The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  The problem of representing The Race is compounded by whites who protest its injustice to famous blacks. “Why should they be made to represent the race?” well-meaning whites ask, as if anonymous blacks had more choice in the matter than their well-known peers. (Besides, such protest releases these whites from the awful burden of confronting racism in their own world. If the representative of The Race is relieved of duty, everybody can party. It also obscures how the need for racial representation was created by white racism to begin with.) The assumption is that fame makes the burden of representation heavier for some blacks. In many ways, that’s true. There’s more territory to cover. And there are certainly more folk to deal with in countering or confirming destructive views of black life. On the other hand, visible blacks have routes of escape that ordinary blacks will never know. The well-known black can bask in fortunes of fate most blacks will never be tempted by. They can make lots of money, join elite social clubs, live in exclusive neighborhoods, send their kids to tony schools, enjoy the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Famous blacks can cash in on their complaints about having to represent all blacks. They can enjoy the fruits of a situation created by their being black in the first place.

  Simpson took the path of least resistance for those looking to dodge the burden of being black: ignoring race. Although ignoring race is often mistaken for selfhatred, they are not the same. Those who confuse them commit what philosophers call a “category mistake.” In such cases, shades of meaning slip off the edges of sloppy distinctions. Those who ignore race, and those who hate themselves because they can’t, do share self-defeating habits: both deny the differences race makes and the lingering effects of racism. But not all blacks who have these habits hate themselves or consciously set out to ignore race. Some blacks are simply nonconformists who seek to defy the bitter boundaries of race, both within and beyond black life.

  Simpson has confessed (not exactly, I’m afraid, what millions of Americans were hoping for) that it wasn’t until he got hate mail in jail that he admitted racism hadn’t gone away. Simpson concedes that he simply ignored or denied racism for most of his adult life. Simpson’s denial, combined with his raceless image, entitled him to a derisive honor: White Man’s Negro. Simpson earned his crown by avoiding and forgetting about race. He kept it by lusting after white acceptance at any cost. On the face of it—at least the side of his face he showed on the BET interview—that lust continues to shape his sense of reality. On the BET interview, Simpson said most whites don’t believe he’s guilty. That suggests more than Simpson’s delusional state of mind. It shows how his perception of events squares with the logic of denial that made him useful to the white world. It is a vicious twist of fate for Simpson. The same technique of survival that brought him praise from whites in the past—as he was lauded, no doubt, for bravely resisting the demagogic demand to represent The Race—now causes those same whites to view him as pathological. No wonder O.J. is confused.

  Simpson has now been forced to claim his race by default. It is an act that undoubtedly fills him—at least it would the old Simpson—with great regret. And not a little disdain. The blackness Simpson embraced during the trial was foreign to him. Its unfamiliar feel made him clutch it with great desperation. That blackness was molded for Simpson by Johnnie Cochran, who proved to be a shrewd conjurer of a “one size fits all” blackness. After all, it might complicate matters to acknowledge the conflicting varieties of black identity. In Cochran’s conjuring, the complexity of race was skillfully shifted to a more narrow, but, on the surface at least, universal meaning of blackness-as-oppression. When applied to Simpson, such a meaning was laughable. It fit him even worse than the gloves prosecutor Christopher Darden tried to make Simpson force over his arthritic joints. But because blackness-as-oppression is often true for most blacks, Simpson benefited from its link to his case.

  Darden, on the other hand, was unfairly stigmatized by Cochran’s conjuring of blackness during the trial. Darden was viewed by many blacks as a traitor because he dared to call narrow blackness a phony idea in full view of white America. Darden failed because he didn’t have Cochran’s oratorical or lawyerly skills. (But Darden also had the thankless task of prosecuting a beloved, fallen American hero who was, at the same time, seeking to make a comeback to his black roots. Black folk are too often suckers for this sort of figure. Although blacks resent racial infidelity, we are often open to reconciliation. Even if the forgiven black continues to abuse the privilege of return, as Simpson has done. It’s painfully clear that black folk are his fallback, not his first choice.) Darden also goofed when he argued that black jurors would be outdone if they had to hear the dreaded “N” word, particularly if it leapt from the past of star prosecution witness, police detective Mark Fuhrman. Black folk endure that epithet and much worse every day.

  Darden’s naïveté and strategic mistakes made it easy to believe that he had little understanding of the harsh realities black folk routinely face. Ironically, Darden desperately tried to point out that it was Simpson who had avoided the hardship most blacks confront. In the symbolic war of blackness being waged between Darden and Cochran, Darden tried to make Simpson appear unworthy of the knee-jerk black loyalty he enjoyed but from which Darden had been excluded. But that point was skillfully shredded in rhetorical and legal crossfire with Cochran, both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion.

  Simpson has largely sidestepped the indignities imposed on ordinary blacks. His fame and fortune certainly helped. Equally important, Simpson has made a career out of making white folk feel safe. He has been an emissary of blackness-as-blandness. With O.J. present, there was no threat of black rage careening out of control. He made no unreasonable demands—or any reasonable ones for that matter—for change of any sort. He blessed the civility and rightness of the status quo. Indeed, O.J. got a big bonus by comparing favorably not only to black “hotheads,” but to figures like Hank Aaron, the baseball legend whose mellow thunder led him to speak gently but insistently about racism in sports. Once Simpson put away his youthful law breaking in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill projects, he adopted a winning formula: he would play by the rules within the limits of the Given. The Given amounts to whites being on top. To win, you must act and talk white. In many interviews, Simpson has literally said so.

  The extraordinary white hostility aimed at Simpson after the verdicts can largely be explained by the equally extraordinary investment O.J. made in the white world. He was a Good Negro who played by the rules. Many whites returned the favor. They invested in Simpson as a surrogate white. That investment explains their sense of betrayal by O.J. once he was charged, then cleared, of murder. According to the rules of surrogate whiteness, Simpson should have confessed his guilt and taken his punishment like a (white) man. Of course, by breaking the rules of surrogate whiteness, Simpson actually followed the rules of the Given: Those on top—wealthy whites—are not accountable to the system of justice in the same way as those on the bottom. The rules—of justice, fairness, equality—work fine for privileged whites as long as they are applied to a world of experience whites are familiar with. Beyond that territory, their sense of how and when the rules should apply is severely limited. That’s the supreme paradox of white power Simpson learned up close.

  It’s not that white people are inherently more unfair or unjust than others. It’s just that the rules are often applied in an arbitrary fashion to those outside the realm of their understanding and sympathy. That’s why the barbarity of police brutality against blacks didn’t faze many whites until the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed his molesters’ acquittal. (Even now many whites still don’t get it, as the response to the April 1996 beatings of illegal Mexican immigrants by deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s office in South El Monte, California, proves.) Once O.J. lost his standing as a surrogate white, once he reverted back to a barbaric blackness, all bets were off. All rules were broken. Simpson began to see, perhaps for the first time, that
he was worse than “just another nigger.” He was a spurned black member of the white elite, an honorary white who had fallen from grace.

  Simpson’s celebrity, honorary whiteness, and wealth made him largely immune to the treatment shown the run-of-the-mill black male suspect. He was partly exempted by analogy: just the notion that a person like Simpson could murder his wife was hard for many of us to believe. The glow of false familiarity that fit his affable screen image helped too. (If one doubts the transfer between screen roles and real life, ask soap stars, who are constantly taken for their television characters, sometimes with disastrous results.) For a long stretch, Simpson made nice on television, both as a sports commentator and in typecast roles in a string of forgettable films that occasionally surface on late-night rotation. Simpson had only recently managed to find a role whose career benefit exceeded his paycheck: the hilariously unlucky Lt. Nordberg in the three Naked Gun films highlighted Simpson’s comedic talent.

  The sum of Simpson’s celebrated parts—plus an unnameably perverse addiction to vicarious disintegration—moved his mostly white fans to cheer “the Juice” as he and pal A.C. Cowlings halfheartedly fled the law up I-5 and, later, the I-405 freeway in Cowlings’s infamous white Bronco. (Always wanting to be like Simpson but never quite measuring up, Cowlings, this one time, ended up in the driver’s seat.) Here privilege intervened. Any other black fugitive would most likely have been shot or otherwise stomped before he could call his mother, or swing by home to get a swig of orange juice. (At the time of Simpson’s ungetaway cruise, L.A.’s freeways had been the setting of the blockbuster adventure flick Speed. The similarities are eerie: a chase with an uncertain conclusion; a spectacle involving revenge, murder, and obsession; and the freeway itself as a metaphor for both the resolution and realization of urban trauma.)

  If Simpson’s celebrity kept him from trauma, it attracted others to his trial to compete for public attention. Understanding that there’s only so much understanding to go around—witness the spread of “compassion fatigue” and the backlash against “PC”—abused women, blacks, feminists, and others lobbied for the trial to be viewed through the lens of their suffering. While their pain was legitimate, their perspectives were often depressingly narrow. The scamper for the spotlight ruined some. Plain old greed and self-aggrandizement spoiled others.

  Still, the Simpson trial and its aftermath reveal how nefarious social forces intersect and collide, how the suffering these forces breed cuts across every imaginable line of social identity, and how the suffering of some groups outweighs the suffering of others. Domestic violence made a cameo appearance at the trial’s center stage. It quickly became a bit player in the judicial drama that followed. It was shattered and swept away by a hurricane of legal strategies and tactical maneuvers. It was clear that the bodies of battered women simply don’t count where they should matter most—in the public imagination, and in private spaces where women live, work, play, and, too often, where they die.

  True enough, the exposure of his ugly treatment of Nicole rightly shamed Simpson. The halo Simpson wore blinded the public to the darker corners of his character. The trial deglamorized Simpson’s gentle, happy-go-lucky public demeanor. At the same time, a more telling symptom of our national hypocrisy emerged. The attack on Simpson as a batterer often degenerated into scapegoating. Such a practice eases consciences. It does little, however, to erase harmful attitudes and behaviors. By demonizing Simpson, many felt they were proving the moral enlightenment of a culture that refuses to tolerate such behavior. Such selfcongratulation is groundless. The demonization of Simpson amounted to little more than moral posturing. We permit, sometimes condone, the abuse and killing of women every day. We need look no further than countless courtrooms and morgues for proof. Scapegoating allows us to avoid changing the beliefs and behavior that give domestic violence secret vitality.

  If we were to really change our cultural habits, calling Simpson’s behavior barbaric would ring true. It would be the extension of, not the exception to, our everyday practice. In our present climate, labeling Simpson’s behavior barbaric revives, however remotely, ugly stereotypes of black men as beasts. The less sophisticated version of that stereotype has long been demolished. It is reborn, however, in images of young black males as social pariahs and older black males as rootless, ruthless ne’er-do-wells. Plus, the labeling invokes the ancient taboo against interracial love, whispering to all potential Nicoles: “See, that’s what happens when you mess around with a black man.”

  Let’s face it. Beating women is a manly sport in America. It is not a widely reviled practice, at least not before the Simpson trial. (It is helpful to remind ourselves that for years many white stars in every major American sport have beat their wives, too. But without a history of stereotypes to support white male beastliness, the wife-beating issue failed to catch on among the cause célèbre set.) Simpson’s treatment of Nicole—manhandling, stalking, surveilling, beating, and tyrannizing her—was vicious. It was the extreme but logical outgrowth of deeply entrenched beliefs about the worth of women’s bodies in our culture. Sadly, such beliefs persist in the face of feminist activism.

  Part of our problem is that we think we can have it both ways. We think we can detest feminists while lauding the “good” women, those who wouldn’t call themselves feminists to save their lives. And often don’t. But most men are ignorant of flesh and blood feminism and the lives of the women who fill its ranks. Feminism is what women do when they realize they must struggle to protect the rights and privileges most men take for granted.

  Still, Gloria Steinem’s appearance on the Charlie Rose show immediately after the verdicts—where she recounted taking solace in an apology offered to her, and, presumably, all whites, by an elderly black man who assured her that “not all of us feel this way”—was disappointing. It showed a lack of appreciation for the trial’s complexity from a feminist who has heroically struggled for human rights. Steinem’s lapse was topped, however, by the pit bull meanness of NOW’s Los Angeles head, Tammy Bruce. She was later removed from office because of her relentlessly racist attacks on Simpson.

  Steinem’s and Bruce’s behavior underlines why it is difficult for even battered black women to imagine themselves as feminists. They played the dangerous game of ranking suffering without regard to context. They made their pain, and the greater pain of abused women, the almost exclusive focus of their fiery outrage. Domestic abuse is a legitimate and largely neglected plague. But what Steinem and Bruce overlooked was how race gives white women’s pain, and the bodies on which that pain is inflicted, more visibility than the suffering bodies of black women. There are thousands of black women who have gone to their graves at the hands of hateful men. Some of their deaths were more heinous than Nicole’s. (True, they didn’t have the dubious advantage of having a famous man charged with their murder.) But these women remain invisible. Even to folk like Steinem and Bruce, who are bravely committed to keeping the memory of abused women alive.

  No doubt some of this resentment of unspoken white privilege—of ranking black bodies lower on the totem pole of distress—slid onto the tongues of black women who claimed the Simpson case was not about domestic violence. Technically, that’s true. But neither was it, technically, about race. The important ways this case was about race are the same ways it was about domestic violence. And about the benefits and liabilities of class, wealth, fame, and gender. The disavowal of domestic abuse as an issue in the Simpson case by black women reinforces the tragic refusal of many blacks to face the crushing convergence of issues that shape black life. Their disavowal was not simply a way these women remained loyal to the script they’ve been handed—race first, race finally, race foremost. It was a telling example of how that script writes out their lives as well, often in their own handwriting. The dispute between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill showcased the futility of thinking about our problems in strictly racial terms.

  There is damning evidence too, that Nicole contributed t
o the brutality that broke her. And in all likelihood, killed her. I’m not arguing that Nicole should have simply left, got out at the first whiff of trouble. The destructive dance of complicity and shame, of cooperation and resistance, of instigation and retaliation, is too complex to blame victims for the brutal behavior of their abusers. And the psychology of identifying with one’s abuser is too well established to mock the difficulty of leaving. But Nicole was also obsessed with O.J. Her huge appetites for cash, cocaine, and convenience tied her to a destructive lifestyle that rivaled her relationship to Simpson.

  Equally tragic, Nicole’s suffering was partially aided by her family’s silence and inaction. Time and again Simpson hurled Nicole’s body across the room. He crashed her face with his fists, leaving telltale signs almost as large as his anger. Her family surely knew or suspected that there was big trouble between Nicole and O.J. The Browns’ not knowing is just as plausible as Simpson not having murdered Ron and Nicole. After Nicole’s death, her sister, Denise, insisted that Nicole wasn’t a battered woman. That’s an excusable lie if we admit that silence, secrecy, and shame choke domestic abuse victims and their families.