COLUMN ONE : Focus on Simpson Troubling for Blacks : Constant scrutiny has made him a lightning rod for thorny issues of race, class and privilege. African Americans find their loyalties are divided, and old wounds are reopened.

It is an unlikely setting for a salon.

In the electronics section of the Broadway department store in the Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills Plaza, a small group of African American men and women stand transfixed by a wall of murmuring televisions. More than two dozen images moving in unison display a larger-than-life O.J. Simpson.

Some comment on the white band of his stiff collar, the crisp lines of his dark suit, the sleek matinee-idol profile. The commentary is punctuated with “too bads” and “how sads”--each statement delivered in a tone that suggests they are viewing not a defendant but a corpse.

Beyond Simpson’s innocence or guilt, beyond expressions of sympathy or sadness for the bereaved, beyond the public obsession with the melodrama, for many African Americans the Simpson saga brings up a host of thorny, unresolved issues--about race, about class and about privilege. It opens old psychic wounds. The ubiquitous image of Simpson sitting silently in a courtroom is both a blow and a rebuke.

Although a recent Times poll and a USA Today survey show that African Americans are nearly twice as likely as whites to sympathize with Simpson, a subterranean dialogue is gaining steady momentum. At informal meeting places around the city and the country--from barber and beauty shops, to bus stops and cafes, to racquetball courts and sunny breakfast tables--another hearing of sorts is well under way.

Even before Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell’s decision Friday that Simpson should be tried for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, race had begun to emerge from the shadows. It was beginning to find shape and form near the center of discussion about the case, especially among African Americans. It moved from private conversations and radio talk shows into a more public sphere. And once the subject of race arrives, many believe, the specter of racism is sure to follow, finding its voice not in shouts but in whispers.

Some people call it the “hidden issue.” Some pointedly argue that it is not an issue at all. Still others believe it was from the beginning--and will always be--at the center of any high-profile event or small incident that involves a person of color.

But with Simpson it is more complicated than that.

“There are some people regardless of their color who hit such a celebrity status they transcend the issue of race,” said Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn, who teaches African American Studies at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “When you go above and beyond, that tends to diffuse the issue of race. . . . And the fact that he is so associated with the white world, he is not a threat. He is not one of them, but yet he is.”

Yet, as with so much of American culture, race is a lens that focuses or distorts the world in a particular way. And for many African Americans, the Simpson debate is seen through that very prism.

“People want him to be innocent,” said Michael Hughes, a West Los Angeles-based psychotherapist. “I think the way that wish manifests itself is different in white people than in black people. I think . . . it’s easy for white people to put race out of their minds. I don’t mean that nastily, but I don’t think any of us want to be burdened. But I don’t think that a black person doesn’t wake up any day and not reckon with being black. I don’t think white people share that same concern at the same degree.”

Even black people who were not especially fond of Simpson have empathized with his plight. Kathy, 39, who asked that her last name not be used, says that, from the beginning, she believed it was going to be “a race thing.”

“Since watching the case I really feel sorry for him,” she said, spoon-feeding her niece a chocolate sundae at the Crenshaw mall. “I blame the media. It’s a conspiracy to keep black people down. First it was Clarence Thomas. Then Mike Tyson. Michael Jackson. Rodney King.”

Simpson’s “hero” status, his place as an icon, especially among African Americans, adds another dimension to the debate. But as the weeks pass, Simpson becomes less a hero and more a symbol. A catalyst. A scapegoat, a lightning rod.

“I’m a writer and a member of the media. I take this in stride,” said Ellis Cose, a contributing editor at Newsweek and author of “The Rage of a Privileged Class.”

“But it’s different on the street: ‘Jesus, why are they going after this black man? . . . That’s what happens when a black man tries to be white,’ ” Cose said. “I’m also hearing a lot of people saying that it sort of serves him right for turning his back on the community.”

Cose sees it as an intriguingly complex case of schizophrenia. “There are a lot of (black) people who don’t identify with him, they think he abandoned the community. But they are invested in his well-being somehow. If O.J. is guilty, then somehow they are.

“It is,” Cose said, “part of the cross that minorities bear. And it goes back to that sense of being on probation in America. It either expiates you or deepens your misery.”

Nonetheless, Cose feels that the Simpson case, on its face, has very little to do with race. But it plays a large part in the way many African Americans are reacting to the media coverage.

Early on, many reactions--from unconditional support to condemnation--weren’t based so much on a particular transgression--but on what many thought might lie around the corner. Vivid memories and cautionary tales--like that of Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman--are slow to recede; they fuel suspicion, spur dialogue. When Time magazine darkened the image of Simpson on its June 27 cover, the proverbial smoking gun surfaced.

Media have attempted to tip-toe around the race issue, Cose said, for a couple of reasons. “We’ve spent 40 years dealing with race, and people want to get it off the table. . . . (People) tend to be very polite and very nervous about race. And very correct. The first inclination of the responsible media is to play it as straight as they can, bend over backward to make race not a factor. The irony is,” Cose said, “that it is coming through the back door.”

Many African Americans tend to see the Simpson panorama--from media and law enforcement to something as quietly powerful as the loaded language of the public discourse--a shade differently. Diligently scanning for the subliminal messages, early on they saw the harbingers of worse things to come.

“My buttons were pushed when O.J. was handcuffed initially, not as (a) suspect but a person who may be able to provide information,” said Westwood-based attorney George L. Mallory Jr. “I don’t want to suggest that this is all racial, but having served as a prosecutor, I realized that at that stage, O.J. was not a suspect. It wasn’t appropriate to put on the handcuffs . . . he was going to speak to police, he was not combative. The handcuffs illustrated at an early stage that the LAPD were inappropriately exercising their discretion.”

Ralph Wiley, a former sports journalist and author of the book “What Black People Should Do Now,” says it’s what didn’t happen in those early days that gave him pause.

“What I first noticed was that I saw an African American man be treated as a man in the American justice system. I thought I was living in an alternate universe,” Wiley said. “I’ve never seen the police take the handcuffs off a black murder suspect. To see that. In some ways O.J. is a paradigm. I wish the American justice system would treat everyone the way that they treated O.J.”

Opinions became more vocal as media coverage picked up steam: the omnipresent mug shot, the nonstop footage of O.J. Simpson at the pinnacle (Nicole Brown Simpson smiling in the background), now juxtaposed against the duly subdued and somber man in cuffs. For some, the haunting parade of unsettling images revived dormant ghosts and opened old wounds.

“Every time we have a black man with power the system along with the media has to take them down,” said Ronald Mathis, modeling one of his wares--a black T-shirt emblazoned with a visage of Simpson in his glory days--and the message: “Save O.J. We Believe in You.” Mathis is staked out at the corner of Temple and Spring Downtown selling T-shirts ($10) and caps ($5) at a brisk clip. “They’re just blowing it all out of proportion. Just want to take a black man down,” he said.

Others feel it is a bit more complex than that. “The Time and Newsweek covers did it for me,” said Muhammad Nassardeen, founder of the Inglewood-based Recycling Black Dollars community improvement organization.

“I understand marketing and I understand imagery, so when those hit the newsstand, I thought: ‘Wow, they are really playing games.’ And ‘A Trail of Blood,’ it was a horrible caption,” said Nassardeen of Newsweek’s June 27 cover. “I thought it was just as bad as the Time cover, but (that one) had a sensitive caption: ‘An American Tragedy.’ Just think if you were a white person and the only black person that you saw was with a broom or was a caddy, and now this. That was about fear. They think: ‘Wow, we should be afraid of them.’ ”

Nassardeen, however, says he wants to be careful about choosing the cause, lest the import of the message be lessened. “We need balance in the portrait of the African American. I don’t want to be running around screaming, carrying the racism flag, anytime that an African American does anything that hurts us,” he said. “We can not allow ourselves to be tied with Darryl Strawberry’s drugs, or O.J.’s problems. We can’t become victims of a myopic view. We have to step back and look at the big picture.”

He echoes Cose’s observation about African Americans feeling as if they are on probation, viewed as a group rather than as individuals. For many, the stakes feel, and are, high. And sometimes the most intense pressure comes from within the ranks. “I’m really saddened by it as a person who’s basically committed to African and African American images,” said Nassardeen. “This, this is a major blow.”

Patricia A. Turner, a professor of African American Studies at UC Davis, tells a story that many African Americans would find familiar. “When I was a little girl a series of murders were committed in our town. . . . I remember my parents hoping and praying the killer wasn’t black,” Turner recalled. “This was in the early days of the civil rights movement. . . . We didn’t want anything to happen that would set Martin Luther King back.

“This is something that I don’t think many white people understand,” Turner said. “Like the murder of Polly Klaas wasn’t looked at as a blow against the white race. But the faults of one of us are viewed as blows against all of us.”

As with many minority groups, shrugging off those reflexive responses requires peeling off layers of expectations and warnings passed down through generations. And as Florida-based clinical psychologist Na’im Akbar notes, the more public the figure, the more prevalent the tendency to reach out and protect the fall.

“We are very protective of our celebrities,” Akbar said. “We are protective of anyone who gains visibility . . . and the reason being that there are so few of us who do. When they do gain prominence, it is usually for some negative reason,” he said.

When a high-profile individual takes a tumble, the reverberations are particularly intense within black circles: “When they become tainted in some way, then their shortcomings become equated with the whole black community,” Akbar said. “And as long as the person is a black hero when they are tainted, their taint is a direct consequence of them being African American.”

But it is Simpson’s complicated public persona that make unconditional allegiances complex: His second wife and a string of white girlfriends, golf games at the country club, the symbols of landed (read: white) gentry.

That has made fully embracing Simpson difficult for some African Americans. Even the terms “transcendence” and “colorlessness” have been used by supporters and detractors alike. A transcendence that raised his profile and rallied support from all hues; yet a colorlessness that made some African Americans wonder of late, aloud, if he “forgot where he came from.”

“I think O.J. was universally accepted,” said attorney Mallory. “O.J. had really, at least in his mind--and probably in the mind of others--in some sense transcended race, and I think that in some part because O.J. was never really viewed as an individual intricately involved in the black community. Therefore, blacks and whites somehow became more tolerant of O.J.’s lifestyle--which was non-threatening to either ethnic group,” Mallory said. “I think the commercials more than anything else brought him into mainstream America. And his image somewhat endeared him to the hearts of Middle America because of his non-threatening style.”

Treading a line between two worlds upped the psychological ante, said Person-Lynn of Cal State Dominguez Hills. “O.J. Simpson has been, and has not been part of the African American psyche, so to speak. And so we’ve embraced him as our own. As an African American man, we don’t want to see him abused; we will close ranks.” But he added, careful not to shroud the crucial particulars of the case, “we want to see him . . . treated fairly, if he is innocent. If he is guilty . . . we want to see him punished.”

But Ralph Wiley views it through a slightly different prism--beyond race.

“The hero worshipers feel betrayed,” Wiley said. “ ‘Juice’ became what people expected him to be. That’s what causes these things, this abuse of power, corruption of power.”

Power and class , said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.

“To some degree Simpson’s celebrity status placed him above. He ran across our TV screen for years playing football, then ran across our TV screens in the car rental commercials. His celebrity status allowed him to be viewed as a celebrity--who happened to be black.

“I don’t think that race has anything to do with this,” Hicks said, “except among some peripheral people around some communities. I think it’s a discussion trying to seep its way out of this talk show circuit, suck out some bigger issues. The longer (the case) goes, it gives people time for their minds to sink back into different modes and issues, to develop some sort of racial posture, so that the races both black and white can snipe at each other.”

To Hicks, class speaks louder than race in this instance. “It points up the degree to which money can buy you some justice in America. He has the ability and the money to hire himself a battery of defense attorneys that a normal person couldn’t even dream of. Justice is clearly a class issue--this is not about a black man married to a white woman. I certainly don’t see this.”

The discussion of race also obscures another issue central to the debate--domestic abuse.

Five years ago, Simpson pleaded no contest to charges of spousal battery. “In ’89 was when we should have helped the brother out,” said Gary Phillips, a local writer and activist. “Here was a man who by his own admission beat his wife.”

You cannot divorce the issue of race, Phillips said, “but there is another reality there too. It really raises this debate around men. Do we start to deal with this whole question of wife beating? Do we as men confront that? Call your friends on something that they might be doing.”

But even a youngster who raised the question of domestic abuse saw at the core an issue of disparity and unequal treatment.

“I think it just isn’t fair,” said Brandy, 11, taking a break from shopping with her mother at the Crenshaw mall. “It isn’t fair because it’s happening here all the time--women getting beaten, killed. But when it happens over in that area,” she said, gesturing toward a vague expanse, “then they do something about it.”

And that issue most ruffles Kimberle Crenshaw.

“I’m sorry I don’t think that that many people were that invested in O.J., and therein lies the rub for me,” said Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor. “My own set of concerns goes along the gender lines--to circle the wagons around gender. But you don’t see a similar kind of concern when it comes to black women.”

The black community was lukewarm when it came to Lani Guinier and Anita Hill, she says. “And we’re about to have the most Draconian welfare reforms which (will affect) black women, and I don’t see a lot of people rallying around to support those women. Though a lot of us were raised by single black women.”

Crenshaw wants to push people to examine other hidden issues tangential to race, but intraracial in nature.

But airing issues that suggest disharmony in the black community, especially those of gender equity, often gets viewed as diluting the cause, breaking ranks or airing dirty laundry.

“I wouldn’t mind if we had a washing machine inside” and cleaned up the problems, Crenshaw said. “It’s just that I don’t like sleeping on dirty sheets.”