Shelby and Eli Steele seek to find the answers of what killed Michael Brown
Shelby and Eli Steele seek to find the answers of what killed Michael Brown
Alpharetta, Georgia — The Rundown: In 2008, The United States of America voted for our nation’s first Black president in an overwhelming landslide with the selection of Barack Obama.
In 2012, that president was re-elected by the same wide margin, solidifying eight years as our Commander-In-Chief. In a country that once thought voting a Black man into the highest office in the world would be the moment of overcoming years of racial hatred, now sees a country in 2020 as racially divided as it has ever been to many.
Why is that? How did we get to this point in just a few short years? Some will say the problem was Obama, while others will say the problem is Trump. Shelby and Eli Steele seek to find the answer to this question in a new documentary entitled, “What Killed Michael Brown?”
The Story: Directed by Eli Steele and narrated by his award-winning father Shelby, the documentary explores the fall of race relations and the escalation of violence in America.
The film takes us back to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., the death of Michael Brown, the 17-year-old Black male, who was shot and killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
The narrative became that Brown’s death was a modern-day lynching and a continuation stemming centuries of oppression of Black people in America.
What came next was years of media sensationalism that grew on the backs of Black America’s anger and emotion, which was driven by people who saw an advancement in their own personal agendas.
Bright Spots: Steele begins this film by focusing on the misinformation that flowed in the Brown case’s early days. Testimonials and the response to Brown’s death sparked a fire that gave life to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is even more powerful now than it was six years ago.
Steele interviews Civil Rights Activist Al Sharpton, who gives testimony explaining why Brown and Eric Garner became known nationally unlike many other African Americans killed by police because of the protests.
The protests gave those men life in his eyes. While one could agree with that statement, another could easily argue that the protests were due to the media’s misreporting and gaslighting.
To this day, some people still believe that Brown was gunned down by a White cop while begging for his life. Many in the Black Lives Matter movement often repeat the chant of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” because they believe the narrative of how Brown’s death unfolded.
But why wouldn’t they believe that to be fact?
Many notable 24/7 news outlets repeated that story until the majority of people believed it to be true. So why wouldn’t they be shocked and disgusted when Officer Darren Wilson was acquitted at the trial stage? He killed an innocent boy in cold blood…Right?
At one point, the question is asked why did Brown’s death spark national outrage while thousands of Black people are gunned down yearly, and their death doesn’t receive the same reaction?
His death was the perfect storm of victim and oppressor — a White police officer in authority vs. a Black victim of oppression. Not only did the usual suspects of race hustlers jump all over this story, but even the then-President of the United States (Barack Obama) and Attorney General Eric Holder threw their own Molotov cocktails into the mix alleging racial discrepancy from police as a reason for Brown’s death.
Weak Spots: Amazon Prime decided to ban it from their platform before its release temporarily. There is the feeling of a missed opportunity because the film doesn’t spend enough time dissecting the media’s role in our nation’s discourse, which feels like the bigger story in itself.
It is hard to knock Eli and Shelby for not going into more in-depth detail in Black Lives Matter’s exhausting narrative as the film was completed in the early stages of George Floyd’s passing in Minnesota.
There was a lot of new information that became relevant to the story on this documentary that Steele’s simply didn’t have the time to add, given how close it occurred to the film’s release.
Bad timing makes this feel like an incomplete film. However, one could also argue that adding more from the Floyd riots would have just ballooned the film to a narrative that was too big for one movie.
The film does a great job in its coverage of how the city of Ferguson in Missouri recovered after the riots in 2015. Still, the second half’s narrative switch is almost too much to maintain that movement they had going.
The Takeaway: “What Killed Michael Brown?” Does a strong job in highlighting the mindset of the modern-day left-wing protesters and establishing the Black community’s failures in its embrace of government dependency over independence.
While the film is informative, given the events of the last few months, it also feels like the film missed an opportunity to dig deeper and spotlight a more significant community issue.
See or Skip: Even if you are not a fan of the Black Lives Matter movement, a film like this is a must-see because you have to understand what your opposition believes and the tactics they believe in understanding how we got to this point.
(Edited by Daniel Kucin Jr. and Ganesh Lakshman)
(Edited by Daniel James Kucin Jr. and Ganesh Swaminath Lakshman)
