“Hands up, don’t shoot.” That narrative was heard frequently after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, abetting the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. This was a singular event in the history of racial conflict in America. It would appear that, actually, there was no validity to the “hands up, don’t shoot” story. Rather, Brown attacked the police officer who, fearing for his life, then shot him. Independent investigations by local authorities and the US Justice Department concluded as much. Eyewitnesses have testified to this effect. The fact of the matter is that “hands up, don’t shoot” never happened.
But it did happen virtually. It happened in effect. It happened because of the force of the narrative: a black man brutalized by overbearing, vicious, and racist state power. For many, that story overwhelmed all the facts in the case. There is a documentary by filmmaker Eli Steele, narrated by his father, Shelby, called What Killed Michael Brown? The film reviews the Michael Brown case and concludes that “hands up, don’t shoot” is what Shelby Steele calls a “poetic truth”—an account so powerfully resonant with a narrative paradigm that it may as well be true. Once it gets out there, many will have a hard time believing that it is not true because the power of the narrative is so great. For many, stories about bias against African Americans have this allure. This has become a problem.