Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

Hi all,

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation.

The lie never happened.

After six months of nightly riots in the streets and confrontations with law enforcement while the media salivated at the free spectacle, Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice found that there was no evidence that Brown was in the process of surrendering with his hands up. Dorian Johnson’s own account fell apart under scrutiny. The DOJ found he had been hiding behind a vehicle for significant portions of the incident, and concluded it was unclear whether he could even have accurately seen the shooting that he had described to the world. Officer Darren Wilson was also cleared when Holder said there was no evidence of racism.

However, the Obama-Holder White House could not let the opportunity of Ferguson go flat, especially the charge of racism. When Holder traveled to Ferguson he said that he was doing so as the Attorney General of the United States and as a “black man.” The message was sent that the nation’s top lawman was surveying Ferguson through the racial lens, and before any facts were in. After the first report found no racism, the same Justice Department issued a second report that used the tool of disparate impact to claim that the Ferguson police department was guilty of pulling over a disproportionate number of blacks. We detail how the true answer was more complex than this simplistic picture in What Killed Michael Brown? To Holder it didn’t matter how the charge of racism landed as long as it landed on Ferguson somewhere and the report that Ferguson was systemically racist gave new wings to the Hands Up Don’t Shoot lie.

So the lie continues to this day, long after the last fires were put out in Ferguson. But the lie did something far worse than travel. It continues to exist, and by existing it hovers above us as a threat of sorts. I felt this lie directly when I went to Ferguson four years after the shooting in 2018 to begin filming What Killed Michael Brown? People called me and my father brave for daring to go into the town in search of the answer to the question that my father asks in the film, “Why was the truth so hard to see here?” They used the word brave because they knew that the lie had become the correct narrative in America. To question it was to be on the wrong side of history and to be charged with racism. So this lie was not some mere inanimate slogan, but a conditioning force that warned us against questioning the poetic truth that America was a white supremacist and systemically racist nation.

The lie survived because the white guilt machine needs it to survive. What is the Left without the accusation that America is a characterologically evil nation, to borrow another one of my father’s phrases?

That is why many schools and institutions of higher learning continue to teach the lie in the classrooms. I will never forget driving by Pomona College around 2020, six years after the shooting, and seeing the New York Times article about the shooting plastered to the side of the arts building. All the words in the article were blacked out except for “unarmed black teenager” and “white police officer.” Many in academia embraced this lie. Tommy Curry, formerly of Texas A&M and now the Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh, wrote that Michael Brown was executed in broad daylight with his hands up. NYU professor Nicholas Mirzoeff had to conclude that Officer Wilson was justified but chose to title his article with the lie: “The Murder of Michael Brown.” Another NYU course called Before Ferguson taught that policing itself was an instrument of capitalism, racism and state violence. A Georgetown professor named Marcia Chatelain created the Ferguson Syllabus, a crowdsourced set of readings to bring Brown’s death into classrooms across the nation. My research shows no mention that Officer Wilson was found to be justified in his shooting of Michael Brown. This same research led me to an organization called Facing History and Ourselves which supplies lessons to high school teachers and they push the Hands Up Don’t Shoot lie. In their footnotes, they admit their claim is false.

In the United States Congress, several of its members have been advocates of this lie for years. I could name them but that is not the point here. The point is that these lawmakers who are elected to represent us have chosen to push the lie that Brown was executed by a racist cop. The cynical hypocrisy here is that they are going against the very lie that their own government — an Obama led government — discredited with evidence.

In the St. Louis area the lie has granted enormous power to the local politicians and nonprofits. In a new City Journal piece by Jordan Duecker he documented how two hundred million dollars from the federal pandemic relief fund had been routed to local organizations tied to the racial equity agenda. (If you have seen What Killed Michael Brown? then you saw how the aftermath of the shooting birthed many social justice organizations.) At least a hundred and twenty six million dollars of those funds went to other programs pushing the same agenda. The kicker of the article was the Forward Through Ferguson’s 2025 Racial Equity Summit, a nonprofit that grew directly out of the Ferguson Commission. Its executive director told the donors in a boldface move: I need you to stay guilty. Yep. She didn’t even hide it. It was quite the astonishing claim. She wasn’t asking for money on the grounds of betterment or justice but guilt.

Six years after Ferguson, the lie exploded with incredible new strength with the death of George Floyd. By then Americans had been undergoing a conditioning that raised their racial consciousness. Over and over, they heard white privilege, white fragility, white supremacy and they had been told not to question blacks or other minorities and to always put their victimization before facts. That summer of George Floyd changed America profoundly in so many ways and we’re still living in its shadow.

What many did not understand, when October 7 exploded, was that it was not an isolated event in the Middle East. It was part of the lie but on the international scale. Locals in Ferguson and Minneapolis told me that one of the striking things they had witnessed on their streets was the involvement of Palestinian activists. Why were they there? Part of the answer lies in the liberation ideology which believes in uniting all the oppressed people of color against the evil Western empire. That is why in 2021, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, released a statement on Floyd’s death. We included the clip in the upcoming White Guilt documentary and he says, “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by Israel against the Palestinians.” The man who had no objection to putting innocent Palestinians in the line of fire to bolster the lies of genocide against Israel was exploiting Floyd’s death for his own aim. He understood something about the West that most of us did not or refused to understand. The lie that began on Canfield Drive, that the body of color is always the victim of the white executioner, had become the lens that many in the West had willingly or unconsciously been conditioned to view the world with.

Mere hours after the West was flooded with videos of beheadings, snatched babies, mangled bodies, and executions the carriers of this lie began pushing their narrative. Israel was so evil that these “freedom fighters” had no choice but to slaughter. Their celebrations in the streets of Gaza with dead bodies of Israelis was not bloodlust but liberation. They knew which bodies were innocent and not and it had nothing to do with truth.

This lie still lives twelve years later. Imagine how many children and students who are taught that Michael Brown was executed in cold blood. There are at least six other documentaries out there that support this lie to some degree. That is why my father and I felt so compelled to make What Killed Michael Brown? We called out the lie and we told the story of the true witnesses who came forward, despite “snitches get stitches” spray painted around town, and told the truth. We must carry on the truth of these witnesses and never back down in the face of the lie.

My best,

Eli