people internalize pro-social values instead of anti-social ones.

The film appears to be a real examination of questions such as these. From Shelby Steele’s prior work, I expect it will be thoughtful and well done. I look forward to watching it.

And why has Amazon put the film on ice? From the Man of Steele website (emphasis added):

Amazon placed What Killed Michael Brown? into “content review” on October 1st, 2020. This move blocks the film from being available on their platform — for now. Their generic explanation states that a film warrants a review if it has offensive content, illegal and infringing content, public domain contain, or poor customer experience offensive content. Our film has not violated any of the above conditions — unless offering a differing cultural viewpoint is offensive.

Yes, I expect that is exactly the reason.