A DOUBLE STRAND OF PARANOIA

By Jack E. White

OF ALL THE JOLTING TWISTS AND TURNS IN THE SIMPSON trial, none was more startling than the defendant's rebirth as a black man. What we tend to forget is that before June 12, 1994, the Juice was no hero to African Americans. His postfootball success was largely due to his ability to make whites comfortable as he played golf with ceos at country clubs from which other blacks were excluded or shucked and jived his way through goofy movies like some modern Stepin Fetchit. Never one to speak out about civil rights, he seemed to shed his racial identity, crossing over into a sort of colorless minor celebrity as easily as he escaped from tacklers--or from the black wife he traded in for a white teenager. By trial time Simpson wasn't exactly white, but he wasn't exactly black either.

Yet now O.J. has become black again, thanks to Mark Fuhrman, who treated him like a "nigger," and Johnnie Cochran, who made sure nobody forgot it. Once again, blacks and whites are glaring at each other across the color line in mutual incomprehension as yet another trial of American race relations unfolds in the City of Angels. To whites, the central issue is whether Simpson is a murderer, while to blacks it is whether the process that brought him to trial was fatally contaminated by racial bias. Simpson is still no hero to most blacks, but he has become an indelible symbol of their mistreatment by white authority. "We always reach out to another black person we perceive as being mistreated by whites because it has happened to so many of us," says Darlene Powell Hopson, a black clinical psychologist. Says political scientist Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal: "I hear a lot of anger from even middle-class and professional blacks about this. They believe that the police, the prosecutors, the whole criminal justice system are out to tear down black men, especially successful black men."

What we have here are two mutually reinforcing strains of paranoia. On one hand, blacks are so suspicious of whites that many seriously believe aids is a genocidal plague cooked up by the cia. That is the flip side of the fear that makes many white women clutch their purses when a black man in a business suit gets on the elevator. Perhaps because of their minority status, most blacks who live with these grim realities have learned to keep their fears in perspective most of the time. They know their justified rage can be exploited, and have schooled themselves to distinguish between cynical appeals to their sense of racial injustice and valid pleas for the unjustly accused. What infuriates them is that whites often fail to make equivalent distinctions, dismissing blacks' protests against racist mistreatment as a tactic without bothering to investigate the mistreatment itself. And that is why the Simpson case is so divisive. Until blacks are convinced that the cops and the prosecutors are dealing fairly with them, they won't listen to anything else.

Blacks seethe when Cochran's attack on Detecttive Fuhrman is denigrated in the white-controlled media as merely "playing the race card." Such a tactic could hardly have been avoided in a case that, in Hacker's phrase,"was dripping with race" from the start. How could it have been otherwise when a black man stood accused of cutting the throats of two white people in a city that exploded just 3 1/2 years ago after four white cops who beat Rodney King were set free by a jury from which blacks were conspicuously absent? Few would disagree with Thelma Golden, curator of a controversial 1994 exhibition on black males in contemporary culture, that "if Nicole had been black, this case would have been a cover on Jet magazine [the black newsweekly] and not much more."

Moreover, Simpson's choice of Johnnie Cochran as his lead lawyer made the race factor inevitable. Cochran's career was built around suing the L.A.P.D. for racially inspired misconduct--some of it even more horrendous than that revealed in the Simpson trial--and he is no fool. Still, prosecutors, knowing Fuhrman's history, decided to have the detective testify. That gave Cochran the opening to cast the trial in racial terms, which worked because Simpson was wealthy enough to hire lawyers and investigators to dig up proof of racially motivated police misconduct. It is no more unethical for Simpson's team to employ such a strategy than it was for Clarence Thomas to claim he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching" during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. As Cochran explained to me last week, "any lawyer who didn't go after that would be guilty of malpractice."

Moreover, as inflammatory and cynical as Cochran's tactics may seem to whites, there is little proof that black jurors go easy on black defendants solely due to race. In heavily black jurisdictions such as Washington, mostly black juries routinely send African-American defendants to prison when the evidence merits it. History shows that from Mississippi during the civil rights era to Simi Valley in the '90s, it is all-white juries that tend to exonerate defendants of their own race despite the evidence.

Which is not to say Simpson's lawyers have not crossed the line into cynical exploitation of blacks' sense of racial aggrievement. Case in point: Cochran's acceptance of security guards from the Nation of Islam, which strikes many as being like a white lawyer's taking on bodyguards from the Ku Klux Klan. Cochran and I have been friends for years, but we never discussed the Simpson case until it went to the jury last week. That was in part because I think the evidence points to Simpson's guilt, as well as to police corruption--and I'm not alone, even among blacks. "I think it's possible for the Los Angeles police department to be corrupt and racist and for Simpson to still be guilty," says Julianne Malveaux, the African-American host of a radio show in Washington. "The evidence has clearly shown you can be a clean-cut cop like Fuhrman and still be a racist liar, or be a nice guy like O.J. who smiles all the time and still beat the hell out of women." The cops may have tried to frame a guilty man.

But if the polls can be trusted, most Americans consider those possibilities to be mutually exclusive--dismal proof, as if more were needed, that most of us continue to view race relations as a zero-sum game in which every gain by blacks is a loss for whites and vice versa. It is up to the white majority, I'm afraid, to take the first step in breaking this cycle, because only they have the power to do it. Remove the Fuhrmans from authority. Back laws that make police misconduct a serious crime with serious penalties, and give civilian complaint review boards the power to punish cops who flout them. Raise police salaries to attract better recruits, and make sure that lots of them come from the minority neighborhoods where crime is most serious and relationships between police and citizens are most in need of repair.

Most of all, realize that it is the persistence of racism itself that makes it possible for suspects like Simpson to play the race card. Just as the Simpson case was going to the jury, news broke of another tape of vile racist invective--this time by a member of the Dallas school board, who among other things referred to students as "little niggers.'' Blacks know Fuhrman is not an aberration. And as long as his brand of bigotry is at large in the land, it may sometimes engender the further injustice that a guilty man goes free.