[Steele Trying Movie Mp4 Download
Amancio Mccrae
My job is to support birth families who are trying to reunify with their children, work with foster parents who are providing temporary care, and help find permanent families for children who need them.
Of course, that does not always happen. The hardest part of my job is when I have to tell a child that they cannot return home. I will practice for hours, but there is no easy way to deliver that news.
The documentary is written and narrated by Shelby Steele, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele. It is available through their website, whatkilledmichaelbrown.com.
Howard Husock: Hello, and welcome to 10 Blocks, the City Journal podcast. I'm your host today, Howard Husock, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. I'm joined today by one of America's most original and courageous writers and scholars, Shelby Steele, of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and by Eli Steele, who heads the documentary film production firm, Man of Steele Productions. They're the co-producers of the new film, What Killed Michael Brown, a film that all Americans interested in gaining a clearer understanding of our racial dilemmas should see, but which Amazon Prime has decided you shouldn't see. We'll talk about the film and Amazon's decision with Shelby and Eli Steele.
Shelby Steele came of age in Chicago. He's the author of five books, including How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, main title, Shame. Two documentary films previously, he's won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Emmy Award, and the Writer's Guild Award for his 1991 Frontline documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst.
Eli Steele has produced and directed three films, What's Bugging Seth, Unlucky Lucky, and now, What Killed Michael Brown. What Killed Michael Brown is a tour de force that uses the fact of teenager Michael Brown's death as a result of a confrontation with a Ferguson, Missouri police officer, as the point of departure for a great deal, including the facts of that case, which garnered national and international attention and how it intersects with the effects of progressive politics, the black community, and how it contrasts with Shelby Steele's own life as a black American, and with those of other blacks in the film that he might characterize as being committed to recovering their own personal agency. Welcome, Shelby and Eli.
Howard Husock: Shelby, let me start with the news that you've made with this film. Amazon Prime, I guess we can't say they've banned your film because it has other outlets, but they've refused to distribute the film. How do you understand that decision? What do you think was going on?
Shelby Steele: Well, I think clearly the film challenged a... It's also important to note that at the same time that I was canceled, they contributed $10 million to Black Lives Matter, Amazon did, and then they canceled me, so it's hard not to conclude that they're protecting, I think, a view of race in America, of systemic racism and black victimization. They're protecting it, as opposed to a more individualistic view of race in America, how we're doing as people, human beings.
I think it fits all the kind of things that I've written about. White guilt, I see it as a sort of white guilt. We're going to prove our innocence of racism by supporting groups like Black Lives Matter and by denouncing groups like Steele's. This is how we gain our legitimacy and credibility in American life. We're on one side, not both sides.
Eli Steele: When you go through the whole process, that was the one that was going to be the process. It was probably the most... And you should run the project. Like you get more customer service when you order twenty people from Amazon. I got nothing, I mean I send e-mails, I was trying to figure out what the issue was. And once I realized that this technical aspects of the film were fine. It has to be the content.
Eli Steele: Nothing. I mean, there's nothing in the film... If you look at the other purchasing film there on the platform, we use a lot of the same third-party footage. And then was used our own interview. This is just like those films too, it just have a different voice behind those films, and we do. So the point behind our content is different, and maybe that's what they have a problem with.
Shelby Steele: Well, because in many ways the incident, black teenager killed by white cop, has become almost an archetype in America. And it seemed to me that the Michael Brown case sort of had all of the dimensions of this story and of race relations in America today, inherent in it. If we could uncover it.
Howard Husock: You talk about kind of how fatigued you were when the news of the Michael Brown incident broke. That you said, "Oh, no, not all this again. All sorts of things are going to happen. I'm going to be dragged into this in certain ways that I'm uncomfortable with." And yet you and your son made an almost two hour film that's based in the Michael Brown incident. Why did you do that?
Shelby Steele: Because I sensed that in America at that time, eight, nine, ten years ago, six years ago for the Michael Brown case. I sensed that black America had, since the sixties, had come to rely on our victimization, our history of victimization, as our source of power in American life. That we felt that by America's own admission, racism had prevailed for centuries. We were victims of it. And in that sense, we had a moral authority over America. We could say to America, you must do this, you must do that, you must give us this. We are entitled because of that history.
And so this narrow focus on victimization as our power, not our... We didn't invent the computer or something. But we were victims. And you know we were, and you've admitted your role in it. And so now America owes us. And that source of power, it seemed to me, what made the Michael Brown case explosive. Because here was an instance of a young man who was shot and killed by a white cop. So obviously the temptation was to say, Well, there it is. That's our chance. That's our opportunity. This poor kid is victimized by a racist, no doubt, racist, white cop, that duplicates American history, that proves our point, our argument that America is still systemically racist and that we're victims and that we therefore are entitled.
Shelby Steele: I'm feeling that I've already seen this play, that it's utterly predictable. And yet I'm convinced that America is going to march through it. And we're going to do the whole thing. We're going to have the riots. We're going to have the national television coverage. We're going to have certain personalities that are going to emerge. It's going to be a big drama because all of America, even beyond America, are looking. The same with George Floyd much more recently, are looking at this one and they're asking this question, is victimization of black people still alive? Is it still a profound force? Does it still shame us? Does it rob us of moral authority?
Most whites feel that it does. Most whites feel that, okay, blacks are still subjected to this kind of victimization, and again, therefore their entitlement expands. And that's how you get caught full American corporate world dumping millions of dollars in to demonstrators and so forth. Canceling Shelby Steele at Amazon, because they're trying to prove that they're not racist, that they're innocent of racism.
And that is their power, that is white power and white legitimacy. And they were quite willing to pay for it. A war on poverty, great society, school buses, public housing, expanded welfare payments, so forth. They're quite willing to pay trillions of dollars to win back that innocence that they lost by confessing to racism in the past. It's like we have to pay history's bill. Or we are part of that ugly history. We are racist. So we now have to prove ourselves to be innocent of racism. And we, as blacks, that's our meat and potatoes. That's our... So the flood into a Ferguson was to reinforce that victimization as a source of power.
Howard Husock: And interestingly, the film does go through the findings of the justice department, which clearly exonerated the police officer. And even the attorney general in the United States, then Eric Holder, who was certainly up on his high horse about the incident. No indictments were brought, and he didn't say there should have been. But the film is only partly about the true facts if you will, of the case. You then pivot, don't you? Into something quite a bit broader. Tell me about where the film takes it.
Shelby Steele: One of the places where we do that pivot had a little bit to do with you. We move into the whole, what we thought of as we were working on it, the Pruitt-Igoe section. And here, we sort of see white guilt expanded and taking on this colossal form, this shape.
Shelby Steele: That's a giant public housing project in St. Louis. But duplicated all across the country and in other cities as well, public housing. And what was fascinating was that in those housing projects was, this wasn't the idea, but this was the result, was that they took away from blacks. Blacks who were, as you pointed out in the film, doing okay in their rather ragged neighborhoods, they were coming up from the South. The families were pretty much intact. They were extremely poor, but they saw low rent as an opportunity, and they were going to move up in American life and so forth. Then came this whole new etiology of liberalism in the sixties. Which is again, based on the sort of white-guilt-black-victim structure. As you talk about, there was a photograph taken of them.
Shelby Steele: And so we see them in this impoverished situation. And we say, we're going to wipe out that by building these massive apartment buildings, and we're going to put all these people in there. And of course, what we do is take away from the people themselves agency over their own fate, over their own life. My parents, I grew up in pretty much in that kind of a neighborhood where everybody was striving upward and so forth. My father was extremely suspicious of public housing, wanted nothing to do with it, and so forth, but many blacks were seduced into it.
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