Yes, Fuhrman is vermin, and the prosecution should never have tried to prop him up. Proving that the lead detective is a liar would be fatal to many other criminal cases, even ones without racial issues. And obviously it would be good if the fallout from the case forced law enforcement to be less sloppy and arrogant.
So why the white rage? The flash point was less the non-guilty verdict itself than the continued insistence that the man is genuinely innocent. When you repeat a lie long enough and loud enough it lives. To have framed Simpson, the level of conspiracy required by detectives other than Mark Fuhrman is virtually impossible logistically, no matter how racist the LAPD might be. If believing a conspiracy is unreasonable and ignoring voluminous unrefut-ed blood and motive evidence is unreasonable, then doubt itself is unreasonable.
Jurors now insist they were not sending a message. Fine. But anyone who closely followed the trial would have to acknowledge that the jury seemed in deep denial about many prosecution arguments. To every point raised by juror No. 8 on “Nightline,” for instance, the prosecution had a convincing response, which apparently didn’t get aired in the jury room. Unless they’re lying, the jurors talked about the case with each other for a far shorter time than 100 million other Americans talked about it with each other. Whatever the verdict, the victims and their families deserved better than that.
As for other possible killers, the suspects were inadvertently narrowed in a little-noticed comment by Robert Shapiro on “Larry King Live” last week. Shapiro casually said Ron Goldman was an “innocent bystander.” That takes care of most of the defense’s theories about drug conspiracies and the like. We now know the real killer is someone else with a major grudge against Nicole Brown specifically. Go get ’em, O.J.
Of course such specifics don’t really explain the strength of emotion among many whites who consider themselves to be enlightened on matters of race. Perhaps the key is that we assumed, unthinkingly, that we occupied some kind of demilitarized zone with moderate blacks. If it wasn’t color-blind, it was at least color-farsighted, with certain common values allowed to share the foreground. Suddenly that zone was gone, at least as far as O.J. was concerned. Black moderates are familiar with the pressure to fall in line with a “black” position. They feel it again in this case. But for many white moderates, it’s jarring to find ourselves identifying not with a set of racially idealistic principles but with the so-called “white” position. We expected more blacks to look beyond race to facts, as thousands of whites had during the Rodney King trial. When so many blacks didn’t, it shocked us-and hardened us in ways that shocked us even more.
Here’s the intentionally provocative message that Ben Stein, an L.A. writer, e-mailed Frank Rich of The New York Times last week: “When O.J. gets off, the whites will riot the way we whites do: leave the cities, go to Idaho or Oregon or Arizona, vote for Gingrich. . . and punish the blacks by closing their day-care programs and cutting off their Medicaid.” Stein might have added that more than a few overwrought whites could end up deciding that they weren’t so keen on Colin Powell for president after all. And Powell’s failure to show leadership last week by criticizing the rejoicing didn’t help bridge the gap.
Even if predictions of post-Simpson backlash are grossly overblown (and let’s hope they are) the basic white frustration remains: that race trumps spousal abuse, factual consistency and just about anything else. As early as the first polls, the Simpson ease was perceived as racial–and perception became reality. But the truer subtext was always about money and celebrity and the sale of “reasonable doubt” to any defendant who can afford to plant it. If the same case had been brought against a defendant who wasn’t rich and famous, it wouldn’t matter whether he–or the jury–was black or white. He’d be on death row. That should be more than a TV truism about this case; it should stimulate thinking about how to take big money out of the courtroom. (One idea: limit compensation for expert witnesses to what government experts receive, which would allow poorer defendants to afford them.)
It’s just as bad for whites who didn’t follow the case to assume Simpson’s guilty as it is for blacks to assume he’s innocent. But for blacks who did review the tremendous evidence, cheering wasrepugnant. Harlon L. Dalton, a black Yale law professor and the author of a perceptive new book called “Racial Healing,” says that some black friends of his have admitted that they think Simpson did it, but can’t say it publicly for fear of being seen as traitors to their race. That may be the saddest news of the week.
The Simpson case did not create all of these racial tensions, but the structure of today’s “Crossfire” culture has worsened them. Over time, the adversary principle at the heart of the legal sys-tem–opponents fight and justice emerges–has been adopted by the media and the outside world. Now we have a full-blown adversary culture, where the clash of ideas is aimed mostly at producing entertainment. It’s not just that arguing yields more heat than light, it’s that the heat obliterates the light–at least on race. Maybe no real healing is possible on this one-maybe blacks and whites need to talk to each other more, but not about O. J. Simpson. So let’s give it a rest, at long last, and work hard to find some other terrain on which to reacquaint ourselves.
