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Oct. 20, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
37:41
A Systematic Takedown of 'Systemic Racism' with Dr. Shelby Steele

Charlie is joined by Shelby Steele—author, scholar, and director of the new film, 'What Killed Michael Brown?' to get an exclusive insight into race relations in America 14 days out from the presidential election. He gives his expert...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Charlie Kirk Show Intro 00:03:22
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
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Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have the incredible Dr. Shelby Steele.
Dr. Steele is one of the leading authors and thought leaders when it comes to the racial issues in America.
He coined the term white guilt in the mid-2000s and has a new documentary out, What Killed Michael Brown.
You are really going to enjoy this conversation.
We talk about systemic racism, what is driving the ultra-liberal elites to continue this racial division in our country, and so much more.
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Shelby Steele is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
We are joined today with Dr. Shelby Steele, who is the really the mastermind behind this incredible new documentary, Who Killed Michael Brown, and also involved with the Hoover Institution, which is one of my favorite organizations, and just an incredibly clear and articulate voice in our country.
Dr. Steele, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thank you for having me.
So tell us about your new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, and also tell us a little about the news surrounding Amazon canceling this documentary.
I'm reading from a Wall Street Journal piece that says Amazon cancels Shelby Steele.
Amazon Cancels Michael Brown Film 00:13:33
Yes, they did.
They canceled us.
We're now in discussions, I guess is the way you would put it, to see whether or not we will come back.
But no, they were very vociferous and a little nasty.
And cancel is, I think, the correct word.
They wanted to be rid of us.
Then publicity came out.
And the Wall Street Journal had a couple pieces in two, three days in a row.
And all of a sudden, we were up and streaming on Amazon.
So we're sort of still in the middle, what that means, what kind of relationship, if any, we're going to have.
But they clearly were censoring.
And it's important for me to have them own up to that in some way.
So I saw the trailer to your film.
I have not yet had a chance to watch the film.
Tell us why you made it.
And also, what are some of the lessons that you hope people glean from it, especially in this election cycle that has become, in many different ways, I think, overly racialized?
I think what got me interested initially is the incident with Michael Brown.
Like also, there's been several such incidents, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, young black male shot by policemen or otherwise killed by policemen.
And so this story, all of these instances, George Floyd is a more recent one.
They're followed by an explosion of public fascination, demonstrations around the world and so forth.
Why is that?
What's really going on there?
We wanted to sort of look at that in some depth and try to understand.
One of the things that occurred to me even as we got into the film, one of the greatest sources of power for black Americans today is the history of their victimization.
It gives them a moral authority that we can wield over the rest of society.
And so a situation where a black teenager is shot and killed by a white policeman evokes the racism of American history.
And so there is potentially, at any rate, enormous power in that.
And the power to affect and change society in any number of ways.
The power that comes out of black victimization is the deepest source of power on the political left, I think, in America.
And so we wanted to sort of expose that and show how it worked.
And here you have one black kid shot and killed, President of the United States, Attorney General of the United States, the Justice Department, the FBI, not to mention all the local police agencies involved in investigating it.
I think is, again, a measure of the power that is at stake in situations like this.
And from people came into Ferguson from all around the country, even around the world for that matter.
So the title is What Killed Michael Brown, not who killed Michael Brown.
What did you mean by that?
Did you think that there was underlying just events or preconceptions?
Obviously, you chose that word intentionally.
What exactly does the movie kind of, what's the story that it tells that helps answer that question?
What killed Michael Brown was, as we discovered as we got deeper into it, a brand of liberalism that came out of the 60s that through it, again, in the 60s was the trigger was that America confessed the centuries of racism.
And, you know, when you do that, the confession was, I think, a moment of greatness in America.
It showed a character that I've never seen or heard of in any other society in the world.
It was America at its very highest moment.
However, when you confess, you lose moral authority.
And people can use that, your confession against you.
And they can doubt everything you do and say, well, see, don't say you weren't racist.
Look at what you did in the past.
You're systemically racist.
And it gives them a kind of power that America doesn't know what to do with pretty much since the 60s.
We came up with social programs.
It was a great society.
There was a war on poverty.
There was affirmative action, school busing, expanded welfare.
It's just on and on of things that programs and policies that America thought would buy back some of the moral authority they lost by confessing to their past.
The problem is that blacks then became dependent on that white guilt.
And white guilt and black power, as we've emerged through the years, have become the same thing.
And so in a situation like Michael Brown, well, boy, it's a war.
It's a mini war over who's right, who's going to come away from this with moral power.
In Michael Brown's case, there was not a single shred of evidence to suggest or prove that Michael Brown was killed by racism, that there was a racial animus behind it.
Nothing to prove it.
Yet, even to this day, this moment, there are many people in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere who believe that he was killed, that it was a racially motivated murder.
Facts mean nothing, but the feeling is we can't say something different, or we'll lose power if we actually tell the truth.
And so blacks then, we find ourselves in that position where our power is contingent on us continuing to be victims of racism.
And so we think of ourselves now and have for 60 years as victims.
It is a tragic sort of place to be.
But if you want to upset the black leadership in America, tell them that they're not really victims anymore.
Well, that's how far gone we've, in a sense, become, given this last 60 years of symbiosis between white guilt and black power.
And we wanted to show how deep that goes and how much it affects our lives here in America.
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Yeah, I got my political start right during the beginning of the Ferguson riots and the beginning of Black Lives Matter.
And it had implications that were far-reaching outside of Ferguson.
It was the hands-up, don't shoot moment as well, when all the CNN anchors put up their hands, and it was completely untrue.
It was an absolute lie.
The Ferguson effect also then spread to many different cities in the region where they, because of the retreat of police, more black individuals were victims of crime.
And then it even spread as far to the University of Missouri, where they saw a decline in enrollment and donations.
All of this kind of, and I love the way you frame it.
I want to ask a question here more about your documentary, What Killed Michael Brown.
It seems as if that the kind of Michael Brown outrage industry, that's not the right way to put it, but the outrage industry around that started with Michael Brown, and it has been replicated and duplicated in years past.
Have you found that there are people that are financially incentivized and incentivized in other ways to almost find the next point of outrage and try to make it seem worse than it might actually be, try to imply racism where it might not exist?
What were your findings as you did this film?
Yes.
One of the things we found was what I call poetic truth.
And poetic truth is when you take an event like the murder of the shooting of, it's not remotely a murder, the shooting of Michael Brown, and you cast it as a murder, as something having to do, again, reflecting how deep racism is in American society.
You are creating a sort of, with poetic license, you are creating a narrative, a story that shows extreme white racism and extreme black victimization.
And, of course, the people who conceive the poetic truth, who spin it out to the world, then of course benefit.
That means that you mentioned the situation with me and Amazon at this point.
Amazon sort of canceled my film, but at the same time gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter.
Well, I'm telling you the flat objective facts and truth about what happened, grand juries and the evidence and so forth.
Black Lives Matter is invested in the idea that Michael Brown was a victim of racism and no hands up and so forth.
So again, the poetic truth is where the money and the power is, and it's where the white guilt is.
Because poetic truth always is designed to prick white guilt.
Because that's where we get, that's whites then are in a position where in order to be innocent of racism, they have to give us things.
They have to pay us off.
I call that entitlement.
We use our poetic truth to sort of expand our entitlement in American life.
And that, again, is our tremendous source of power.
So the death of one kid in Ferguson causes all this.
Simultaneously, in 2016, 3,000 black kids were shot in Chicago.
762 were killed.
No government, no presidential interventions, no attorney general coming in, no local interest barely covered in the local press.
Because the trigger finger in Chicago was black.
The trigger finger with Michael Brown was white.
And so therefore, it replicates, seemed to replicate the past of America's racial past.
And so there was tremendous power, tremendous power.
You mentioned the University of Missouri.
Universities across the country are affected by this.
Their curriculums have changed.
Universities are different institutions than they used to be because of so much concern with sort of Michael Brown circumstance of black victimization.
What really led to that intersection point of Michael Brown?
For example, why didn't this happen in 2009 or in 2002 or in the mid-1990s?
What was it about that incident, maybe with social media, maybe with the outside groups being pushed?
I would love to dive deeper into all the different pieces that went into it.
But you made a great point, which is that the American left have been searching for individual narratives or individual stories to fit a false narrative that they have been talking about for the last couple of decades that give them a lot of power.
Redefining Black Identity and Racism 00:06:19
And if they find singular names or singular instances that confirm that, then they are able to speak about it for weeks or months on end.
And if you dare question it, you have your Amazon will cancel you or you'll get kicked off a college campus.
So, Dr. Steele, I want to ask about this idea of systemic racism.
I get this all the time on college campuses.
I think we have become pretty equipped in combating this charge that America is systemically racist.
Can you help our listeners and our viewers unpack this lie that America is systemically racist to its core?
Yes, it's particularly easy for me to do that because I was raised when segregation was real.
When every single aspect of your life, white people lived on one side of the street I grew up on, blacks lived on the other side, and the 20 never met.
We never could play in their yards.
We never could say hello to them.
It was a complete wall.
You wanted to get an Italian sausage sandwich at the local deli, and you had to stand outside the door sill.
I'd be here for a month talking about all the constrictions, the little and large humiliations that we had to endure just to move forward in life.
Yet we did move forward.
And I'll come back to that.
But that was the today, segregation is, it's impossible to say it's completely vanished.
Racism will always be there and is a part of the human condition, as I say.
Stupidity is a part of the human condition as well.
We will always have to be on guard against that impulse within us to judge people by their race.
But the much larger reality today is that we as blacks are free for the very first time.
And our challenge today is not racism, it's freedom.
This is where we've not had a lot of experience.
This is where we've not built a culture that is prepared to take on the challenges of freedom.
And those are very, the demands of freedom are very rigorous.
And so rather than face that challenge, we pull back and say, no, our problem is systemic racism.
Thought racism was just a little bit, but it's much larger than that and it's what's?
It's what's holding me back and stifling my humanity, and and uh um, once again um, systemic racism is designed to expand entitlement.
If I say well, racism is just here and there, a little isolated incident, then no big deal.
But if I say it's everywhere, then my entitlement is everywhere.
Then my moral power is everywhere.
I can begin to tell the institutions how to behave.
I can tell corporate America to contribute money to Black Lives Matter.
I can change the curriculum at my university.
I can, in my corporation, insist on a new human resources department.
I can, on and on.
I've got real power that I can wield in society because whites don't have the moral authority to resist it.
To say to whites cannot say to me, there's no such thing as systemic racism anymore.
They can't name the truth.
We can't hear the truth.
That's where we are.
And what I have found in some of these conversations, and I'd love to have you help us unpack this, is sometimes when I'm interfacing with a leftist or a member of the activist media, we're talking about two different things.
So racism, the way I was raised, is one person of a particular skin color having a prejudice or hatred or bias towards another person of another skin color or culture.
It could be a white person against a black person or a black person against a white person or a black person against a Latino, so on and so forth.
The term racism is not, that's not their definition of racism.
Their definition of racism is a power struggle, is that black people are unable to be racist towards white people.
And even deeper than that, so that's number one I'd like to have you unpack.
And number two, and we've seen this happen, and you deserve a lot of credit for this in recent years more so than any other time in my lifetime, is the challenging of people are not black if they're not on the left.
You see this with Candace Owens, Brandon Tatum, yourself, Thomas Sowell.
The leading kind of black voices are no longer considered to be adequately black because they do not hold a certain ideological view.
Can you help unpack those two things about how we just have a disagreement on basic terms with some of the people that have been pushing them, especially when it comes to this idea of what is racism and is someone black if they are not on the left?
Right.
What is behind this is the fact, again, coming out of the 60s, that our history of victimization in America as blacks became our greatest source of power in freedom.
As a black, I can go around and I have a moral authority in American life to come up with wild ideas like systemic racism.
I can demand this.
I can demand just because I come from a race that's been victimized by America in the past.
So America's indebted to me.
Vincero Watches Sponsorship Segment 00:02:31
They owe me.
That's power.
At least I think that.
What tragically happened to blacks is that we thought the moral authority we gained when America confessed to its racist past, we thought that moral authority was our greatest weapon in society.
We could use it.
We have used it a great deal.
So Without realizing it, we developed a faith, almost a religious faith in the idea, belief that we're victims of white racism.
It just becomes a part of the identity.
We develop what I call a victim-focused identity.
You want to make many blacks angry?
Tell them that they're not a victim.
That's just beyond the pale.
And so it's more than ideology.
It is really this, they are protecting today this idea of victimization as power because we don't have faith that we have another source of power.
And this is the tragedy.
We don't invent computers.
So we don't do other sorts of things that traditionally bring power.
We were victims.
And boy, there's a lot of power in that when a society has admitted, yeah, we did victimize.
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Whites Must Stand Up Themselves 00:11:54
Do you think part of the problem is that there has been this continuation or the overemphasis or the over-generalization of a certain group of people being the oppressors versus the oppressed?
For example, I was born in 1993, almost three decades after the civil rights movement.
I am completely, personally, disconnected from any form of the real and legitimate segregation and racism that you lived through.
However, I'm still being blamed for it intergenerationally, despite myself having no involvement in it.
Do you think that is part of the problem that we are not viewing people as individuals instead, almost in tribal groups?
It's not as if that you have the individual agency to apply yourself, but you are only in the box of which you look most similar to those people.
I think the real problem behind this is that white Americans have lost their moral confidence.
They don't know whether they're, they may, they all doubt.
There's a doubt.
Am I racist?
Am I not?
There's an ambivalence.
There's a question.
As a black, well, boy, there's my chance.
There's my opportunity to exploit.
They can't make up their mind.
They're confused.
They don't have the confidence to enforce on me as a black the same values and principles they enforce on themselves.
They can't ask me to sacrifice in order to get ahead.
They have to give me something.
You notice all the social programs in the 19th, from the 60s on, every single one of them basically says, we're going to give you something.
We're never going to ask anything.
That attitude basically destroys black America.
We haven't recovered yet.
So, if the government asks us of something, ask something of us, we just built a whole new school system here in this city.
We'd like you to get your kids, so forth and so on.
Well, you're a racist.
And that's your real motivation.
And whites then don't have the confidence to white America lost the confidence to enforce the principles that made it great, to enforce the Bill of Rights, to enforce the Declaration of Independence, so forth and so on.
And we sort of have used that.
We've developed what's called the grievance industry, which basically exploits the lack of confidence in whites.
So, one of my real prayers is that at some point white America finds its confidence again.
Find some confidence that because they're not helpful, they're not going to be helpful.
We can't get over that problem.
Why would Amazon give somebody like me and give $10 million to Black Lives Matter if they had confidence?
They don't have any.
So, Black Lives Matter is going to extract millions from whites who will just go along with it and actually pretend that they're doing something wonderful and good and beneficent.
So, this is this sort of symbiosis that whites and blacks have today is, I think, where the real problem begins.
I think that's really well said.
And I also think that the issue that you pinpoint of white guilt, and I think you wrote that in 2006, if I'm not mistaken, right?
You saw this coming 15 years ago, 14, 15 years ago.
So, I want to ask a question: what was it about that year at that point that kind of exploded all of this social unrest?
Because in 2012 or 2008, there were demonstrations, but nothing like that.
Was it just the right place, right time?
Was there a social movement that led to this?
What was it about the Michael Brown incident that just started this now six-year or six or seven-year kind of ramp-up as now we've seen in 2020 with BLM Inc. and George Floyd?
Well, I'm not sure there was one sort of thing behind the timing of it.
This had been building.
The big incident before Michael Brown was Trayvon Martin, who was in Florida.
George Zimmerman killed by George Zimmerman, shot, so forth.
And that sort of was the beginning of the people began to, in these events, began to smell power.
There was in Trayvon Martin, wow, there was coming out of this event an imagery of white racism that and there again, it was in Michael Brown, the same sort of imagery.
Well, wow, that imagery translates into black power.
And again, that's when Black Lives Matter began to form into a group, into an organization.
That's where other groups, the whole sort of violent demonstrations and so forth that we see today sort of got started there.
Realized, and you see this in demonstrations right now, Portland, Oregon, and so forth, and Minneapolis, Antifa, as well as Black Lives Matter and other groups, all realize they all, as I say, they operate within that vacuum created by white self-doubt, by white faithlessness in themselves.
So that the only, when you are motivated by white guilt, the only thing you can bring to bear as a solution to a problem is deference.
And so you defer to anything.
And in your deference, you, in a sense, establish your innocence of racism, of evil.
That's what the mayor of Minneapolis gives the police station over to the mob to burn down.
This is white guilt in its purest, in its purest form.
Take over the city of Seattle for a number of days and weeks.
The city showing deference to these kids, these wild protesters and so forth.
All because there again is this lack of moral confidence that comes from our history.
We have not fought, it's though we're paying a price year in and year out now for that history.
And it weakens our entire society.
So I want to read a quote you said here, and you said there is a struggle for moral authority in the country right now brought about by the death of George Floyd.
What do those people listening and watching to this in the two minutes we have left, what can they do to reclaim the moral authority away from white guilt and black power and back towards a country that we all want to live in that is much more fair and decent?
I think, well, it's not easy.
If it was easy, it probably would have already happened by now.
But I think the first thing is that people have to understand the pressure that being white puts on them in this society with this history.
We're a specific people in a specific place in a specific time and history.
And it's important for us to understand you're born white today in America and you're already guilty.
You're already a racist.
And that is the sort of ideology that minorities feel empowered them.
It doesn't.
Believe me, it does not.
It ruins them.
But the illusion is that that power really is their power that history has bestowed on them to use in this society.
Well, until what I think whites have to begin to do is be very honest with themselves and stand up and say, if you've done something that is, that people accuse you of being racist, we've got to stand up for that.
Whites have to stand up for themselves.
They have to fight back on this at some point and say, enough is enough.
The principle, here's my, what's the solution?
What's the way out of this?
Never again reward race for anything.
Never count race.
Race has no meaning.
What is important is that you and I are citizens of the same democracy.
We have the same responsibilities, the same freedoms, and so forth.
And we have to treat each other strictly as citizens.
And this idea that you, the government, you have to honor my identity as a black.
I know then immediately you're making a power move on me.
You're going to hurt me in another way.
No, no, no, no.
Treat me only as a citizen of the United States and respect my rights and ask the same responsibilities, ask that I carry the same responsibilities.
And that's it.
And with discipline, never go into identity.
Never go there.
It is the kiss of death.
It may seem that it serves you well in the short term, but in the long term, it will destroy you.
When I grew up in a poor black community, the south side of Chicago, there was no black underclass in the 1950s.
There were also no social programs, no governmental programs, nothing.
We were on our own, up against the segregated society.
And we were thriving.
We were doing well.
The minute mid-60s comes, we win the civil rights victories.
We put into place countless programs.
We have been declining steadily ever since.
And identity, the liberal, liberalism uses identity to sort of, again, win back white innocence.
We've got to get over that and expect the same things.
You're black and you apply to university, then it's irrelevant.
You make it on merit or you don't make it at all.
Blacks need that.
We need that kind of discipline at this point to give up this idea that our victimization is our freedom.
Well, everyone, thank you, Dr. Steele, for that.
Everyone, check out whatkilledMichaelBrown.com.
Check out the documentary, What Killed Michael Brown.
I know we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming days and weeks.
A very important documentary for the times that we're in.
Dr. Shelby Steele, it was an honor.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me, man.
Enjoyed it.
Thank you guys for listening.
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Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
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