Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: The Trial of O. J. Simpson (1995)

▪ Primary Source

      Race was a central theme in two of the most publicized events of 1995: the trial of O. J. Simpson and the Million Man March. Simpson, a legendary former National Football League running back, was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her companion in Los Angeles in the summer of 1994. Both of the victims were white, whereas Simpson was black. Despite substantial incriminating evidence against Simpson, the predominantly African American jury found him not guilty in less than four hours of deliberations. Many whites condemned the verdict as an example of reverse racism, while many blacks celebrated it as a victory over police harassment of African Americans. The stark difference in black and white responses to the verdict seemed to symbolize a deeper racial division within the country than many Americans realized. Two weeks after the Simpson verdict, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (Farrakhan, Louis) held a march on Washington, D.C., in which he invited a million African American men to attend. Farrakhan s history of anti-Semitic and anti-white rhetoric made him a controversial figure. In the essay reprinted below, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, surveys the responses of African American intellectuals to the Simpson trial and the Million Man March.

      “Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson s acquittal. It s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.

      An American historian I know registers a widespread sense of bathos when he says, “Who would have imagined that the Simpson trial would be like the Kennedy assassination—that you d remember where you were when the verdict was announced?” But everyone does, of course. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson (Wilson, William Julius) was in the red-carpet lounge of a United Airlines terminal, the only black in a crowd of white travellers, and found himself as stunned and disturbed as they were. Wynton Marsalis, on tour with his band in California, recalls that “everybody was acting like they were above watching it, but then when it got to be ten o clock—zoom, we said, ‘Put the verdict on! ” Spike Lee (Lee, Spike) was with Jackie Robinson s widow, Rachel, rummaging though a trunk filled with her husband s belongings, in preparation for a bio-pic he s making on the athlete. Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in her car in the parking lot of her local grocery store in Vermont, listening to the proceedings on National Public Radio, and she didn t pull out until after they were over. I was teaching a literature seminar at Harvard from twelve to two, and watched the verdict with the class on a television set in the seminar room. That s where I first saw the sort of racialized response that itself would fill television screens for the next few days: the white students looked aghast, and the black students cheered. “Maybe you should remind the students that this is a case about two people who were brutally slain, and not an occasion to celebrate,” my teaching assistant, a white woman, whispered to me.

      The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they d ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner s disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove (Dove, Rita), who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it “appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not.” Of course, it s possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, “You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides.”

      The matter of side-taking cuts deep. An old cartoon depicts a woman who has taken her errant daughter to see a child psychiatrist. “And when we were watching ‘The Wizard of Oz, ” the distraught mother is explaining, “she was rooting for the wicked witch!” What many whites experienced was the bewildering sense that an entire population had been rooting for the wrong side. “This case is a classic example of what I call interstitial spaces,” says Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, who recently retired from the federal Court of Appeals, and who last month received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The jury system is predicated on the idea that different people can view the same evidence and reach diametrically opposed conclusions.” But the observation brings little solace. If we disagree about something so basic, how can we find agreement about far thornier matters? For white observers, what s even scarier than the idea that black Americans were plumping for the villain, which is a misprision of value, is the idea that black Americans didn t recognize him as the villain, which is a misprision of fact. How can conversation begin when we disagree about reality? To put it at its harshest, for many whites a sincere belief in Simpson s innocence looks less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis.

      Perhaps you didn t know that Liz Claiborne appeared on “Oprah” not long ago and said that she didn t design her clothes for black women—that their hips were too wide. Perhaps you didn t know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program “20/20.”) Perhaps you didn t know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church s Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye s?

      Perhaps you didn t know these things, but a good many black Americans think they do, and will discuss them with the same intentness they bring to speculations about the “shadowy figure” in a Brentwood driveway. Never mind that Liz Claiborne has never appeared on “Oprah,” that the beleaguered Brooklyn company that makes Tropical Fantasy has gone as far as to make available an F.D.A. assay of its ingredients, and that those fried-chicken franchises pose a threat mainly to black folks arteries. The folklorist Patricia A. Turner, who has collected dozens of such tales in an invaluable 1993 study of rumor in African-American culture, “I Heard It Though the Grapevine,” points out the patterns to be found here: that these stories encode regnant anxieties, that they take root under particular conditions and play particular social roles, that the currency of rumor flourishes where “official” news has proved untrustworthy.

      Certainly the Fuhrman tapes might have been scripted to confirm the old saw that paranoids, too, have enemies. If you wonder why blacks seem particularly susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories, you might look at a history in which the official story was a poor guide to anything that mattered much, and in which rumor sometimes verged on the truth. Heard the one about the L.A. cop who hated interracial couples, fantasized about making a bonfire of black bodies, and boasted of planting evidence? How about the one about the federal government s forty-year study of how untreated syphilis affects black men? For that matter, have you ever read through some of the F.B.I. s COINTELPRO files? (“There is but one way out for you,” an F.B.I. scribe wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, thoughtfully urging on him the advantages of suicide. “You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”)

      People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest the dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There s a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The “shadowy figures” of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved. In any case, fealty to counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color. . . .

      Yet you need nothing so grand as an epistemic rupture to explain why different people weigh the evidence of authority differently. In the words of the cunning Republican campaign slogan, “Who do you trust?” It s a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don t. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they re continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn t be. Norman Podhoretz s soul-searching 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem, and Ours”—one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race sentiment—tells of a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author s residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood. And yet, he notes in a crucial passage, “I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them.” That ordinary, unremarkable comfort—the feeling that “the police are working for me”—continues to elude blacks, even many successful blacks. Thelma Golden, the curator of the Whitney s “Black Male” show, points out that on the very day the verdict was announced a black man in Harlem was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. As older blacks like to repeat, “When white folks say ‘justice, they mean ‘just us. ”

      Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don t have more than one story to tell. “These stories have a ring of cliché about them,” Erroll McDonald, Pantheon s executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, “but, as we all know about clichés, they re almost always true.” McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply “to show cause why I shouldn t be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car.” Wynton Marsalis says, “Shit, the police slapped me upside the head when I was in high school. I wasn t Wynton Marsalis then. I was just another nigger standing out somewhere on the street whose head could be slapped and did get slapped.” The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, “When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me that I was stealing things.” Nor does William Julius Wilson—who has a son-in-law on the Chicago police force (“You couldn t find a nicer, more dedicated guy”)—wonder why he was stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts. There s a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black.

      So we all have our stories. In 1968, when I was eighteen, a man who knew me was elected mayor of my West Virginia county, in an upset victory. A few weeks into his term, he passed on something he thought I should know: the county police had made a list of people to be arrested in the event of a serious civil disturbance, and my name was on it. Years of conditioning will tell. Wynton Marsalis says, “My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal-justice system.” Absurdly enough, it s mine, too.

      Another barrier to interracial comprehension is talk of the “race card”—a phrase that itself infuriates many blacks. Judge Higginbotham, who pronounces himself “not uncomfortable at all” with the verdict, is uncomfortable indeed with charges that Johnnie Cochran played the race card. “This whole point is one hundred per cent inaccurate,” Higginbotham says. “If you knew that the most important witness had a history of racism and hostility against black people, that should have been a relevant factor of inquiry even if the jury had been all white. If the defendant had been Jewish and the police officer had a long history of expressed anti-Semitism and having planted evidence against innocent persons who were Jewish, I can t believe that anyone would have been saying that defense counsel was playing the anti-Semitism card.” Angela Davis (Davis, Angela) finds the very metaphor to be a problem. “Race is not a card,” she says firmly. “The whole case was pervaded with issues of race.”

      Those who share her view were especially outraged at Robert Shapiro s famous post-trial rebuke to Cochran—for not only playing the race card but dealing it “from the bottom of the deck.” Ishmael Reed, who is writing a book about the case, regards Shapiro s remarks as sheer opportunism: “He wants to keep his Beverly Hills clients—a perfectly commercial reason.” In Judge Higginbotham s view, “Johnnie Cochran established that he was as effective as any lawyer in America, and though whites can tolerate black excellence in singing, dancing, and dunking, there s always been a certain level of discomfort among many whites when you have a one-on-one challenge in terms of intellectual competition. If Edward Bennett Williams, who was one of the most able lawyers in the country, had raised the same issues, half of the complaints would not exist.”

      By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers. Cornel West (West, Cornel) says, “I think part of the problem is that Shapiro—and this is true of certain white brothers—has a profound fear of black-male charisma. And this is true not only in the law but across the professional world. You see, you have so many talented white brothers who deserve to be in the limelight. But one of the reasons they are not in the limelight is that they are not charismatic. And here comes a black person who s highly talented but also charismatic and therefore able to command center stage. So you get a very real visceral kind of jealousy that has to do with sexual competition as well as professional competition.”

      Erroll McDonald touches upon another aspect of sexual tension when he says, “The so-called race card has always been the joker. And the joker is the history of sexual racial politics in this country. People forget the singularity of this issue—people forget that less than a century ago black men were routinely lynched for merely glancing at white women or for having been thought to have glanced at a white woman.” He adds, with mordant irony, “Now we ve come to a point in our history where a black man could, potentially, have murdered a white woman and thrown in a white man to boot—and got off. So the country has become far more complex in its discussion of race.” This is, as he appreciates, a less than perfectly consoling thought. . . .

      Of course, the popular trial of Nicole Brown Simpson—one conducted off camera, in whispers—has further occluded anything recognizable as sexual politics. When Anita Hill heard that O. J. Simpson was going to be part of the Million Man March on Washington, she felt it was entirely in keeping with the occasion: a trial in which she believed that matters of gender had been “bracketed” was going to be succeeded by a march from which women were excluded. And, while Minister Louis Farrakhan had told black men that October 16th was to serve as a “day of atonement” for their sins, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was obviously not among the sins he had in mind. Bell Hooks (hooks, bell) argues, “Both O. J. s case and the Million Man March confirm that, while white men are trying to be sensitive and pretending they re the new man, black men are saying that patriarchy must be upheld at all costs, even if women must die.” She sees the march as a congenial arena for Simpson in symbolic terms: “I think he d like to strut his stuff, as the patriarch. He is the dick that stayed hard longer.” (“The surprising thing is that you won t see Clarence Thomas (Thomas, Clarence) going on that march,” Anita Hill remarks of another icon of patriarchy.) Farrakhan himself prefers metaphors of military mobilization, but the exclusionary politics of the event has clearly distracted from its ostensible message of solidarity. “First of all, I wouldn t go to no war and leave half the army home,” says Amiri Baraka (Baraka, Amiri), the radical poet and playwright who achieved international renown in the sixties as the leading spokesman for the Black Arts movement (black aesthetic movement). “Logistically, that doesn t make sense.” He notes that Martin Luther King s 1963 March on Washington was “much more inclusive,” and sees Farrakhan s regression as “an absolute duplication of what s happening in the country,” from Robert Bly on: the sacralization of masculinity.

      Something like that dynamic is what many white feminists saw on display in the Simpson verdict; but it s among women that the racial divide is especially salient. The black legal scholar and activist Patricia Williams says she was “stunned by the intensely personal resentment of some of my white women friends in particular.” Stunned but, on reflection, not mystified. “This is Greek drama,” she declares. “Two of the most hotly contended aspects of our lives are violence among human beings who happen to be police officers and violence among human beings who happen to be husbands, spouses, lovers.” Meanwhile, our attention has been fixated on the rhetorical violence between human beings who happen to disagree about the outcome of the O. J. Simpson trial. . . .

      There are some for whom the question of adaptation is not entirely abstract. The performance artist and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has already worked on the 911 tape and F. Lee Bailey s cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman in the drama classes she teaches at Stanford. Now, with a dramaturge s eye, she identifies what she takes to be the climactic moment: “Just after the verdict was read I will always remember two sounds and one image. I heard Johnnie Cochran go ‘Ugh, and then I heard the weeping of Kim Goldman. And then I saw the image of O. J. s son, with one hand going upward on one eye and one hand pointed down, shaking and sobbing. I couldn t do the words right now; if I could find a collaborator, I would do something else. I feel that a choreographer ought to do that thing. Part of the tragedy was the fact of that ‘Ugh and that crying. Because that ‘Ugh wasn t even a full sound of victory, really.” In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” Wallace Stevens famously said he didn t know whether he preferred “The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” American culture has spoken as with one voice: we like it just after.

      Just after is when our choices and allegiances are made starkly apparent. Just after is when interpretation can be detached from the thing interpreted. Anita Hill, who saw her own presence at the Clarence Thomas hearings endlessly analyzed and allegorized, finds plenty of significance in the trial s reception, but says the trial itself had none. Naturally, the notion that the trial was sui generis is alien to most commentators. Yet it did not arrive in the world already costumed as a racial drama; it had to be racialized. And those critics—angry whites, indignant blacks—who like to couple this verdict with the Rodney King verdict should consider an elementary circumstance: Rodney King was an unknown and undistinguished black man who was brutalized by the police; the only thing exceptional about that episode was the presence of a video camera. But, as Bell Hooks asks, “in what other case have we ever had a wealthy black man being tried for murder?” Rodney King was a black man to his captors before he was anything else; O. J. Simpson was, first and foremost, O. J. Simpson. Kathleen Cleaver observes, “A black superhero millionaire is not someone for whom mistreatment is an issue.” And Spike Lee acknowledges that the police “don t really bother black people once they are a personality.” On this point, I m reminded of something that Roland Gift, the lead singer of the pop group Fine Young Cannibals, once told a reporter: “I m not black, I m famous.”

      Simpson, too, was famous rather than black; that is, until the African-American community took its lead from the cover of Time and, well, blackened him. Some intellectuals are reluctant to go along with the conceit. Angela Davis, whose early-seventies career as a fugitive and a political prisoner provides one model of how to be famous and black, speaks of the need to question the way “O. J. Simpson serves as the generic black man,” given that “he did not identify himself as black before then.” More bluntly, Baraka says, “To see him get all of this God-damned support from people he has historically and steadfastly eschewed just pissed me off. He eschewed black people all his life and then, like Clarence Thomas, the minute he gets jammed up he comes talking about ‘Hey, I m black. ” And the matter of spousal abuse should remind us of another role-reversal entailed by Simpson s iconic status in a culture of celebrity: Nicole Brown Simpson would have known that her famous-not-black husband commanded a certain deference from the L.A.P.D. which she, who was white but not yet famous, did not.

      “It s just amazing that we in the black community have bought into it,” Anita Hill says, with some asperity, and she sees the manufacture of black-male heroes as part of the syndrome. “We continue to create a superclass of individuals who are above the rules.” It bewilders her that Simpson “was being honored as someone who was being persecuted for his politics, when he had none,” she says. “Not only do we forget about the abuse of his wife but we also forget about the abuse of the community, his walking away from the community.” And so Simpson s connection to a smitten black America can be construed as yet another romance, another troubled relationship, another case study in mutual exploitation.

      Yet to accept the racial reduction (“whites v. blacks,” as last week s Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites. I myself was convinced of Simpson s guilt, so convinced that in the middle of the night before the verdict was to be announced I found myself worrying about his prospective sojourn in prison: would he be brutalized, raped, assaulted? Yes, on sober reflection, such worries over a man s condign punishment seemed senseless, a study in misplaced compassion; but there it was. When the verdict was announced, I was stunned—but, then again, wasn t my own outrage mingled with an unaccountable sense of relief? Anna Deavere Smith says, “I am seeing more than that white people are pissed off and black people are ecstatic. I am seeing the difficulty of that; I am seeing people having difficulty talking about it.” And many are weary of what Ishmael Reed calls “zebra journalism, where everything is seen in black-and-white.” Davis says, “I have the feeling that the media are in part responsible for the creation of this so-called racial divide—putting all the white people on one side and all the black people on the other side.”

      Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial s outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor s comic rejoinder “Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?” “I think if he were innocent he wouldn t have behaved that way,” Jamaica Kincaid says of Simpson, taking note of his refusal to testify on his own behalf. “If you are innocent,” she believes, “you might want to admit you have done every possible thing in the world—had sex with ten donkeys, twenty mules—but did not do this particular thing.” William Julius Wilson says mournfully, “There s something wrong with a system where it s better to be guilty and rich and have good lawyers than to be innocent and poor and have bad ones.”

      The Simpson verdict was “the ultimate in affirmative action,” Amiri Baraka says. “I know the son of a bitch did it.” For his part, Baraka essentially agrees with Shapiro s rebuke of Cochran: “Cochran is belittling folks. What he s saying is ‘Well, the niggers can t understand the question of perjury in the first place. The only thing they can understand is, ‘He called you a nigger. ” He alludes to Ebony s fixation on “black firsts”—the magazine s spotlight coverage of the first black to do this or that—and fantasizes the appropriate Ebony accolade. “They can feature him on the cover as ‘The first Negro to kill a white woman and get away with it, ” he offers acidly. Then he imagines Farrakhan introducing him with just that tribute at the Million Man March. Baraka has been writing a play called “Othello, Jr.,” so such themes have been on his mind. The play is still in progress, but he has just finished a short poem:

      Free Mumia! O.J. did it And you know it.

      “Trials don t establish absolute truth; that s a theological enterprise,” Patricia Williams says. So perhaps it is appropriate that a religious leader, Louis Farrakhan, convened a day of atonement; indeed, some worry that it is all too appropriate, coming at a time when the resurgent right has offered us a long list of sins for which black men must atone. But the crisis of race in America is real enough. And with respect to that crisis a mass mobilization is surely a better fit than a criminal trial. These days, the assignment of blame for black woes increasingly looks like an exercise in scholasticism; and calls for interracial union increasingly look like an exercise in inanity. (“Sorry for the Middle Passage, old chap. I don t know what we were thinking.” “Hey, man, forget it—and here s your wallet back. No, really, I want you to have it.”) The black economist Glenn Loury says, “If I could get a million black men together, I wouldn t march them to Washington, I d march them into the ghettos.”

      But because the meanings of the march are so ambiguous, it has become itself a racial Rorschach—a vast ambulatory allegory waiting to happen. The actor and director Sidney Poitier (Poitier, Sidney) says, “If we go on such a march to say to ourselves and to the rest of America that we want to be counted among America s people, we would like our family structure to be nurtured and strengthened by ourselves and by the society, that s a good point to make.” He sees the march as an occasion for the community to say, “Look, we are adrift. Not only is the nation adrift on the question of race—we, too, are adrift. We need to have a sense of purpose and a sense of direction.” Maya Angelou, who agreed to address the assembled men, views the event not as a display of male self-affirmation but as a ceremony of penitence: “It s a chance for African-American males to say to African-American females, ‘I m sorry. I am sorry for what I did, and I am sorry for what happened to both of us. ” But different observers will have different interpretations. Mass mobilizations launch a thousand narratives—especially among subscribers to what might be called the “great event” school of history. And yet Farrakhan s recurrent calls for individual accountability consort oddly with the absolution, both juridical and populist, accorded O. J. Simpson. Simpson has been seen as a symbol for many things, but he is not yet a symbol for taking responsibility for one s actions.

      All the same, the task for black America is not to get its symbols in shape: symbolism is one of the few commodities we have in abundance. Meanwhile, Du Bois s century-old question “How does it feel to be a problem?” grows in trenchancy with every new bulletin about crime and poverty. And the Simpson trial spurs us to question everything except the way that the discourse of crime and punishment has enveloped, and suffocated, the analysis of race and poverty in this country. For the debate over the rights and wrongs of the Simpson verdict has meshed all too well with the manner in which we have long talked about race and social justice. The defendant may be free, but we remain captive to a binary discourse of accusation and counter-grievance, of victims and victimizers. It is a discourse in which O. J. Simpson is a suitable remedy for Rodney King, and reductions in Medicaid are entertained as a suitable remedy for O. J. Simpson: a discourse in which everyone speaks of payback and nobody is paid. The result is that race politics becomes a court of the imagination wherein blacks seek to punish whites for their misdeeds and whites seek to punish blacks for theirs, and an infinite regress of score-settling ensues—yet another way in which we are daily becoming meta and meta. And so an empty vessel like O. J. Simpson becomes filled with meaning, and more meaning—more meaning than any of us can bear. No doubt it is a far easier thing to assign blame than to render justice. But if the imagery of the court continues to confine the conversation about race, it really will be a crime.

Source: The New Yorker, October 23, 1995, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.”

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