 What killed Michael Brown is that liberalism, that put him in public housing, that expanded welfare payments so that his family broke up, the fatherless home, terrible education, terrible schools. This is what victimized Michael Brown. Before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there was the 2014 killing of this 18-year-old black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael Brown's death energized the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement, and hands up don't shoot. A line derived from accounts of Brown's final words has been a rallying cry at protests against police violence ever since. Hands up! Don't shoot! Don't shoot! But Michael Brown probably never spoke those words. An exhaustive Department of Justice report later concluded that the claim that Brown held his hands up in clear surrender came from sources who later acknowledged that they didn't actually witness the shooting, but rather repeated what others told them. And that account was inconsistent with the physical evidence which instead corroborated Officer Darren Wilson's claim that Brown attacked him and tried to grab his gun. In contrast to other police killings that have energized the Black Lives Matter movement, including that of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot while wielding a plastic gun, of Eric Garner, who died while an officer held him in a chokehold, and of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. There's no reason to believe that by shooting Brown, Wilson was acting unreasonably, as Barack Obama's Department of Justice concluded, because the officer was under attack. The difference between the reality and this magnificent story of victimization is poetic truth, a truth designed to win power, not a truth to reveal reality, but to win power for, in this case, Blacks and the entire American left. Later in filmmaker Shelby Steele went to Ferguson to investigate the meaning of Brown's death and the reaction that it inspired. His new documentary, A Collaboration with His Son, Eli, is called What Killed Michael Brown? What happened in Ferguson was more about America, the very same America that would explode in 2020. If Michael Brown valued his life, he wouldn't take the chance of risking it. Where does that dispiritedness come from? It comes from the fact that Black America having come to rely on its victimization as its power. It was the worst deal we've ever made in our history, and it destroys us. Born in 1946, Steele was a former college professor who specialized in Russian literature. He's the son of a truck driver and the grandson of a man born into slavery. His views on how to correct America's racial injustices are deeply influenced by his experiences in the late 1960s and early 70s, working in a poverty program in East St. Louis. And I could sit there in the afternoon and write a grant bringing $20,000 to set up a library. Money came, it came, it came. People who ran it began to drive fancy German automobiles. In other words, I began to see that white guilt made a space for Black corruption. Our grievances paid off. They paid hard cash. It wasn't just that we could claim racism, it was that we could get paid for it. This began to establish a paradigm, I think, in Black America that created what we now call a grievance industry in Black America, which basically lives by claiming racism. Why did the programs that were instituted under the Great Society, why do you think they didn't work to uplift people, regardless of the motivation of why whites were doing it? One reason. They stole from Black people agency over their own fate. They said, you're poor, we victimized you, you're therefore underdeveloped backward. We will take responsibility for your uplift. You will achieve uplift not through yourself, but through the things we do for you, the new programs we create, the use of racial preferences and affirmative action and so forth. We will socially engineer you up to parity with all of the groups in American life. Steele says that virtuous struggle of the civil rights era was perverted to serve the needs of white Americans. At that moment in history, America made what I call the great confession. It finally, after centuries of woeful oppression of blacks, America finally and quite bravely and quite honorably confessed, yes, we did it, and it was wrong. It was we colluded with evil. That's what white America lives with now. So what motivates social policy, the government action, welfare, war on poverty, great society, so forth? Those are programs that we say are designed to uplift the people that we once oppressed. But in fact, those programs have nothing to do with uplift. They have to do with regaining moral authority for whites. The liberalism based on this created the first black middle of underclass. When I was growing up in segregation, there was no black underclass. Everybody worked. Everybody. Steele says that the mythology surrounding Michael Brown's death was a reflection of that narrative. Hands up, don't shoot. It implies that Michael Brown was murdered in cold blood by a white cop for no more than walking down the middle of the street. In other words, it expands the sense of black victimization. If you can prove that blacks were victims, then you sort of invoke that long history of oppression, racial oppression in America, slavery, segregation, and so forth. And suddenly this little shooting of one young man makes us accountable to that entire history. It's as though the one incident is going to be made to pay off for all this history that precedes it, that gives it a context. The best path forward, says Steele, is to focus on the commonality of all Americans. One of the things I would love to see is citizens understand that identity is the enemy of citizenship.