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Share This Article:By Joe Nalven

Throughout history we find deceptions that have lulled us into thinking they were true. All that is required is a Pied Piper with a fanciful narrative and gullible listeners.

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Here are several deceptions over the past century.

The Soviet Potemkin Villages were constructed in the early 1930s to put a false face on the famine of Ukrainians. The New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for buying into the Soviet deception. The New York Times offered an apology in 2003.

The Nazis misled the International Red Cross in beautifying the Terezin concentration camp (Theresienstadt Ghetto) in 1944. Once the Red Cross observers left this mirage, the Germans returned to deportations to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka.

Rigoberta Mench, a Quiche Guatemalan, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for advocating for the rights of the indigenous. When her facts about the conflicts she described proved to be significantly inaccurate, the Nobel Prize committee, nevertheless, declined to void the prize. After all, she was a human rights activist waging the war for social justice. Those in her defense argued that the narrative of oppression was more important than the facts of oppression.

And perhaps the most pernicious of all, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabrication by Russian state police in the 1890s served as a catalyst for antisemitism. The London Times exposed The Protocols in 1921 as plagiarizing a French political satire, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The original 1864 satire never mentioned Jews, but the Russian deception persuaded the gullible for many decades, joining a series of long-lived anti-semitic tropes.

And now, the movie What Killed Michael Brown? explores a deception hypnotizing many who protest. This deception takes race relations in America in the wrong direction. That deception is hands up, dont shoot. The Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios in its fact-checking.

We know that it is a deception because President Obamas Attorney General Eric Holder investigated the shooting of Michael Brown and declined to bring any civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown: Michael Browns death, though a tragedy, did not involve prosecutable conduct on the part of Officer Wilson.

Credible witnesses and forensic analysis led to the conclusion that Brown was not shot in the back; that Brown charged at the officer; that Browns DNA was on the officers collar. Holder concurred with his offices decision as representing the sound, considered and independent judgment of the expert career prosecutors.

The movie, What Killed Michael Brown, recounts the facts and the myths that surround Browns death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Shelby Steele, steeped in the history of social change for blacks in America, wrote and narrated the film. His son, Eli Steele, directed the movie.

Shelby Steele explains how those who advocate for social justice with hands up, dont shoot seek a poetic truth one that is not grounded in evidence, but a deception that demands us to conflate the present with past persecution. Those who wave the flag of poetic truth appear to be interested more in power rather than actually working on the communitys social issues.

Still, the fact is that many believe this deception. Poetic truth offers an attractive delusion. But instead of taking us into palpable change for blacks in America, it has, instead, deepened the divide on race relations and made it difficult to find a path to reforming current and past injustices.

Thats where Eli and Shelby Steeles powerful movie enters the discussion.

Anyone who pretends to want to repair race relations in America, anyone who pretends to repair the world, anyone who wants justice needs to see this movie.

Why this movie? The killing of a black man is not a new event. Shelby Steele himself filmed an earlier movie, Seven Days in Bensonhurst about the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. Yusuf was ambushed and killed in 1989 by white youths. They were tried and went to jail.

But is the killing of Michael Brown a repeat of Yusuf Hawkins? Or are we seeing something different? Do we rely on a persistent narrative of whites killing blacks or do we need to look at the facts of each event? Do we need to explore the history and context of Michael Brown to find out what else is responsible for killing him?

The Steeles present a multi-layered examination of blacks in America from the decade before the War on Poverty. The movie steers the viewer away from power and exploitation of Browns killing to the underlying factors driving the gullibility of those who feel required to believe the deception.

The movie takes us to East Saint Louis about 12 miles from Ferguson. Shelby Steele had worked there in a War on Poverty program. Wasnt this the justice work that needed to be done to repair poverty? But looking around, one area of the black community was demolished to make way for an imagined penthouse for the poor the Pruitt-Igoe projects. Built in the 1950s as a liberal promise to poverty, but then demolished in the 1970s as having failed that promise.

This imagined solution to poverty, arising from liberal aspirations, destroyed a community where blacks owned a majority of the housing. This was what outsiders saw a snapshot of poverty. They had good intentions.

Mayor Joseph Darst said in 1951, We must rebuild, open up and clean up the hearts of our cities. The fact that slums were created with all the intrinsic evils was everybodys fault. Now it is everybodys responsibility to repair the damage.

The reality was otherwise to the community that had been destroyed.

We return to Ferguson. The whites who lived there resisted white flight; they stayed and embraced social change away from racism. But they were caught off-guard by the explosion of violence that followed Michael Browns killing. So, too, were the Pakistani owners of the Ferguson Market where Michael Brown was caught on video and alerted the police. The owners offered to comply with the demands of protesters to help but were then asked to turn over their market. They were told they didnt belong.

They were Pakistanis they were immigrants. The movie tracks the craziness they emerged from Browns killing. Yes, the grief was notable, but the solutions were misguided.

The puzzle seems overwhelming. How does one move forward from this kaleidoscope of racial, immigrant, class, residents and outside agitators? The Steeles turn to individual transformation both by way of local clergy and individual responsibility. The individuals need to own their own future and not rely on liberals, especially guilt-ridden whites, to do the heavy lifting. The social entitlement programs such as Pruitt-Igoe projects, affirmative action and diversity programs give whites the illusion of moral legitimacy, a feeling of racial innocence, but fail to help the black underclass.

Why? Shelby Steele zeros in on that part of the solution often lacking among the media, elected officials and social commentators. Black individuals are robbed of agency, of being able to find solutions tailored to their situation, and instead forever dependent on whites to solve whatever problem for them. Shelby Steele sees liberals reliant on an ideology of white innocence (read: Im not a racist, let me help), and requiring blacks to be blacks and not just human beings.

From Steeles perspective, racism is not Americas original sin; it is used as a means to power. The original civil rights movement was one of good-faith, of wanting to become part of America; some of the current protests are a bad faith movement, wanting to destroy America, wanting to destroy the nuclear family, wanting to destroy capitalism.

The move is available on https://whatkilledmichaelbrown.com/. Go see it. Test yourself with the Steeles adventure into American history, the deceptions and the facts, and a possible path forward.

But I wonder how many of us are among the gullible. I wondered if Eli Steele had a different audience in mind than the readers of this movie review. I asked Eli, and I was surprised, though I shouldnt have been: Great question. We made this movie with black teens in mind. They need to know their history in its full complexity. That allows for a solid foundation to move forward.

Joe Nalven is a former associate director of theInstitute for Regional Studies of the Californiasat San Diego State University.

Opinion: What Killed Michael Brown? A Controversial Movie About Truth and Lies was last modified: October 24th, 2020 by Editor

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Excerpt from:
Opinion: What Killed Michael Brown? A Controversial Movie About Truth and Lies - Times of San Diego

Shelby Steeles new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, ostensibly focuses on the tragic case of a black teenager killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. But what it tells us about cultural mythshow they develop and whygoes far beyond a single flashpoint.

A widespread inaccuracy about the Brown shooting is that he had his hands up and said Dont shoot just before he died. Its one of several myths that Steele, a Hoover Institution fellow at Stanford University and long-respected race scholar, calls poetic truth. People believe cultural myths, he says, not because they have examined evidence and found it credible but because they align with narratives theyve already bought into. They feel true. In Steeles illustration, the poetic truth is that systemic racism in the Ferguson Police Department created the environment that led to Browns death.

While President Barack Obamas attorney general, Eric Holder, found no evidence Officer Darren Wilson was motivated by race, he argued that because black people made up only 67 percent of Fergusons population but represented 85 percent of traffic stops, it was clear the police department was guilty of widespread bias. Fergusons mayor had another explanation: While the city may be two-thirds black, the racial makeup of the surrounding -communities is 90 to 95 percent black. People from all over this area come to Sams because there are no grocery stores, no Walmarts, nothing in North St. Louis City, and every one of those people come to Ferguson to shop, the mayor says. Statistically, who do you think is driving down those roads?

Steele says the danger in favoring poetic truth over objective truth (or, broad theories over specific details) is that it traps us into solving the wrong problems. For Christian viewers, its especially valuable how he lays out his thesis through two different churches.

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Truth and myth in Ferguson | WORLD News Group - WORLD News Group

Gorrell is an advocate for the deaf, a former Republican Party election statistician, and a longtime congressional aide. He has been advocating against partisan gerrymandering for four decades.

I got a jolt of optimism in late September when someone alerted me to a four-minute video posted by the progressive news organization NowThis News.

There was former President Barack Obama, urging his fans to vote for state legislative candidates committed to doing the right thing when redrawing the nation's congressional and legislative lines next year. "Those maps will stand for 10 years," he reminded viewers. "That could mean a decade of fairly drawn districts where folks have an equal voice in their government, or it could mean a decade of unfair partisan gerrymandering."

Could this mean that, after all these years, that Obama had become a genuine anti-gerrymanderer? It was thrilling to think about, but soon enough I was reminded of all the other ways he's been more of an invisible gerrymanderer.

His personal relationship to the practice dates back two decades, to his days as an ambitious young Illinois legislator.

Having recently won his first re-election to the state Senate, Obama was in position to get what he wanted when the General Assembly redrew its own districts in 2001. And so he did. With the assistance of Democratic consultant John Corrigan, the contours of Obama's 13th District were shifted northward to assure that some of Chicago's wealthiest citizens would become part of his financial and political base.

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The Democratic coalition Obama wanted to build wealthier, whiter, less blue-collar and better-educated allowed him to sharpen the campaign message that helped him move from the Senate in Springfield to the Senate in Washington, and then onto the presidency.

At the same time, however, the forces of partisan gerrymandering were being used against him. Obama had been trounced in 2000 when he challenged Rep. Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary, but the congressman wanted to make sure his young rival did not set his eyes on a rematch. And so, with the help of venerable political mapmaker Kimball Brace, Rush persuaded his friends in Springfield to tinker ever so slightly with the boundaries of the 1st Congressional District so the lines ran one block to the north, two blocks to the west and one block to the south of Obama's residence.

"There is a conflict of interest built into the process," he told the weekly newspaper in his Hyde Park neighborhood that summer. "Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves."

It was a message he resurrected 15 years later, in his final State of the Union address. "We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around," Obama told Congress in January 2016. "Let a bipartisan group do it."

And yet, he spent none of his presidential political capital trying to advance the cause of bipartisan, let alone nonpartisan, mapmaking. He did not act when it mattered most in his first two years, when fellow Democrats controlled the House and Senate. At the time, it seemed their party would do well enough in the 2010 midterms to dominate redistricting for the decade now coming to an end.

It turned out the opposite way. A Republican wave that year (fueled in part by fundraising for something called the Redistricting Majority Project) resulted in all-GOP state governments getting to draw almost half the 435 congressional districts the next year while all-Democratic governments drew about 50.

Freed from his presidential duties, and the NowThis video notwithstanding, Obama has returned to his gerrymandering ways. With his former attorney general, Eric Holder, he's captaining the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

While working to portray itself as out to combat partisan gerrymandering, the opposite is plainly true. Its website describes the NDRC as "the centralized hub for executing a comprehensive redistricting strategy that shifts the redistricting power, creating fair districts where Democrats can compete." Its IRS filings say the organization's purpose is to "build a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process through 2022."

Obama's video does not mention his past support for redistricting commissions. He has not spoken out in favor of the one measure on the ballot next month, in Virginia, that would make nonpartisan citizens central players in the remapping for the next decade. He has not offered a kind word about the ad hoc citizen panel convened by Gov. Tony Evers, a fellow Democrat, to pressure the GOP majority in the Wisconsin Legislature.

Most recently notable, he did not mention redistricting reform as one of the cures for democracy's problems he rattled off Wednesday during a stemwinder at a drive-in pep rally Philadelphia, his debut as a Joe Biden campaign surrogate.

So don't be fooled by the video. Obama has evolved in the past 20 years, from the target of a partisan gerrymander into the invisible gerrymanderer.

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Deeds, not words, show Obama is not the reformer he's sounding like - The Fulcrum

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This afternoon, Barack Obama stopped by Philadelphia, the largest city in that crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, to urge people to elect his former vice president, Joe Biden, to the highest office in the land.

At the roundtable of community leaders, Anthony Phillips, the executive director of a youth civic engagement organization in Philadelphia, asked the president, Given our political and social atmosphere, why should young Black men care to be engaged in the political process?

Obama didnt mince words. What I consistently try to communicate during this year, particularly when Im talking to young brothers who may be cynical about what can happen, is to acknowledge to them that government and voting alone isnt gonna change anything, he said. Young people are sophisticated, so theres no point in overhyping what happens.

Obama admitted that his presidency had not solved all the nations issues. But he likes to think he left the country a little bit better. Criminal justice reform under Attorney General Eric Holder meant that many Black men convicted of nonviolent drug crimes faced more lenient sentences than they may have under previous administrations. The Affordable Care Act insured more than 20 million Americans, saving countless lives.

The answer for young people when I talk to them is not that voting makes everything perfect, he said. Its that it makes things better.

This post was brought to you bythe Mother Jones Dailynewsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg, and regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues. Sign up for ithere.

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Barack Obama Doesn't Think Voting Will Make the Country Perfect. He Wants You to Do It Anyway. - Mother Jones

Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick opened up about his road to redemption following his 21-month prison sentence in 2007 for his involvement in a dogfighting ring during a panel about empowering g the next generation of Black men at BLACK ENTERPRISEs4th annualBlack Men XCELsummit.

When I came home from prison, I felt the pressure. I felt like I was living in a bubble, admitted the FOX Sports analyst and activist at the virtual conference on Thursday about the notorious incident which overshadowed his football career.

However, rather than succumbing to the pressure he felt, Vick says he used the tools he developed behind bars to help him persevere.

I set goals while I was in prison. I accomplished almost everything that I wanted to accomplish and then some. That right there was the ultimate confirmation that I could do anything that I wanted to do in my life.

Vick added that now he uses the adversity hes overcome as a teachable moment for younger Black men and women.

I preach a hard message when talking to the youth in terms of responsibility, character, your beliefs, values, and morals, said the NFL legend. I try to explain to young men and women the hurt and the anguish that Ive experienced to grow stronger and to get to where I am today. I want my message to be, at all cost, youre not going to go through life perfect, there are going to be some ups and downs, but its all in how you persevere.

He went on to talk about leaning on faith, saying, let God lead you from there.

At another point, the former Atlanta Falcons player talked about the need to provide Black athletes with guidance, mentorship, and father figures.

Young athletes today straddle the fence in terms of what I should do [versus] what shouldnt I do. It can be very complicated. A lot of them come up from backgrounds where theyre not taught, not educated, and they dont have that guidance in order to prepare themselves for what theyre going to be facing, he said.

Were all put in high positions for a reason. Ive been thought a lot and I look back and I say I want to help the younger generation not make the mistakes that Ive made, he added.

Sponsored by FedEx Express, Black Men XCEL (BMX) was designed to provide Black men with the tools, resources, and training needed to advance in their respective careers and industries as well as acquire generational wealth and maintain mental wellness. The two-day summit featured a variety of sessions, workshops, coaching, and virtual activities. BMX also gave participants access to some of todays most successful business and executive influencers. Furthermore, the summit, which was also facilitated in partnership with presenting sponsors AT&T and JPMorgan Chase, provided attendees with the opportunity to conduct live chats with speakers, experts, mentors, and fellow attendees.

The motto for this years BMX is celebrating the best of who we are, said BLACK ENTERPRISE President and CEO Earl Butch Graves Jr. in his opening remarks. It is a celebration of Black mens collective achievement, resolve, and resilience during one of the most challenging periods of our history. We meet under the cloud of COVID-19 and a crippled economy. We are nearing the end of a divisive, racially charged election, and Black men are under assault at all levels.

Speakers included Walker Co. & Brands founder and CEO Tristan Walker, BCT Partners Chairman & CEO Randal Pinkett, AT&T Chief Development & Diversity Officer Corey Anthony, TV Host and Daddy Duty 365 Founder Shannon Lanier, former NFL Player Tiki Barber, PayPal Head of Global Financial Compliance Investigations Art Taylor, CNN contributor, attorney, and author Bakari Sellers, and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

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Exclusive: Michael Vick on Prison and Succeeding Through The Fire - Black Enterprise