Bigger and O.J.
Ishmael Reed

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas, a part-time hoodlum and welfare recipient, lives in the slums of Chicago with his dysfunctional family. He gets a job in the rich household of the Daltons, a wealthy white family, whose philanthropic patriarch is also a slumlord. His wife is blind, and his daughter flirts with radical politics and has a radical lover. After driving the drunken daughter Mary home one night, he tries to put her to bed, all done in innocence, but so as to avoid detection by her blind mother, who enters the room, he suffocates Mary. The narrator calls this an accident. The rest of the novel covers Bigger’s flight from justice, capture, and imprisonment. Unlike today’s middle-class writers who write about underclass characters, the Boyz in the Hood, Richard Wright knew what he was talking about. Not only had he been poor but as a youth worker he got to know many Biggers and, on the basis of this experience, was able to draw a character so convincing that Bigger has become an archetype for the inner-cities’ disaffiliated youth.

During the O.J. Simpson trial, Simpson was compared to Shakespeare’s Othello, which seemed stretched, since it is apparent that while Othello was a naive patsy, O.J. Simpson’s cunning and intellect contributed to his legal team’s overwhelming one of the most formidable adversarial armadas ever assembled: forty prosecutors, an international police force, including Interpol, the FBI, and media investigation teams so biased as to appear as operatives for the prosecution. In addition, a hi-tech paradigm constructed by a Silicon Valley computer, which concluded that Simpson was the killer, was used by the prosecution. Moreover, Nicole Simpson was no Desdemona.

On other occasions, Simpson was compared to Bigger Thomas. On the surface, the two have little in common. Bigger Thomas was a poor, rootless slum-dweller whose opportunities were slight. O.J. Simpson, though of humble origin, graduated from college, became a football star with the Buffalo Bills, a celebrity salesperson for Hertz Rent A Car, and a movie actor. While Bigger Thomas was one who used violence to communicate with his associates, O.J. Simpson is highly articulate. I saw him deliver a stand-up monologue on Saturday Night Live. It was flawless.

O.J. was comfortable in a world of whites, while Bigger remained in a psychological and mental slum, even though the hand of white philanthropy reached out to him. What Bigger and O.J. Simpson do have in common is that both were arrested for the murder of blond white women, both were subjected to a mob rule public opinion that convicted them before all of the evidence was examined, and both were tried in the media, which, instead of serving as an objective reporter of the facts, inflamed the situation and contributed to a racial divide. (A caller into NPRs “Talk of the Nation” on March 28, 1996, asked why the media never repeated its showing of a split screen that showed both an all-white bar in Buffalo, New York, and a gathering of blacks, cheering the announcement of the acquittal. Christopher Darden, the show’s guest, agreed with the caller that the media contributed to a racial divide by depicting all whites in favor of a guilty verdict, and all blacks favoring an acquittal.) This wouldn’t be the first time. A book titled The Betrayal of the Negro by Dr. Rayford W. Logan documents how, historically, the American media have contributed to racial discord and riots between whites and blacks. For example, the Carnival Riot that took place in New Orleans in 1900 was the result of a newspaper publisher’s agitation, both public and editorial.

Richard Wright’s book also indicates that the relationship between African Americans and the racist criminal justice system hasn’t changed since Richard Wright wrote Native Son.

The views of the characters and the narrator about politics, class, race, gender, religion, economics, and the media also have a contemporary ring.

Bigger’s arrest, imprisonment, trial, and execution provides Wright with an opportunity to explore racism in the criminal justice system, which is still an issue—especially when black youth are five to ten times more likely to be incarcerated than white youth for committing the same crime, and when blacks are receiving mandatory five-year sentences for possession of crack cocaine while white crack possessors are not, and when there exists a disproportionate number of black prisoners on death row. My examination of Uniform Crime Reports (U.C.R.), a system that critics accuse of being flawed, leads me to conclude that blacks don’t commit more crimes: they’re arrested more.

The institutions that manipulate the crime figures are often institutions whose racist attitudes toward blacks have been documented. The police departments and the FBI have been investigating and often smearing black celebrities and political leaders at least since 1919. In the Simpson case, it was obvious that the police were willing to lie in order to convict a black defendant, and the FBI’s role was also designed to benefit the prosecution. In fact, during the last phase of the trial, a witness was ready to testify about an FBI scientist’s willingness to produce results favorable to the prosecution. The FBI agent in question agreed with the defense about some crucial sock testimony but, after being contacted by the prosecution, changed his testimony.

Bigger travels through the novel complaining about his lack of freedom in a white society that controls him and orders him around. After the Simpson verdict, Tammy Bruce, head of Los Angeles NOW, proposed that Simpson leave the country and be removed from the culture. Media commentators like Geraldo Rivera urged that he be ostracized. Both Rivera and Bruce were attempting to restrict Simpson’s movements, to control him. Nothing could be more revealing of the attitudes of some whites toward African Americans than Jeffrey Toobin’s remark that Simpson was now treated like a “pariah.” Obviously, Simpson has been greeted very warmly by African-American audiences. For Toobin, being a pariah means ostracism by the wealthy whites of Brentwood. Where do pariahs go? To the African-American community, which, for Toobin, is occupied by intellectually inferior lepers. Professor Dennis Schatzman described the Toobin book as the second bell curve in which blacks are characterized as stupid and incapable of understanding hard evidence. Though he found no evidence to accuse Colonel North of drug dealing, Toobin is convinced of Simpson’s guilt. It figures. Mr. Toobin’s ideas about blacks are consistent with his employer’s. The New Yorker, attitudes toward blacks. Its founding editor, Harold Ross, characterized “negroes” as “dangerous or funny.” The soft treatment accorded Toobin by the media was typical of how pro-prosecution writers and pundits were coddled and nurtured. Former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates told the networks that he never used the “N” word. However, former Chief of Police of San Jose Joseph McNamara, now a fellow at the Hoover Institute, said that he had heard Gates use the word “nigger” frequently. When I called a local television station to ask McNamara, a guest on the show, to elaborate, the screener said that she didn’t think the question important.

Bigger tells his lawyer, Max, “… a guy gets tired of being told what he can do and can’t do. You get a little job here and a little job there. You shine shoes, sweep streets; anything …” Elsewhere he mentions the penal-like condition of African Americans. “Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood.” Like Bigger, Simpson became a commodity, making fortunes for television networks and publishers, rescuing careers, and even providing a man who hated him, Chris Darden, with an opportunity to make more money than he ever would have had he remained an obscure Los Angeles prosecutor; and his fellow prosecutor, Marcia Clark, received the third highest advance in history to write a nonfiction book about the case. Geraldo Rivera’s show was about to be dropped, which would have jeopardized his $500,000 per year income, before he began to do hundreds of shows about Simpson. The ratings of CNN were described as “languishing” before the onset of the Simpson trial. Afterwards its ratings increased sevenfold and put Ted Turner in a position to bargain with CBS and Time Warner. Though journalists and politicians complained about the $13 million that the Simpson case cost Los Angeles, they rarely mentioned the millions made by the city as the result of it being the site of the trial, including $400 million in hotel taxes.

Moreover, an industry of mostly white pundits and commentators, some of whom didn’t even follow the trial yet had opinions, was generated as a result of the trial. CNN’s Greta Van Susteran and Roger Sessions and Entertainment TV’s Kathleen Sullivan deserve congratulations for their fair and unbiased coverage of the trial. Newsday’s Shirley Perleman also deserves kudos for her avoiding the lurid stampede toward the tabloid exhibited by many journalists covering the case, but in their general coverage, the media were on bended knees before the prosecution. Katie Couric, Geraldo Rivera, and Gloria Allred became little more than advocates for the Brown family, abandoning any pretense of objectivity.

Steve Brill’s Court TV, which has been accused of commercializing and tabloidizing the criminal justice system, ran ads for the O.J. trial, and Brill was quoted by The New York Observer as saying that he was the happiest man on the planet when O.J didn’t commit suicide, a quote that Brill denied having made. At one point, the amount of money made by some businesses from the O.J. phenomenon totaled $300 million, more than the economy of Grenada; yet, when Simpson attempted to earn money by promoting a video that explained his side of the case, he was chastised by others who were making money from the case themselves, including Dominick Dunne, who expressed his disgust about Simpson marketing his video, even while writing his own book about the case. Mr. Dunne, one of a number of commentators who pronounced Simpson guilty before the defense began its case, wrote vicious, gossipy articles in Vanity Fair (published by a tabloid-happy import named Tina Brown). Dunne called the jury, which included nine African-American women, stupid for acquitting Simpson; yet he was also used by NBC as an objective reporter about the trial.

Of whites, Bigger says, “They choke you off the face of the earth … they don’t even let you feel what you want to feel. They after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you. They kill you before you die.”

In another section Bigger says, “We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence….” This remark by Bigger expresses the feeling that many African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans have when viewing a media that’s fifty years behind the South in their efforts to diversify. Having their points-of-view excluded from a media discussion during which their enemies often discuss their lives and culture contemptuously and without risk of rebuttal is for African Americans and others like peeping into the world from a knothole in a fence. During the recent protests over Hollywood’s lack of black Oscar nominees, it was revealed that the number of black writers who are members of the Screen Writers’ Guild totals two and a half percent. Minority representation in newspapers and television is slightly higher, and so the dialogue regarding race in this country is monopolized by white males, who are ignorant of black history and culture, talking to each other, or to themselves. This characterized the media discussion in the Simpson case. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, who carried on like a prosecution plant, even went so far as to serve as a consultant to other white journalists about the mores in the African-American community. Because he presumably was able to read the minds of the mostly black female jury, he predicted, the night before the acquittal, that they would convict Simpson. Shortly before the verdict another white male expert on black psychology predicted that the black women would vote for conviction because black women can tell when black men are lying.

The most conspicuous representative of white society for many blacks, and the only whites whom they may see on a day-to-day basis, are the police, who are often viewed as members of an invading force, which arrives in the community to impose brutality and engage in illicit activities. This image is reinforced by the large percentage of policemen who don’t reside in the inner city. In Oakland, California, where I live, eighty percent of the police reside outside of the city, including one officer who commutes from Denver, Colorado. Every time the citizens of Oakland attempt to change this situation, they are opposed by the policeman’s union.

As in the case of the 1992 Stuart case in Boston, in which a white man claimed that his pregnant wife was murdered by a black man, and the 1994 Susan Smith case, in which a white woman accused a fictitious black figure of murdering her children, the murder of a white person, especially a Nordic-appearing white woman, as in the Simpson case, puts the entire black male population under suspicion. Police suspend with the Bill of Rights and employ the kind of tactics that the United States says it despises in totalitarian regimes. In Native Son, the police and the vigilantes search every black home under a blanket warrant from the mayor. The police in the Simpson case were accused by the judge of a reckless disregard for the truth when they concocted a probable cause for entering Simpson’s property without a warrant.

After it is discovered that Bigger is responsible for Mary Dalton’s death, thousands of police and vigilantes throw a cordon around the Black Belt. For whites, all blacks become culpable for the actions of one black and must be punished. Since the Simpson case, America’s yellow journalists, who feed upon racial psychoses for profit, have been speculating about how whites are going to pay blacks for the verdict. Will affirmative-action programs be curtailed? Will welfare policies become more stringent? Some have suggested that this is how whites riot—economically—though whites still engage in physical riots as well. Thirteen percent of those arrested during the 1992 riots that took place after the Rodney King verdict were white (and probably from two-parent households), yet no black or Latino mob has given as good a riot as Irish Americans did in New York in the late 1800s. The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley said that whites were responsible for burning down restaurants in Koreatown.

Since the typical recipient of both affirmative action and welfare is white, this retaliation will affect whites as well. Mob psychoses cause one to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Self-maiming is the kind of action that results from a psychosis.

In Wright’s time, the whites perpetrated physical assaults upon African Americans when a black man was accused of a heinous crime against a white. After Bigger has escaped, black men are beaten and the homes of black people are assaulted. One thousand homes are raided. The New York Times of October 25, 1995, reported that interviews conducted with students on American campuses revealed an anger among whites about the outcome of the Simpson trial. Oprah Winfrey reported that tips given black doormen declined after the Simpson verdict. (A week after Ms. Winfrey made this remark, the black doormen at New Orleans’s Fairmont Hotel told me the same thing.) Economic reprisals were also visited upon blacks after Bigger Thomas’s escape. Bigger reads a newspaper that reports “several hundred Negro employees throughout the city had been dismissed from jobs. A well-known banker’s wife phoned a newspaper that she dismissed her Negro cook “for fear that she might poison the children.” Just as, in some instances, groups of Native Americans were slaughtered because of the actions of one or two, and the German Jews paid with Krisstalnacht after a Jew assassinated a high-ranking Nazi official, the fact that all blacks are still blamed for the actions of some blacks is an indication of how much racism in this country persists. In fact, freedom can be measured according to the degree of anonymity that the society offers to members of a particular group. Though Irish-American Andy Rooney offered a reward for the capture of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson’s killers, no one in the media blames Andy Rooney for the actions of Irish-American Timothy McVeigh, who is suspect in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, nor were Irish-American leaders like Daniel Moynihan required to condemn Irish-American extremists like Pat Buchanan. (In fact Newsweek, which ran a scurrilous article about Simpson, presented what for some was a sympathetic portrait of Oklahoma bombing suspect McVeigh and Time, which issued a controversial cover portrait of Simpson, printed a benign one of McVeigh.)

As soon as Bigger encounters the police he is accosted with “N” words, “A” words, and “B” words. He’s an animal, a black son of a bitch. The “array of faces, white and looming,” threaten to kill him, to lynch him. After the Simpson verdict, a white woman called one of the talk shows and said that the people in her town were saying that the “nigger” ought to be lynched, that the “nigger” ought to be burned. For me, the low point of the ugly and racist journalism in the Simpson case occurred when A.J. Benza, a reporter for the Daily News, appearing on Entertainment Network’s The Gossip Show, encouraged Fred Goldman to shoot Simpson.

In Native Son, Bigger is called a black ape. Black men are animals, and the inner cities are the jungles that we inhabit. Bigger is described as a “rapacious beast who is driven from his den into the open. He is a beast utterly untouched by the softening influence of modern civilization. He seems out of place in a white man’s civilization, according to the Tribune, the rabble-rousing newspaper that carries the story of Bigger’s flight, capture, imprisonment, and trial. Such descriptions of African Americans are not limited to contemporary ultra-right publications; but they are the kinds of things one might read in the New Republic, where The Bell Curve was favorably discussed, or The End of Racism, where an imported demagogue named Dinesh D’Souza (who was once associated with the anti-black, anti-Semitic Dartmouth Review, and who is backed by powerful interests, including William Simon, a former cabinet member, The Olin Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute) writes that blacks have a civilization gap. Mr. Dinesh D’Souza suffers from the same historical amnesia as the Irish police captain who is quoted in the same Tribune article in Wright’s novel describing Bigger as a beast, a man without civilization. A governor general of India said that Indians had the intelligence of a dog, and the British said that the Irish were the earlier missing link in the human species, which matches the description of Bigger in the novel. It has been noted that in the United States, the former victims of racial oppression practice racist oppression against blacks.

Animal imagery was also used to describe Simpson. A savage. A beast. The networks kept rubbing the 1993 tape recording in the public’s face, without informing them that during the time period of this tape Simpson didn’t strike Nicole Simpson. Photos of her bruised face were shown to worldwide audiences without the media stipulating that there was no proof that Simpson was responsible for inflicting these bruises. In one of a number of salacious Vanity Fair pieces about the case written by Dominick Dunne, Nicole Simpson’s reference to Simpson as an animal was gleefully highlighted in bold type. In a phone call to the Larry King Show, Louis H. Brown, Nicole Simpson’s father, a man who has benefited from Simpson’s largesse, called Simpson an animal when it was suggested that the defense might call Sidney Simpson as a witness. Whether Brown expressed indignation at the actions of his daughter Dominique is not known; she sold pictures of a topless Nicole, and of the Simpson children, to tabloid publications for $100,000.

While Wright mocks the novel’s journalists with scathing gusto, these early journalists behave like Freedom Forum Fellows in comparison to today’s journalists, those who work for outfits whose ambition is not to create good journalism but to make money. So sleazy was the coverage of the Simpson case that when the editor of the National Enquirer appeared on ABC’s Nightline to discuss the case in the company of some prominent mainstream journalists, he seemed right at home. In the Thomas case, as in the Simpson case, the media behaved as a sort of public relations department for the police and for the prosecution, inflaming the public with sensational copy unfavorable to the defendant. From the time of the Simpson arrest, the police and the media began a partnership—the media doing its part by leaking damaging information, much of which was false. Remember the ski mask and the scratches on O.J.’s body? Five days after Simpson’s arrest, CBS ran a poll to which respondents were asked whether, if convicted, Simpson should receive life imprisonment or death. There was no question in CBS’s mind about Simpson’s guilt.

A gullible American public, which reveals its ignorance about the world in poll after poll, is an easy prey for manipulation by the media that keeps them confused and naive. A white public, large segments of which expresses shock frequently when some outrage upon the black community is exposed, is fair game. They’re shocked that the CIA is cooperating with drug dealers who’ve been selling drugs in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They’re shocked that Susan Smith lied about blacks kidnapping her children. They’re shocked that the government permits plutonium injections upon unsuspecting blacks. They’re shocked by the brutal beating of Rodney King. They’re shocked by Mark Fuhrman’s testimony about the kind of torture and cruelty practiced against blacks and Latinos in police stations throughout the country. Even the pundits and the commentators showed themselves to be as naive as the average white about the police’s attitudes toward black Americans. Jack Ford, who was then a commentator for Court TV (before his looks got him a job on NBC), said that the idea of the police planting evidence was absurd. Vincent Bugliosi told CNBC commentator Charles Grodin that to suggest that police plant evidence is “blasphemy.” The white commentariat and segments of the white public also expressed a naïveté about how the drug trade works in California. Willard Scott hinted on the Today show that cocaine is the drug of choice among media personnel, and so they must reside in a world where the drug dealers extend unlimited credit and make appointments before arriving to slay deadbeats. The white public dismissed the theory that drug kingpins murdered Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, yet Colombian nationals are regularly arrested for drug dealings in California. Many whites showed their naïveté about how the criminal justice system effects blacks when they were seduced by Mark Fuhrman’s testimony. Even the media lavished praise upon Fuhrman. He became a hero to many whites and had the McKinny tapes, during which he revealed his hatred of blacks and Mexicans, not come to light, it’s quite possible that he could have become a powerful political figure, running on a fascist platform. Not only did Fuhrman express a bias toward Mexican Americans and African Americans, but he also displayed Nazi paraphenalia. In addition, two Jews told Hard Copy that Fuhrman beat them up.

This early trial by leak, and the subsequent siding with the police and prosecution by the media, its pundits, and pro-prosecution commentariat, did much to influence the polls that saw the majority of whites convinced of Simpson’s guilt long before evidence had been introduced and the defense had begun its arguments. I followed the case on a daily basis and found the media coverage to be full of errors and a pro-prosecution bias. Those seven thousand daily callers, who followed the trial, instead of relying upon news reports, and who were polled daily by Entertainment network, consistently favored the defense in their voting, and at the end of the case voted overwhelmingly for acquittal. Whites telling white pollsters that they believed in O.J.’s guilt may have been a result of their desiring to express solidarity with pollsters belonging to the same race. When they voted by phone and were able to be anonymous, those who followed the case on a daily basis voted for the defense. If the majority of whites do believe in Simpson’s guilt, it could be the result of the media siding with the prosecution. In taped network news reports which were blatantly of such a nature, often the networks failed to even cover the defense’s arguments. When Johnny Cochran attributes the animus toward Simpson to pontificating pundits and biased wrapups, he has a point. Alan M. Dershowitz pointed to one glaring example of media bias when he mentioned a report on the case by The New York Times, whose copy was consistently pro-prosecution and whose reporter, David Margolick, seemed to spend most of his time hanging out with Faye Resnick. After the glove demonstration, Margolick said that the gloves fit “snugly” even though he didn’t witness the demonstration. During an exchange with a black lawyer, Margolick pompously ridiculed the legal profession. Pundits like Jeffrey Toobin also raised questions about the ethics of the legal profession. Toobin works for The New Yorker magazine, whose editorial policies are being influenced by Roseanne Barr, a Denise Brown confidante, leading to the resignations of some of its finest writers. Certainly the legal profession could use some reform, but so could the media. But we won’t hear about it because the media resent criticism. They can dish it out but they can’t take it. Their attitude toward Simpson is typical of their attitude toward black people in general, which hasn’t changed since the time of Wright’s novel: Blacks are guilty until proven guilty. CNBC’s Jay Monahan, expressing regret that the public will have to rely upon media reports of the civil trial instead of being able to watch it on television, said on October 3 that “the bad reporting and bad commentary which characterized the media’s treatment of the first trial contributed to the polls which saw the majority of whites convinced of Simpson’s guilt, while those who actually followed the trial came to the opposite conclusion.” He also questioned the methodology of the polls.

Bigger’s lawyer accuses the press of being part of a conspiracy to kill not only Bigger but the Communist party in the hearts of its readers. The press then, as now, reaps revenues by whipping up irrational fear on the part of the white population, and being used as a weapon against minorities and unpopular beliefs. And instead of engaging in serious debate with one’s opponents, slogans are substituted for thought. Those who disagree with media pundits are politically incorrect or out of touch with reality. Bigger’s lawyer says, during the trial, “The hunt for Bigger Thomas served as an excuse to terrorize the entire Negro population, to arrest hundreds of Communists, to raid labor union headquarters and worker’s organizations, indeed the tone of the press, the silence of the church, the attitude of the prosecution and the simulated temper of the people are of such a nature as to indicate that more than revenge is being sought upon a man who has committed a crime.” The media, in the Simpson case, was used as lynch-mob leader just as it was used against Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas.

The behavior of some media feminists in the Simpson case confirms my suspicion that some elements in the white feminist movement, and their African-American surrogates, pose the most serious threat to African-American men since the Klan. Michelle Carouso, of the Daily News, said on Larry King Live that she was glad that there were eight women on the jury, implying that she was hoping for a conviction, and Leslie Abrahamson and Gloria Allred recommended the death penalty for Simpson—yet both were hired by ABC and CNN to be objective consultants on the case. Ms. Allred was even accused by one defense witness of phoning her and trying to badger her into revealing her testimony. The Nation printed an article about how the white women who ran for office as Anita Hill feminists abandoned women’s issues and voted with their male colleagues. During the Simpson trial, Ms. Hill was used as a prosecution prop, putting her on the side of a team that gave Mark Furhman a clean bill of health, possibly planted evidence, had the defense teams’ experts followed and harassed, and withheld exculpatory evidence.

The Simpson case also provided some high-profile white male journalists and pundits who hypocritically posed as women’s rights advocates with an opportunity to posture. They included Geraldo Rivera, who admitted in his autobiography that he abused his first wife, Edie Vonnegut, causing Kurt Vonnegut to refer to Rivera as the vilest human being he knows; a talk-show host who was accused of sexual harassment by a woman employee, and a former attorney general who functioned as a consultant on the Simpson case for different networks. This man’s use of women to entrap a black mayor was termed pandering by a New York Times columnist, yet he wasn’t subjected to the sort of feminist harassment to which black men have been subjected, portrayed as poster-boys for sexism by women who are silent about such practices that occur in their ethnic groups. The case also revealed a split between white feminists and black women. After the jury came back with the not-guilty verdict, a prominent feminist appeared on television to denounce the verdict. She said that this verdict arose from black women being accustomed to abuse by black men. Yet statistics show that the rate of black men murdering black women and black women murdering black men is about the same, due to the tendency of black women to retaliate.

Also never mentioned in places like The New York Times, The Village Voice, and NPR, where misogyny is viewed as an exclusively black male problem (but where we never learn how women, who share the ethnic backgrounds of the men who direct these media outfits, are treated), are statistics which show that the murder of black women by their husbands and boyfriends has declined by 40 percent since 1976. The split between white feminists and black women, exemplified by the racist comments of Tammy Bruce, the grand dragon of the feminist movement, continues. In a review of journalist Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life, Times critic Wendy Kaminer came to Marcia Clark’s rescue by rebutting characterizations of Ms. Clark which Kaminer considered sexist, but failed to defend her black sisters on the jury from Toobin’s assault upon their integrity. Mr. Toobin said that these black women were swayed by the demonic negro oratory of Johnnie Cochran to vote for Simpson’s acquittal, but the jurors themselves said that they were more impressed with Barry Scheck’s testimony than with Cochran. During his book tour none of his interviewers, including Bryant Gumbel, asked whether the two white and the one Hispanic juror were enchanted by Cochran’s spellbinding Negro oratory. Just as Bigger Thomas was used by the establishment to smear all blacks, O.J was used to signify on all black men, and the black women jurors were used to do the same for black women. Indeed, for some white men and white women in the media, Faye Resnick, whose wretched past has been exposed in Joe Bosco’s new book, had more credibility than the black women jurors.

Though the criminal justice system and the media are treated in Wright’s novel, the theme that gives umbrage over all others is the theme of miscegenation. (Though Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro have both been accused of playing the race card, one could argue that Christopher Darden introduced the race card when he accused Simpson of having a fetish for blondes, an accusation he would never have used against a white man). The high-priced model of international capitalism is the white woman, preferably Anglo-looking and preferably thin. Her face and body have launched millions of products. She is the icon that adorns the motion-picture screens and the fashion magazines. Black fashion models complain that they can’t find work and that there’s racism on the runway. Though many claim that the enormous attention paid to the O.J. Simpson case was a result of Simpson being a celebrity and a presence for many years in every living room due to his role as an NBC sportscaster, the miscegenation angle is what excited many viewers, just as Nazi newspapers like Der Stuermer and magazines like Jugend fascinated their readership by printing sensational stories about relationships between Jewish men and Aryan women. But many wondered whether such attention would have been paid if the murdered woman in the case had been a black woman. In Native Son the murder of the white woman by a black man excites more interest than the murder of a black woman, Bessie, by Bigger. Moreover, when Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice sought to discover whether as much attention had been paid to black and Latino women who were murdered in Central Park as there was to the highly publicized crimes against white women, he complained that the New York authorities gave him the runaround. (Gerry Spence, who received an education about race during the trial, said that many whites believed that Simpson had taken something that belonged to them. Their property—our woman.) The commentary on Native Son and even the narrator says that Bigger’s murder of Mary was an accident. But a closer examination of the text reveals that Bigger has a motive. He kills Mary because he doesn’t want to be caught in the bedroom of a white woman. Black men have been lynched for less. Black men have been arrested for recklessly eyeballing a white woman. During the Simpson trial Kathleen Bell testified that Fuhrman told her that he’d arrest a black man driving in the company of a white woman. Deeply embedded in African-American folklore is the notion that a black man shouldn’t be caught dead coming into contact with a white woman. There are tall tales about black men walking up the side of buildings so as to avoid passing a white woman who was approaching them on the street from the opposite direction. But like many taboos the possibility of black men and white women sharing intimacy raises excitement, some of it sexual. When Bigger is captured by the police, they want him to simulate his raping of Mary. They desire to get their kicks by having this entrapped black man tell them how he did it to a white woman. How many commentators about the Simpson case revealed a similar voyeuristic attitude? A San Francisco attorney sought to answer those who believed that Mark Fuhrman planted the infamous bloody gloves by suggesting that Fuhrman could not possibly have done so because he didn’t know whether Simpson had an alibi. He could have been in bed with Paula Barbieri, he explained on several occasions. Was this commentator thrilled by the prospect of Simpson being in bed with one of his bimbos? Would he have liked to have been in some creepy corner of the bedroom, in the dark, panting heavily and, perhaps, manipulating himself?

One of the most vicious attacks on Simpson, the prosecution, and the defense team has come from Mark Fuhrman defender Vincent Bugliosi, former Los Angeles district attorney. He told talk-show host Charles Grodin, whose flagging audience appeal was lifted by one-sided pro-prosecution commentary, and panels that were hostile to Simpson and the defense, that to believe police would plant evidence was “blasphemy.” He is the author of Outrage, a book that the publisher, Norton, described as putting the “noose around Simpson’s neck.” Christopher Darden, who was criticized in the book, said on June 12 that Bugliosi hadn’t even read the transcripts of the trial, or watched it on television. Moreover, he said that Bugliosi hadn’t tried a case in thirty years, and was out to cash in on the case. The book’s arguments were demolished by Alan Dershowitz, who debated Bugliosi on June 11, reducing him to a rubble of sputtering invective. Previously appearing on the Geraldo Rivera show, Bugliosi complained about Simpson’s returning from Bermuda with “lipstick all over his face.”

For her part, Ms. Barbieri told interviewer Diane Sawyer that her father warned her that if she were ever raped by a black man, she shouldn’t come home, which is what an Anglo father may have said to an Anglo woman about associating with Italian-American men—about thirty years ago. In a review of Spike Lee’s film Jungle Fever, Professor Lawrence Di Statsi said of this movie (about a relationship between an Italian-American woman and an African-American male) that taking white women was the charge originally made against Italians. Other commentators said that if Simpson were let out of prison, he’d be at the Riviera Country Club with white women. Geraldo Rivera, who revealed his homoerotic yearnings for Mick Jagger and Rudolph Nureyev in his autobiography, Exposing Myself (yet referred to Simpson as a “punk”), seemed particularly aroused over the prospect of Simpson appearing on the beach in the company of white women. During the trial, the Entertainment network announced a poll that revealed most women would rather watch the O.J. Simpson trial than have sex.

Even the most progressive and intellectual people have bought into the myths surrounding black men and white women. Some highly educated African Americans, including those who can figure out what on earth Foucault and Derrida are driving at, sound like your typical backwoods peckerwoods when discussing miscegenation. Those who make a career out of scolding folks about their sexism, homophobia, and misogyny also get steamed up when the discussion of miscegenation is brought up. Today, as in Bigger’s day, the eerie sexual fantasies that revolve around the black male presence in the United States present a danger to black men in everyday life.

Even feminists like Susan Estrich, who is beginning to sound more like the late Lee Atwater with each new column, have bought into myths about black men and white women. In a column, she warned white women about coming into contact with black men, and justifies this on the basis of crime statistics (even though interracial crime is rare). Young professional black men often complain that white women are scared to ride in the same elevator with black men. Well, if a woman is usually raped or killed by somebody she knows, then white women should be fearful of riding elevators with white men. If Jesse Jackson is fearful of walking down the street at night with a group of blacks following closely behind, then why, given the fact that 70 percent of the violent crimes committed against whites are committed by other whites, aren’t whites afraid of walking down the street while being trailed by other whites? Though sexual contact may have been in Bigger’s thoughts, there is no sexual contact between Bigger and Mary Dalton when he “accidentally” murders her. Yet from the very beginning of the case, the newspapers charged Bigger with rape. One headline reads, “Troops Guard Negro Killer’s Trial, Protect Rapist from Mob Action”—this being the kind of singling out of blacks for crime, especially when the victim is a white, that we read in the newspaper daily. The narrator of the novel says, “To hint that he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce the death sentence; it meant a wiping out of his life even before he was captured; it meant a death before death came, for the white men who read those words would at once kill him in their hearts.”

There’s something crazy about thinking about race in this country, and Richard Wright was among the first to point out the ironies and paradoxes of the American racial situation. Maybe the question of race shouldn’t be left to a crime system that buys into the logic of race, or a media devoted to zebra journalism that only exacerbates the problem by photographing only those whites who were disappointed about the Simpson verdict but providing no photos of those who cheered, and by photographing blacks who cheered but editing out pictures of blacks who were disappointed. Maybe the question of race shouldn’t be left to academics in disciplines that require little empirical proof, the kind of field where demagogues with P.h.D.s are allowed to run wild, such as members of the African-American literary tribal council who are attempting to disappear African-American male writers, including Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, with the charge of misogyny, which is like calling somebody a Communist in the 1950s. They object to Wright’s treatment of Bigger’s mother and his girlfriend but are silent about his treatment of the black males in the novel, Bigger’s associates and even Bigger himself.

Maybe it’s time to bring the question of race into the clinic room or the emergency room and treat it for what it is: a public-health crisis. Miscegenation has made people hysterical. Joel Williamson reports in his powerful book The Crucible of Race (1984) that one of the causes of the Atlanta race riots was a rumor that black men were drinking from a bottle with pictures of white women on them, and a great black Cajun singer was murdered by white men because he used a handkerchief given him by a white woman to wipe the sweat from his face. Miscegenation is also an issue that hovered over the Simpson trial, yet Americans, black and white, though often feigning repugnance at the mixing of the races, are more familiar with this demon than anyone might admit. In fact, interracial sex may be the taboo that millions of Americans have enjoyed the most. There is a saying in the South that white men didn’t know that white women could have sex until they got married. While visiting Memphis, I was told by Professor Brett Singer, the niece of the great Yiddish writer Issac Bashevis Singer, that she asked her classroom of whites how many had engaged in sex with a black person. Everybody raised their hand. (I also asked her why feminists belonging to her ethnic background ignore the copiously documented misogyny—spousal abuse, battery—that occurs in their community, while blaming all of the world’s sexism on Simpson and black men. She said that she was taught by her father to keep the sins of her community a secret.)

The parallels between the racial climate of Wright’s novel and that of the Simpson case are endless. Nineteen nineties California, where the criminal trial took place and the scene of the civil trial, very much resembles the Jim Crow Chicago of Wright’s novel. Scene of a drive against affirmative action, financed by ultraright forces and led by a governor who ties his career to wedge issues, and a right-wing legislature, a number of what might be called Negro laws have been introduced, including the notorious Three Strikes Law, which affects black defendants disproportionately. These laws have been advocated by the same attorney general, Dan Lungren, who negotiated a plea bargaining deal that let Mark Fuhrman, a white policeman, off with a light $200 fine and three years probation, shocking even Melanie Lomax, the Simpson prosecution’s best friend and the darling of the “lynch Simpson” media. Tough on crime for Lungren apparently means tough on the poor and the black. These racist laws follow the historical pattern in which, at one time, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans were excluded from California. During one nineteenth-century legislative session, called The Legislature of a Thousand Drinks because most of its participants were drunk at the end of the session, blacks were nearly excluded. Proposition 187 indicates that such enmity toward nonwhite immigrants still exists since the over one hundred thousand illegal European immigrants reasiding in California are never mentioned in the debate. And so it’s not surprising that the California legislature has intervened three times in the Simpson case, most recently in an effort to change the rules of evidence so that Nicole Simpson’s diary could be admitted, a diary that would usually constitute hearsay. Previously, another get-a-Negro measure, a terms limit proposition, was passed as a way of ridding the assembly of Willie Brown, who California racists considered too uppity. Given California’s attitudes toward Asian Americans and the rising number of hate crime against Asian Americans, it’s not surprising that two Japanese-American judges would side with the prosecution so as not to raise anxiety among some whites about Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. Republican appointee Judge Lance Ito, in the minds of the media and many whites, failed to do the job, even though he did his damnedest to convict Simpson, consistently siding with the prosecution in his rulings. His failure has put pressure on the new Japanese-American judge, Hiroshi Fujisaki, who has to prove to the media and many whites that he can deliver a verdict holding Simpson liable for the wrongful deaths of Goldman and Nicole Simpson. Apparently he is doing a good job. The media are congratulating him as being no nonsense, and praising his toughness with Simpson’s team in the civil case. As of this writing Judge Fujisaki has gutted the defense’s arguments and has permitted the plaintiffs’ attorneys to dismiss fifteen prospective black jurors who had doubts about Simpson’s guilt, while keeping white jurors who expressed belief in his guilt. One observer, the law partner of the late William Kunstler, was right to term this civil trial “the revenge of the white establishment.”

The media lynching of Simpson by prominent feminists, lawyers, intellectuals, and journalists, without exploring the evidence, has not only been disgraceful but should be alarming to black men. Not only was the defendant lynched but also his lawyer has been subjected to media-inspired hatred. A New York Times feminist referred to Johnnie Cochran as “odious.”

Bigger Thomas gets into trouble because this poor black stepped out of the box that society had created for him. While his friends are petty thieves, he gets a job working as a chauffeur, which, in view of what was expected of him, was a step up. He is surrounded by liberals who are interested in his welfare and who give him lectures about self-improvement. Stepping beyond his bounds was the kind of adventure that got his creator, Richard Wright, into trouble. When he left the themes that made him famous—the conflicts between white and black Americans—and abandoned the United States for Europe, Wright was written off by the critics and dismissed as a one-novel writer, that novel being Native Son, when The Outsider, written in exile, might have been his best novel.

Simpson’s troubles may have also arisen from his transcending the fate that awaited him had he not been a talented athlete: imprisonment, death, or a slave to a low-paying service job. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I passed by his Rockingham estate and found it to be the kind of residence that kings and presidents possess in many countries. He associated with the high and the mighty and dated women with international reputations for their beauty. This was too much for some whites—those who couldn’t wait for him to fall, like the four policemen who told us that they all abandoned the crime scene just to inform Simpson of his wife’s death, even though he wasn’t the next of kin; those who told us that they were so worried about Mr. Simpson’s health that they climbed over his wall without a search warrant. One detective, Philip Vannatter, in a remark that the white commentariat overlooked, said it all when asked about the activities of Simpson’s maid on the night of June 13. Mr. Vannatter said wryly, “I don’t have a maid.”

Both Wright and Simpson have been accused by those who still wish to play the racial extortion game of abandoning the “black community.” But if all Wright had done was to write Native Son, he contributed to the African-American community immensely by exposing the racist forces that are arrayed against black achievement, and he did it in a manner that was artful, profound, and with an acid sense of humor. Whatever dues Simpson owed to the community have been paid because never before has the deeply rooted hostility toward African Americans by the police, prosecutors, and other components of the criminal justice system been revealed to the whole world as they were in the Simpson case.

Native Son excels as a novel in my mind because, though published over fifty years ago, the issues that are addressed by the author still exist. A classic is a book that though written decades or even centuries before the present time could have been written today. Thus, Native Son is a classic novel, as true now as it was when it was published on March 1, 1940, and its truth was certified in 1995, the year of the trial of the century.