Eye, the Jury
Armond White
If the word “nigger” could light up the sky, Los Angeles wouldn’t need streetlights; that’s how angry white people are.
—a Los Angeles disk jockey to Emerge magazine
Tenderly leaning his head on O.J. Simpson’s shoulder, Johnnie Cochran displayed caring that went immediately beyond lawyer-client privilege. This image of bonding, coming at the end of the trial, when the country held its breath, was shocking—it vibrated relief, even a sense of love. For all the many Black male images the media flaunts—brothers slapping five on basketball courts, knocking heads in boxing rings, and break dancing in hip-hop videos—none has the intimacy expressed between Cochran and Simpson. It was all the more surprising for their silent communication, a confidence based in trust, a trust the jury might have refuted. Contrast to this was seen soon after in assistant prosecutor Christopher Darden’s own emotional moment—his blockage—behind a podium at a postverdict press conference with Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti. Pausing, searching, disconnecting his thoughts from his speech, Darden fell into the arms of the family of Ronald Goldman then, finding no comfort there, broke free and dashed offstage.
These scenes of trust and distrust, broadcast around the world as if they were formal government ceremonies, revealed nuances in black American male behavior that burst apart the almost obscenely presented public events that occasioned them. Disclosing fraternal alliances and secret fears through a subtle gesture and an impulsive bolting, each scene unsettled whatever disposition one had on the entire trial. The surface of Black men’s public composure cracked open with unexpected behavioral truth.
Such winner-loser reflexes climaxed the hysteria most Americans felt at the O.J. trial. And yet the momentum of the larger event rolled on. Once again, the trial’s revelations trailed in the debris of steamroller speculation and contention, all meaning lost—except in memory. Understanding the broadcast of the trial as an uncanny public concurrence of cultural suspicion and social apprehension requires that we recall it with focus on the three black men it showcased—representatives of what in mainstream America is still an alien existence. Black men of dissenting orientations reflect lives foreign to media conventions. It’s in the mythology of pop culture that the image of Black Americans, particularly the male, is subject to distortion, followed by mistrust. Empirical psychology may help describe the poignancy of certain developments during the trial (and of its key players), but it will also uncover some motivations and meanings in the workings of the media (what pathologists call a videognosis), in the many shades of reporting and editorializing that comprise corrupt contemporary journalism and harden our view of one another.
Our news media, like our fiction films, seem committed to condemning—nullifying—the standing of Black men. It happens so consistently that our culture is at a new, cruel crisis point, relegating Black men to cannon fodder, boldly dreaming O.J.’s conviction unto death. You’ve noticed the media doesn’t keep asserting that brutal cops exonerated from manslaughter trials or celebrity criminal Oliver North are guilty; the press is selective in its commitment to “truth.” And the media may never rebound from this betrayal of ethics. Continuous denigration of Simpson becomes another political utility—not assertions of opinion but an insistence on vilification. Through “He’s guilty!” moralizing, media elitism contrives to coverup daily, historical racial antagonism and injustice.
The last socialquake comparable to this trial (the concussive John F. Kennedy Malcolm X Martin Luther King Robert F. Kennedy assassinations) proved a similar, terrible truth: democracy does not protect against tragedy. And while decades of searching, sorrowful, and honorable American journalism happened in the wake of those calamities (exposing patriotic platitudes), today democracy itself is undermined by media’s insidious allegiance to class and race division—the foundation of lucrative empire. In this onslaught Black American grievance and loving go unaccounted for; various oppressions and hurts of the unempowered go ignored.
As spectators it is crucial to defend what we actually saw of the trial against the avalanche of slanted interpretations. Simpson, Cochran, and Darden—media stars and media targets—challenged conventional pop images of Black men. Each of them refused stereotype in the sensitivity, the spontaneity, of plenary session actions, but especially through their individuality. Those three separate responses to the verdict demonstrated an American plurality (specifically, differences in political positions). These Black men showed moral sensitivity generally thought impossible of their race due to degraded social expectations. It is the limits of the courtroom roles that media assigned to them—criminal, con man, statesman—tied to the proverbial diminutions of Black males that obscures what, in those touching, impromptu gestures, is authentic evidence of American experience, the complexes of masculine rectitude, and the much-needed proof that there’s more to people than we easily presume.
Letting their guards down on Verdict Day, Simpson cringed, then smiled, Cochran closed his eyes in gratitude, and Darden collapsed. These exhibitions are part of what made the O.J. Simpson verdict an historically great moment. (I will always remember the afternoon of the verdict announcement for the tense, eerie calm in Manhattan streets broken only by a few young Black men striking the air and laughing in victory.) Seeing two Black men touch—Cochran’s cheek leaning into Simpson, head to shoulder (repeatedly), mind to body (repeatedly), thought to feeling (repeatedly)—seemed natural enough to miss. But if noticed, without the structure of sports or entertainment to banalize their show of affection, it revealed a Black emotional richness swamped by trial turmoil with its varieties of stoicism and outrage. Simpson and Cochran were expected to gloat, or at least leer, according to monstrous legend. And precisely because of such ass-backward, programmed expectation, their subtle grace, like the laughter of the boys on the street, seems plangent. Their humanity was momentarily given back to us.
How was it ever denied? Through the strange license of popular mythology, Blacks usually enter the national pop dream/nightmare awkwardly. Rather than fulfilling imagination as human ideals, they appear in “news” form as social convicts—potentialities born of the happenstances of politics and history. Denied human richness, they’re then “understood” only as social problems. A trial becomes an occasion for justifying this already warped convention: the malfeasance of murder asserts a problem to be solved, and a Black suspect easily fits a social dilemma. By running with this formula, the media gets to present a case of Black perfidy no different from its usual assumption of Black guilt, treachery, licentiousness, and anarchy. Instead of sensibly following and investigating events in and around the trial, ideological commotion takes over in the name-calling style of 1990s’ tabloid culture. These stereotypes are familiar, but the stereotyping is less obvious because it carries so much unconscious ideology of white-owned and-operated institutions about race, sex, and rights to power. Prejudices then get abstracted into notions of reporting and “truth” speaking—privileges the empowered secure for themselves.
Both George Eliot and Ralph Ellison had words for this occurrence. (It’s not new; it must be an intrinsic part of the post—Industrial Revolution tendency to control popular thought through carefully contrived communication industries.) Eliot answered nineteenth-century social despair with the cry: “While the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition—make haste—oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.”1 She meant the social hostility toward nonconformity, while Ellison’s twentieth-century vantage pinpointed the race problem: “[N]ot only have our popular culture, our newspapers, radio and cinema been devoted to justifying the Negro’s condition and the conflict created thereby, but even our social sciences and serious literature have been conscripted—all in the effort to drown out the persistent voice of outraged conscience.”2
Had Ellison lived to witness the Simpson trial, even he might have been shocked to see the absurd lengths to which “our” media goes in perpetuation of white supremacy—taking an individual matter to extremes of public castigation, fury, and, ultimately, widespread intellectual chaos. When surveillance camera footage is pilfered and fitted into TV broadcasts (as did the All-O.J.-All-the-Time CNBC) to show Simpson entering the courtroom of his untelevised civil trial deposition (implying further, on-the-prowl criminality to Simpson), we get media stalking, another form of vigilantism. Obviously some white people are pissed. And because some of the angriest control the media, their outrage, their hypocritical indignation, as they let go professional and ethical ideals, lights up the sky.
During the current civil trial phase of the O.J. pogrom (what the aftermath of the Nicole Brown Simpson-Ron Goldman murders have become), the media has dropped its pretense about victims’ rights, victims’ honor. Bloodthirst rules. There can be no question that the media’s interest is race-denunciation. A mere murder case or civil rights investigation, government office bombing or airplane crash, never commands this much industry. Due to proliferating modern media, news stories often swell obscenely out of their proper social size, but O.J. busy-ness is actually designed to distract from our social, thereby racial, tensions. Throughout the fifteen months of the hearing and trial, media angled to construct public thinking. Sustaining an individual perception meant constantly firing up skepticism, a wearisome process but also an intrinsic, necessary—and liberating—Black American activity.
Not surprisingly, hip-hop music offers the most remarkable, rigorous example of how differently the Simpson trial has entered our culture’s bloodstream. In the rap group A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ince Again,” Q-Tip chants, “I’m gettin’ off like O.J.” Then, in “Soul Food,” Goodie Mob gripes, “Fuck Chris Darden”—a reference to the deputy prosecutor evoking Willie D’s classic 1992 recording “Rodney ? (Fuck Rodney King!).” There are more illustrations, but these two represent an ordinary cultural process where news events are relayed to personal experience—evidence of a subjective Black interpretation that, in this case, has almost nothing to do with the official mainstream media’s way of presenting and contextualizing the Simpson trial.
By “ordinary cultural process” I want to indicate a natural social reflex at work—especially as it differs from the dominant culture’s view—since the process of understanding public events and evaluating them has been so oppressively governed by the uniformity of the mainstream’s disdain of O.J.—what some are able to recognize as overweening arrogance. In those rappers’ free expression, there’s nothing so petty as the typical tendency to judge Simpson. A Tribe Called Quest understands his acquittal as part of an historical chain where a Black man’s fate is once again in jeopardy, trapped in America’s legal hell. The phrase “gettin off” brashly combines sexual metaphor with an allusion to escape—from the clutches of the court system (these days the bane of one out of every four young Black men, every Black family). Symbolizing rare or ironic freedom, Simpson, in this cultural reading, proves “right or wrong don’t matter” (as Billie Holiday sang in “Don’t Explain”) when the preservation of Black sanity, Black healing, is foremost in mind. You’d have to go to the Black press to find a good analysis of this, such as Sylvester Monroe’s in Emerge (January 1996):
When Simpson reverted to being “just another Black male under arrest,” the African-American community, as usual, reclaimed its Black prodigal son. They demanded that he be given a fair trial and all the rights of an innocent defendant until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And in the end, it was a reasonable doubt, according to the jurors, that allowed Simpson to go free.
In mainstream trial accounts and references, what passes for journalistic objectivity favors something other than Black sanity and racial healing. From ferocious public accusations by deliberately chosen interview subjects to TV newsreaders’ tones of repugnance, a distinct antipathy came through—as an official viewpoint that is by and large undeniably white—and inexcusably biased. At least A Tribe Called Quest’s use of “gettin off” rather than “gettin’ over” (or New York magazine’s October 16, 1995, cover story “Getting Away With It”) steers honorably clear of condemnation. By refusing rightness or wrongness, rappers preserve the greater principle of Simpson’s right to a fair trial and abide by its acquit-and-release rules—a pledge many journalists have forgotten in their zeal to discard professional integrity and ethical precedent, perpetuating social division. This perversion of justice is what Goodie Mob nails in “Soul Food’s” mention of Darden.
Although he could not win his case, Darden has nevertheless been vindicated to the point of heroism by many mainstream commentators, such as the New York Times Book Review or numerous TV talk-show hosts. Darden has entered the cultural bloodstream, too. Propped up as the System’s preferred version of a Black public figure, he’s a Black knight/almost-slayer of Simpson who can be idealized as a better Black man (a TV network plans to cast him as a gospel preacher). But this is not hiphop’s outsider, underground view in which Darden is seen as untrustworthy. Darden’s trial behavior contrasts arduous, set-upon Black folkloric experience as an ignominious performance. For rappers concerned with the integrity of Black appearance, his petulance and diffidence amounts to “wackness,” in the Uncle Tom sense. (The mainstream, meanwhile, pretends to be above racializing its standards of masculine nobility, especially when it is a Black person carrying out the white majority’s will.) Goodie Mob’s displeasure comes as part of a grass-roots ideational flow, colorfully enunciating modern Black American thoughts and experiences in casual hip-hop narrative. Darden gets ruefully taken back into the fold, taken in stride like mundane failure or a passing cab driven by a Third Worlder; his name affording wide recognition to what, here, is a minority definition of self-abnegation.
But it is genuine. As a cultural alternative to both the established media and its implicitly politicized distortions of the Simpson trial, hip-hop manages this feat of representation succinctly (as does social comic Paul Mooney who praised Johnnie Cochran as “My nigga! He’s damned near a rapper!”). These practices recover the ordinary process of observation and interpretation, summarizing events in ways a subculture finds useful and authentic. Simply saying most Blacks view America’s race situation differently from most whites shows lazy thinking. Responses to the verdict proved that many Blacks and whites actively, joyously, reject white media’s leaning on their sense of reality. They knew the meaning of race was the trial’s central subject because of the impact trial coverage has on our psychic well-being. Yet we have virtually relinquished our social intuition in this era of mass media ubiquity. Intricate ambivalence, an ability to observe a social calamity without coarsening our feelings, is endangered. Humanism, its depth and surprise, comes with maintaining a sense of historical proportion. We dare not lose it. Rap group De La Soul puts the trial and the media’s dubious outrage in perspective when its album Stakes Is High ends with the cry, “Fuck O.J. Simpson, who killed Emmet Till?”
Less astute trial pundits seem intent on hanging O.J. as an effigy for Black America itself, but Ellison’s decades-old media-assessment fits even tighter around the necks of these opinion makers:
This unwillingness to resolve the conflict in keeping with … democratic ideals has compelled the white American, figuratively, to force the Negro down into the deeper level of his consciousness, into the inner world, where reason and madness mingle with hope and memory and endlessly give birth to nightmare and to dream; down into the province of the psychiatrist and the artist, from whence spring the lunatic’s fancy and the work of art.3
In reaction to a troubling verdict, a new, dark, antihuman mythology has been created in which mainstream media’s judgment against O.J. is similar to its usual judgments against Blacks. This includes the trial’s TV broadcast and recent movies such as Before and After, Eye for an Eye, and A Time to Kill,4 that exploit Simpson trial controversy. They raise phantoms to prevent people from thinking clearly about the hatred of Blacks saturated in mainstream habit. We must become Doubting Thomases, pull the thorn of race out of the media’s side, and, resisting our guilt-tainted taste for salaciousness, probe the national wound, grabbing evidence to show how racism is allowed to evade awareness. In recognizing that panic and repression must some way be let loose, we should still recognize openly sanctioned, self-righteous media racism as demagoguery.
If Ellison wasn’t sharp on this, it’s because even his litterateurs mind underestimated mass culture’s cunning deceptions. Keep in mind how the initial outrage of homicide got reduced by partisan journalists’ crimes. (Two examples out of many: Ms. magazine and Esquire magazine traducing feminism by praising “Woman of the Year” Marcia Clark’s bungling of the prosecution.) Thus, the ethics of criminal justice, of journalistic responsibility, are steadily diminished. These days (prior to a late-summer ‘96 gag order), TV news reports on the civil trial phase go straight to the Goldman family only for a daily perspective, ignoring balance or even a show of fairness. It is blatant to us because movies exploiting social fear through mixed-up liberal concern are a relatively recent development—post—World War II, even post-1960s, when the barrier sank on B-movie topics and acceptable tactics of public discourse. For instance, the viciously manipulative mother-daughter rape and murder in Death Wish (1975) is echoed in the rape-murder scene in Eye for an Eye (1996), in which a mother overhears on the phone her daughter’s violation and killing. Such ugliness, on screen or off, is by now familiar, generic—part of the sensations audiences settle for when insight ain’t comin’. Opening in the Nixon law-and-order era, Death Wish, a popular genre prototype, used 1970s’ paranoia (which was really just an aftershock of sixties’ urban uprisings) as its exploitation subject. Today, the arrow of fear hits the heart of darkness. It’s the racial threat plain and Simpson. (His trial is one of the first images in Eye for an Eye.) Refusing to admit contemporary race fears is what sets the nineties apart from the seventies as an era of denial. Calling the Simpson trial “the Trial of the Century” is part of it—a grotesque, ignorant tabloid conceit. Yet in its unwieldy way it is our great racial drama, our fin-de-siècle Birth of a Nation or Death of a Republic. This new culture industry habit of fomenting consensus by turning movie houses or TV rooms into courts of public opinion (horrendous concept) only means one thing: keeping people in the dark.
To redefine Ellison: Popular media is the method society uses to reify its fantasies—and biases. Black Americans, being the object of much media fascination, harassment, and scorn know this well. You grow up witnessing how the political contempt for nonwhite, nonaffluent people is directly reflected in how those people are portrayed in movies, newspapers, fiction, and nonfiction TV shows, fantasies from the pious middle class. The fact of demonization backs up the constant illusion of those people’s worthlessness, dangerousness, and burdensome existence. It’s a short jump from the pattern of disparagement in American films and television to its seeming hard proof in news reporting and essayistic journalism. Just a hop, in fact, from Stepin’ Fetchit to Willie Horton; from the white racist specter of Black villainy to the media’s castigation of O.J. Simpson.
Racist illusions suffuse trial coverage so that consideration of trial facts and court protocol is second to society’s traditional, ingrained practice of making a monster. In England such trials are closed to the media to prevent incitement; to insure it, the O.J. Simpson trial was conducted on two fronts: in the courtroom and the exterior social sphere that received, televised, or mediated reportage of the trial. In both instances, racist illusion came back to the center of the event. Media workers, under the delusion of “fairness,” object to discussing America’s racist history—the legacy of biased indoctrination—as irrelevant to the Simpson trial. But if so, why did the issue of race constantly come up? Because it cannot be suppressed, neither in the Black reflex for self-defense nor in the white reflex to control (blame). We can’t get beyond it, and shouldn’t want to, until we understand clearly where these ideas come from and exactly how they affect our country’s capacity for tolerance and judgment. What has happened in our media and daily lives is a changed attitude toward individual social relations in response to the changes in political and economic power since the 1960s. Social fear and depression control the terms in which whites and Blacks regard each other plus the language and laws they use to express that pervasive suspicion. Movies are infected with this miasma as much as journalism—the former expounds the latter’s anxiety and both are a perversion of good will. The trial has been over for months, but the witch-hunt continues in press reports and Simpson-bashing long after the legal resolution that is supposed to absolve the accused and quell accusations. That’s because the mainstream’s preoccupation with Simpson still perplexes as essentially a “problem” of the Black male.
With Simpson Black male denigration reaches an absurd peak, obliterating most attempts at dispassionate disinterest and legal integrity. It proves when white media goes after Black folks, civilians become stars, celebs become criminals—word becomes bondage.
This is what’s behind the insistent proclamation: “I think he did it!” (Saying so falls in line only with the empowered’s view of what is important or true.) It’s become a new password of white solidarity, even for some Blacks who feel it necessary to separate themselves from O.J. by proclaiming their distaste, instead of insight or compassion. (Not since Desert Storm have so many people made themselves this unfeeling, this vengeful, this appalling.) They corroborate the Black male criminal myth without thinking about how it began, what it means, or who it benefits. Embroiled in mythmaking, O.J. coverage emphasizes dread instead of clarifying the social inequities, conditioning Black folks for more abuse, more disenfranchisement.
None of us feel adrift in the O.J. matter; forms of uneasy solidarity have come from it, but our wounded social consciousness hurts worse than our (un)certainty about the actual murders. African Americans rightly discern this confusion as a psychic pressure. The feeling of hatred and domination that comes across must be urgently vanquished. And if it takes a jury to strike this blow, cheering will be then understandable. That’s what determined reactions to the courtroom circus and the disputatious verdict. Cheers or jeers were political reflexes, not moral responses (which must be tempered by grief and solemnity). Yet American media’s arrogant certitude regarding the evil of Black misconduct forsakes ambivalence to exploit bristling, long-standing cultural notions of Black insufficiency. Instead of complexity, the media creates huge, tragic misrepresentations, excoriations. Few political/cultural commentators, from Anna Quindlen on The Charlie Rose Show to People magazine, are able, or willing, to see through this white hegemony. Consciousness of social mythology could help here because when pundits argue that O.J. is not a worthy subject for Black America’s symbology (as did the one Black political columnist for The Village Voice), they ignore how pop myths work; they forget that O.J. degraded is still the image of the white’s Negro.
You can feel for the man’s manipulation—even if you disapprove his doings—because his downfall, perhaps more than his past out-of-reach “success,” resonates with the common Black plight (O.J.’s failure is bound to the prospect of Black achievement in this country, evoking the passions of those who have felt the oppressive stress of white society). O.J. affects any Black persons sense of self. That’s why there’s so much turmoil over whether O.J. deserted “the Black community”; he’s tied to it no matter who doesn’t like it. Plus, the media won’t let O.J.’s downfall be his own—joining the panoply of Black belittling, he’s become a lightning rod for the frustrations of this era’s Angry white Men (and Women.)
These unconfronted issues fit what Wendell B. Harris, writer-director of Chameleon Street, the 1991 tragicomedy about Black identity, was moved to call “the kind of story God would invent William Shakespeare to write.” Simpson’s trial didn’t transcend American racism, but it did something media workers who are not artists are conventionally loathe to do: give racism a mythic, plain-to-see dimension. This is as convenient as it is agonizing, a neat, chagrined way to grasp our society’s racist inclinations. But it’s difficult; one must be conscientious about not getting tangled in the arguments of guilt versus innocence or succumbing to biased journalism’s tricky, insidious fiats. Morality requires that a delicate balance be maintained by viewers of the trial; that they be better than Court TV by placing observation before judgment. It’s the appraisals and evaluations of devious media, such as Court TV’s brutish game-show-style commentators who offered daily rundowns and critiques of the trial in progress, that intruded upon the trial’s moral issues. Media became meddlesome, unholy participants—as much agents of venality, cruelty, dishonesty, conspiracy, hate, soul murder, as anyone whose name was actually stenotyped into the record.
Taboo explains it all. If not for the mixed-race element of the Simpson-Brown marriage, the murder case might have been investigated and news of it broadcast unexceptionally. What Shakespeare knew in the dramatizing of Othello was the perpetual frisson of sexual innuendo. Trial accounts that refuse to parse titillation also fail the necessary examination of our cultural biases—centering instead on the object of a sole malefactor. Dominant culture’s sense of offense subordinated law. Simpson plainly was on trial for more than murder—for audacity, rebellion, the sexual rights he claimed as an American citizen and an American victor. His race, held against him in the mind-blowing way only the white establishment knows, overwhelmed the rationality of the law and most media officials. We now have to extract the trial from its media presentation, sifting out bigoted commentary and the commercializing of sex and violence, relying on our own intelligence and experience to get closer to the truth—not of what happened the night of the killings (that’s not the nation’s business), but to find out what did occur within Simpson’s and Darden’s beloved-now-bizarro worlds, their two paths to upward mobility.
The Simpson trial as pop myth is a Shakespearean drama with great characters confronting the moral limits of one world after having crossed the tribal bounds of another. All viewers of this intrigue, by the fact of cultural engagement, take part in the perpetuation of certain ideas of race and class transience. Thus implicated—and our fantasies of social progress detoured—we are compelled to reexamine the motile figure of the Black American male and every vicissitude affecting the way he is perceived. But the seriousness of the trial and its dread effect also forces us to split criminal social illusion from complicated fact of who Black men—the persons of O.J. Simpson himself, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, and prosecutor Christopher Darden—really are. They’re all on Chameleon Street. It’s the tragicomedy of Black identity mired in media distortion and desperate for rational, humane rescue. Yes, Shakespeare (not Dominick Dunne) could do justice to Wendell B. Harris’s assumption, but the dramatic personae are all America’s own.
Unlike the bourgeois sideshow that came out for the Anita Hill—Clarence Thomas carnival, this was a more incendiary roster. These three represented the interchangeable potential open to Black men. It was a grim joke seeing them televised, on exhibit, in the trial’s public space: their middle-class lifestyles (not evening news stereotypes) yet converged over an evening news issue—Black criminality. O.J. represented a fall from grace, Darden a trip-up into the white establishment’s uneasy good graces. Cochran remains an intermediate figure because he occupies blameless adversarial space, although he did receive much censure, almost as a sign of the cultural opprobrium that always circumscribes Black performance. Whether it’s questionable social assertion like O.J.’s glib climbing or Darden’s similar desperation to succeed, Black American social activity cannot escape seeming aggressive, impolitic. Somehow it exposes the awkward trade-offs of racial pride (solidarity) and ambition (isolation). Public exposure demands wiliness of each man as the three of them try to lift themselves out of the directives, proscriptions, and constraints of a wretched, biased social ethos. Seeking various ways to escape cultural censure and disgust, they must make themselves up out of imagination and experience, against the world’s vicissitudes, but also against its disinterest and cruelty. Chameleon Street perceived and prophesied this. So how did carpet-bombing press denunciations miss it? And fail to appreciate the crucial Simpson-Cochran interplay of stressed unity and Darden’s desolate flight? In such moments these men exposed their own destinies, their personal allegiances: a striving lawyer and client bound by subconscious fraternal needs that Faulkner would call “not-terror”; a panicky prosecutor in free fall like a trapeze artist reaching in midair for a partner he cannot truly believe in. But it’s something journalists would have to be already sensitive to. If Simpson-Cochran’s bond suggested collusion to cynics, Darden’s bust-out should also have rung alarms. (And probably did—a silent alarm that shames.) The Goldman family and district attorney office were there for Darden (as Cochran was for Simpson), but Darden couldn’t see them because he didn’t feel right there or fit with them.
These were not just matters of racial or cultural likeness; they go deeper, to a society’s fundamental assumptions, its daily structure of support and practice of mores as three Black men lived them out. The trial did not create these race tensions, but every aspect of them—from the miscegenation issues of the Brown-Simpson marriage to the formal, political alliance of Darden and lead prosecutor Marcia Clark—surely grew out of them. But Darden himself won’t admit it (in his self-exculpatory book In Contempt). With all his prosecutorial history, and pride in it, Darden was certainly privy to the system’s inequities and mendacities. But when his inner Faust awoke, he attempted, in one brief moment of public candor, to shake it off. Establishment media would have us deny or ignore such complex ambivalence; it so disturbs the outward appearance of justice and fairness that lay politicians don’t want to touch it, even though it reveals alienation common to any mixed-group American workplace. Equally, noticing it would sensitize witnesses to the spontaneous compassion in Simpson’s and Cochran’s summary embrace.
When pundits further perverted the trial by assigning its strangeness to the cult of celebrity, this was merely more evasion. The media’s excessive concentration on Simpson was based in a racist illusion that the crime was “important.” The Bronco chase was a clear case of media exploitation. His celebrity didn’t warrant live, preemptive TV coverage at all. Face it: it was the scandal one could attach to the circumstances of a killing, a fleeing, an impending arrest that made media moguls slather. We are used to having our worst instincts pandered to by the media, thus ungluing the fragile trust of community that we live by. Still, race exploitation was the convenient selling point, the goal. The Bronco chase—with its indecent hovering over the Simpson estate to peek in on catastrophe—was the first offense. (I refuse to borrow the trivializing metaphor “playing the race card” because it is itself loaded with the media elite’s disrespect, and reluctance, for any discourse on race.) Next, Time magazine’s darkened mug shot was proof again of how media wrought this issue along lines of stereotype and fear. Simpson would be made over in the Black monster mode by any graphic, sophistic means necessary. (The magazine itself explained: “To many whites, O.J. entered the trial as a fellow White man and grew darker as the proceedings went on. He was the perfectly assimilated minority hero until he was associated with terrible crimes. Then he became just another Black male under arrest, presumed to be guilty of everything.”)
This betrayal of a former hero is actually a common turnabout, causing Black distrust of whites and their official institutions—from Time magazine to executive office cabinet firings such as Clinton’s axing Jocelyn Elders. The Time magazine cover and the televised Bronco chase were ideological salvos that short-circuited empathy. Both linked with the justice system’s media-friendly, cash-cooperative inclusion of courtroom cameras to announce and prepare the audience for a new level of public spectacle.
Media frequently bends itself into formats that promote its essential allegiance to white supremacy. Americans know that throughout history, rules customarily are broken to disfavor Blacks (the media has been no less willing to do this than police investigators). Before the trial Simpson was but one of many Black sports stars, now one whose field achievements are virtually forgotten after years of lame movies and TV commercials. Some think these promotions of capitalism proved his acceptance by an open America. But accepted how far? Within the admiration by which the mainstream makes racist exceptions of Black atheletes is a repressed contempt that here gets expressed in all-out vengeance. One of the most peculiar instances was the Entertainment Tonight show that, in treating Simpson’s travail as entertainment news, overlooked Simpson and devoted an entire segment to idolizing “The Hunk of the Hearings,” Lt. Mark Fuhrman—as if what this soap opera needed was a white, square-jawed romantic figure. (Their folly eventually turned to horror.) Simpson himself was never hunkier. He looked different, a changed figure—the gravity of the situation knocked the banal pitchman’s smile off his face. He appeared solemn, more handsome, an embodiment of the Black man in trouble (for some an evil, for others an image of fascination). If you could recognize the defamation Black people endure daily, you would sense what Black celebrities oppose by their efforts to withstand suffering and affirm (document) perseverance. They’re expressing themselves and their people—a load Simpson would always carry whether on the field or in court. Although Simpson had never been a community hero like Cochran, whose legal career in civilian rights (as opposed to Darden) inspired trust by demonstrating consciousness about racial conditions in this country, he became a poetic figure anyway. History was turning on Simpson’s shoulders, returning his relevance to Black America at last.
By now Simpson must feel himself transmogrified, taken out of his own life into a psychic desolation very much like slavery’s abduction and dislocation. No matter what else Simpson may have done in his life—won football games, trophies, made movies, babies, driven cars, etc.—the fame, adulation, resentment, happiness, anger it produced could not prepare him for this current persecution. Such stress, coming in waves from the hostile atmosphere and not the result of one’s own conscious, physical endeavor, must astonish a celebrity as well as a jaded public. It’s wilder than mere fame because it’s full of the judgmental society’s menace. Whites may not understand this sense of paranoid disorder, although Black Americans have long endured it even in situations as mundane as being watched then followed by security guards: society’s suspicion and disrespect crowds your sense of free movement, shadowing your anticipation. Even the innocent would feel resentful and the dispassionate, protective. In this climate, the dominant society has won: Simpson’s already a prisoner—as are we all—social captives trapped in the media’s purge, suffering the phenomenon of white supremacy in which a group, explaining itself to itself (and the world), does so at the expense of our health and social stability.
This media transference of dominant group hatred is the evidence of unjust power—the bequest of a guilt-and evil-gripped culture. Overtalking the Simpson case, white media reinforced racist ideology, erecting white sepulchres, white plantations, white abattoirs, white schools, all edifices of white dominance. When The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, the trial’s most “respected” reporter, castigates Simpson as a “semiliterate,” he means untutored, unprincipled, savage. The whole witch-hunt is plainly exposed as part of a class-and race-based need to pronounce guilt, thus to ostracize O.J.—the Other.
Cochran is the second most-vilified figure in this event, but it must be said that his infamy is largely a white projection. The distraught Fred Goldman, still mourning his son, took political objection to Cochran’s comparing Fuhrman’s racism to Adolf Hitler. Goldman railed incoherently against Cochran: “We have seen a man who perhaps is the worst kind of racist himself. This man is the worst kind of human being imaginable. He suggests that racism ought to be the most important thing that any one of us ought to listen to in this court, that any one of us in this nation ought to be listening to, and it’s because of racism we should put aside all other thought, all other reason, and set his murdering client free. He’s a sick man. He ought to be put away.”5 This is incoherent but it blares mainstream race fear, race hysteria.
Sure, Cochran’s “slick”—that’s just American culture’s word for being successfully competitive. In his book Darden envies and despises the way Cochran dresses, but an honest view of Cochran saw no courtroom misconduct, no pouting (despite Judge Lance Ito’s own biased contempt citations). He claimed the moral high ground in arguing against Darden’s racial stigmatizing. (And in smoothly setting up the glove-fitting routine that Darden vainly fell for, Cochran trumped his opponent.) Cochran’s professionalism perfectly analogizes the rigorously maintained perspective of those whites and Blacks who were unwilling to go with hunches and moralize about the case. The opposite to Cochran’s intelligent approach showed in the brash conclusions of observers who refused to wait for the legal process to play out, especially the prosecution team.
Their remarkable sense of superiority (and embattlement) came out in Marcia Clark’s flirty arrogance and Darden’s testy fretting. Basically inept, they relied on an inordinate manipulation of a daily press-conference forum. An important instance of institutional conspiracy showed the media’s willingness to perform public relations for the district attorney’s office (typically part of hack journalists’ dependence on “official source” press statements rather than hunting down a story). No actual trial participant misunderstood his or her role more than Darden, who gambled on the tactic of personalizing the deceased to win sympathy. Darden’s unctuous plea (repeated in In Contempt) that “Ron and Nicole” were his clients immediately unbalanced the issues. A prosecutor serves a state’s interests; currying favor from individuals with a private stake in a trial’s outcome is not his job. Such specious empathy exposed Darden’s allegiance to an unofficial prejudice disparaging Blackness (intimated in Darden’s bitter phrases describing Simpson’s behavior and history). The district attorney’s office used Darden’s own ethnicity to disguise its chosen low strategy of character assassination. But more than willing to deceive, Darden became the System’s eager dupe.
If in Shakespearean terms Simpson was Othello, Darden lago, it remains a toss-up who was the most interesting, most tragic, figure. Certainly Darden was the most duplicitous, since his ethical contradictions were not merely a matter of preserving a public front but serving two communities—Enterprising Black America versus Imperial White America—a poignant, enraging schizophrenia. What was ultimately a self-betrayal began in Darden’s own career history that prepared for his courtroom mendacity.
A Black person’s decision to become a public prosecutor requires holding an antipathetic regard for the ongoing facts of America’s institutional abuse of Black people or perhaps an ignorance of the social history and political facts that contribute to Black troubles. It arbitrarily imputes lawlessness to people without power or opportunity. Darden never ponders his requisite callousness in In Contempt, which would get in the way of his convenient belief that Blacks are to blame for his losing the case, for Ron and Nicole being murdered, for every pathological effect of racism in the United States. Iago was jealous, but Darden was contemptuous of blacks who reject his middle-class, assimilationist notion of correct behavior. A little fascism poisons the law-and-order tendency that compels cops and prosecutors to do their job. It was strange to see Darden’s boyish obstreperousness (so much like an insolent young rapper) taking the side of power—and still steaming, irate. His immature scowls betrayed a lack of moral courage, an insufficiency we know can never be satisfied. Matching tempers with Cochran, Darden frequently lost more than his cool: his head flew off in the way of delinquents caught in the wrong but too vain to admit it.
The entire prosecution team playacted denial on the issue of Mark Fuhrman—the suspicious, unfit, racist Los Angeles cop Darden was assigned to prepare as a state witness. For many viewers this is where the state lost its case: knowing Fuhrman’s history, knowing he lied to F. Lee Bailey’s questions, yet persisting in a Fuhrman cover-up until the defense team doggedly exposed him. This grievous offense, added to bumbled investigations, mishandled evidence, Judge Kennedy-Powell’s prejudiced bench rulings that okayed warrantless search-and-seizure, shook the foundations of the criminal justice system. And—oops!—cameras stayed on, exposing the errors. Pundits, of course, looked the other way, blaming the derailment on the defense team and forestalling the fair-enough notions of a mistrial.
Here’s how ego defeats the person: In his book, Darden excuses Fuhrman, proposing that his racist statements be forgiven, by outrageously linking Fuhrman to post—Mecca Malcolm X as a man with a change of heart. Darden is able to flip the script on Malcolm X—and on the problem of racism—because fundamentally he, like his white cohorts in the district attorney’s office and the media, disdains untoward Black behavior. House-Negro fealty to his boss, camera hog Gil Garcetti, led Darden to disgrace a figure of Black empowerment by comparing him to a Black oppressor. If we mistake Darden’s confusion for tragic heroism, we cheapen human aspiration as nothing more than a craving for authority’s favor. Interestingly Darden never sympathetically compares himself to Cochran or Simpson; he personally circumscribes Black male potential, acquiescing to Black abasement.
Eventually, good sense got lost in Darden’s contest over race with Cochran. No media person seemed able to see through this crucial moment of the trial. Black men pitted against each other had the nation’s attention, but resolved nothing. Watching tempers volley could have enlightened the judge, jury, and world. Instead, their altercation was a plantation owner’s divide-and conquer dream. Their case positions prevented them from sharing truths about race culture and race mythology. They couldn’t converge their different experiences as Black men in America because the separation probably started long before the trial in different, class-bound attitudes about what constitutes necessary or legitimate ethnic sensibility. (Cochran also began his legal career as a young prosecutor, apparently a rite de passage for many Black attorneys in Los Angeles. But he made his reputation defending Blacks—most significantly Black Panther Geronimo Pratt—in police abuse cases. Cochran termed this “the most remarkable civics lesson you could learn in that you don’t accept the official version. But when I started trying cases as a young city attorney thirty-one years ago, you would be almost held in contempt of court if you said a police officer was lying.”)6
Loyal Darden didn’t efface himself for the good of the case. He went ego and started an ideological street fight. More than prosecuting, Darden became the spokesman for white insensitivity and impatience, going for conviction at the cost of moral restraint. It happened when he insisted a Black voice is in itself identifiable, invoking and attempting to legitimate racial stigma, dredging up American weakness and suspicion lurking in posthumous details of the Simpson-Brown marriage. Cochran’s calling out Darden’s racist ploy argued for equity and impartiality in the “evidence” presented. But in the now-exacerbated terms of the public spectacle, Cochran’s fair-mindedness was discredited by mediacrats as militancy. It was, but only in the way that opposition to racist practice required a militant forthrightness. When Darden claimed that Blacks go blind and irrational upon hearing the word nigger, Cochran launched a passionate retort: “It’s demeaning to our jurors to say that African-Americans, who have lived under oppression for 200-plus years in this country, cannot work within the mainstream, cannot hear these offensive words. African-Americans live with offensive words, offensive looks, offensive treatment every day of their lives. But yet they still believe in this country …”7
The standoff between Cochran and Darden aired out suppositions about race that floated freely during the trial, sparking here and there with no place to be proven or debated as needed. This was the most important determinant of the trial’s tone and its ramifications. If the prosecution was willing to argue a witness’s not-hearing/hearing “a Black voice,” then there was nowhere it would stop, no ideal it held important except winning its case at all costs—lynch-mob justice. It is within this racist rigidity—America’s unacknowledged prevailing prejudices—that Simpson, Darden, and Cochran were seen, regardless of the content of their characters. We know such things as accident, hormones, health, environment determine the quality of a voice. Similar variables also influence how a voice is perceived, how people who turn up in a ring or courtroom together come to oppose each other’s very sense of humanity. These highly Visible Men turned a courtroom into Ellison’s hellacious boxing ring.
Observers who sided with Cochran or Darden or Simpson, stuck on deciding guilt or innocence, chose an irrelevant dilemma easier to deal with than this lonely, devastating awareness: that our forces of justice and communication are arrayed against the unempowered—especially converting Black males into grist for our contemporary prison/criminal justice industry. In spite of the jury’s verdict, Simpson can’t receive the rights due him by legal process because these are benefits reserved for (rich) whites who are able to “work within the system’s” money-driven apparatus. Broadcast outlets who seek ad revenue by exploiting Simpson news hypocritically renege on his right to advertise a videotape. Such malevolence is heinously defended by the ploy of guilt or innocence. But if that abreaction prevents us from practicing our supposed democratic principles, our society is despoiled.
Understanding the social and personal urges that made us eye-jurors of the trial, bringing all our fates together with Simpson’s, Brown’s, and Goldman’s, is more important than merely adducing who murdered two people. George Orwell asked, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Its 1990s’ paraphrase would be a proper response to the relentless shit-stirring of media jackals like Geraldo Rivera, who turned this tragedy into a morbid, maniacal bid for ratings. It’s when you consider the millions of lives (Black and white) to be corrupted this media catastrophe that the two murders come to seem relatively unimportant, and the media’s disservice amounts to social devastation. The Simpson trial manifests more than a good read or “sexy” TV. It indicates to us what we are as a nation—social hypocrites and compromisers.
I avoided the word brotherly to describe Simpson and Cochran’s postverdict gestures, even though that’s exactly what distinguished them, because I want to impress a larger sense of human empathy, to suggest, by example, a more complicated writing of history than the mainstream has ordained. But brotherhood is, in the end, unavoidable. It endows some Black men with an understanding of each other that whites may only comprehend as aberrant, an exotic trait, and thus disrespect. But it’s also deeply affectionate, deeply judicious, in the way Cochran intuited the need to press his body to Simpson’s rather than any glib form of encouragement. Nothing could mean more than that sentient assurance. It’s the essence of contact and a base of civilization. Many whites—and Blacks—may have had this connection worn out of them by the chaotic trial, yet it persists in the communal response to larger issues—the political scandal of law run amuck and broken by prosecutors, police, and media. Black people felt enthusiastic about beating a system of corrupt vengeance, a euphoria that surpasses feeling for O.J. himself (though it certainly embraces him). It’s proof of a vibrant, long-offended moral intelligence that, by dint of will and passion, keeps going in spite of domineering media propaganda. Within that tight, tender exchange between Simpson and Cochran is the sustenance one need only observe to hold as a social faith. Darden’s judgmental response to Black trouble is dehumanizing. It can only lead to distress.
Seeing or hearing these voluminous aspersions of O.J. will always, despite the remote abstractions of TV and press, put one back in the moment where every American’s soul hung in anguished suspense. But that moment is also profoundly ordinary: it’s when you decide to clasp humanity or to run away from its difficulty—feeling sorry and terrified.
1. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (New York: Viking Penguin reprint, 1986)
2. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House/Vintage reprint, 1972).
3. Ibid.
4. Each film was a box-office failure. Along with Devil in a Blue Dress and Seven, their refashioned social dread could not compete with the O.J. trial’s suspense, drama, and scandal. I detail this phenomenon in “Simpson Sensibility: Black Male Shows in the Year Mythology Broke Down,” The City Sun, December 20, 1995.
5. Emerge, January 1996.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.