COLUMN ONE : Separating Black and White : The gulf in the way people of different races view the same event can create flash points over everyday issues as well as the nation’s handling of big problems such as crime and drugs.

As the O.J. Simpson case has dramatically illustrated, vast differences exist between the way black and white Americans view everyday reality.

Many whites have expressed surprise and bafflement over opinion polls showing a majority of African Americans sympathetic to Simpson and highly skeptical of the evidence against him while the same polls suggest most whites see things the other way around.

However, such findings come as no surprise to many blacks and to numerous social critics, political scientists and other experts who study black American attitudes. They say a similar gulf splits blacks and whites as they interpret other facets of society. Such polarized views of reality inhibit the nation from effectively dealing with health care, crime, drugs, welfare, gang violence, out-of-wedlock births and a host of debilitating social problems.

Many blacks are so instinctively mistrustful of white society that some automatically reject any idea or judgment whose origins are not easily traced to the black community. Some whites find black suspicions so extreme and far-fetched from their own mainstream views they make no effort to understand the differences.

“Blacks and whites are more politically estranged from each other than they have been in the last 20 to 30 years--since the era of the civil rights movement,” said Melvin Oliver, a sociologist at UCLA’s Urban Poverty Center.

In the late 1960s, many black and white Americans worked together to shatter Jim Crow segregation, creating a sense of hope that the future would be less racially tense, Oliver says. Now, a generation later, as vestiges of racism continue to seep into private and public attitudes, members of both groups have less contact with each other because they don’t wish to risk potentially painful interactions.

Oliver theorizes that some blacks, especially the poor and working class, perceive Congress, courts and media efforts to grapple with social and political issues as conspiratorial attacks against black people. Most white Americans see nothing of the sort.

The consequence is that blacks and whites, as Oliver puts it, “live in the same world, seeing the same set of facts, but are interpreting them in parallel realities.”

While some people of all races try to bridge this gap, many whites and minorities are so far apart in their basic perceptions of the problems that seeking common action against them is almost impossible.

For Gloria Williams, a suburban Washington paralegal who is African American, the woes of black people stem from the coordinated racism of white men. “To some degree, there is a conspiracy to keep the black man down,” she said. “White men view the black man collectively as a threat. They avoid hiring them and as a result it hurts black male-female relationships.”

But Peter Davis, a writer and filmmaker who is white, disagrees. “I’d say the opposite is true,” said Davis, a Los Angeles native who lives in Castine, Me. “There is a belated effort . . . to recruit qualified black people into responsible positions in professional jobs.”

Some blacks reject the idea that conspiracies are at the root of problems facing African Americans. Suzanne Lynn, a New York attorney who is black, calls such views “extremist.”

Beyond the anecdotal, opinion surveys exhibit striking race-based disparities on a variety of policy issues. For example, a 1992 Washington Post poll reported that 71% of blacks surveyed nationwide felt they were not achieving equality as fast as they could because whites did not want them to get ahead, but only 35% of whites agreed that racism held blacks back.

Similarly, a poll conducted last year by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank, found that less than half of the black respondents favored setting two-year limits on welfare benefits without the guarantee of a job when the cutoffs take effect, a proposal that garnered support from more than two-thirds of whites. The finding is all the more striking because blacks and whites make up almost identical shares of the average monthly caseload of welfare recipients.

And, earlier this year, a Times Mirror poll found that 58% of whites believed universal coverage should be the top priority for health care reform, while nearly three-quarters of non-whites agreed.

In the Simpson case, a recent Los Angeles Times poll found that 70% of blacks were “very” or “somewhat” sympathetic toward Simpson, compared to 38% of whites.

As in the Simpson case, the exposure of black celebrities to seemingly harsh treatment by the courts and media focuses black outrage on white institutions.

In interview after interview with The Times, black Americans cited the unproven accusations of child molestation against singer Michael Jackson, the rape conviction of former boxing champion Mike Tyson, the stiff jail sentence given to former Washington Mayor Marion Barry for smoking crack and the Senate hearings into alleged sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas to support their belief that the nation’s white power elites act in concert to maintain white supremacy.

“The white Establishment, which includes big business, the government, the media and all the (white) people who run this country, are hellbent” on eliminating highly visible and successful black men, said Brenda Evans, a 46-year-old marketing and promotions manager in New York City.

“I know people will think I’m crazy, but I think they’re crazy not to see it as I do,” she said. “If they’re not crazy, then they are naive, limited and not exposed to the same reality I’m exposed to.”

David Bositis, who studies black political and social trends at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says African Americans who deeply distrust white institutions are not living in a fantasy world. He says some of their distrust is “justified and healthy” because African Americans experience racism that whites refuse to acknowledge exists.

“Middle-aged white men, who have a disproportionate share of the power and influence in our society, believe that whatever they experience is reality and anything else is not reality,” said Bositis, who is white and middle-aged. “They don’t experience racism, so they say it doesn’t exist. They are not seeing the same reality as the black person who knows racism is real, so it’s logical for blacks to have this distrust.”

Steven Hawkins, a criminal litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, agrees, adding that African Americans have a long history of being victimized by the police and courts that explains their caution in accepting those institutions as legitimate authorities.

While things have improved, Hawkins says, many African Americans still have reason to view the judiciary as a vehicle for maintaining the status quo of white dominance over black people.

“There is a widespread notion among (African Americans) that the (criminal justice) system is unfair and needs to be challenged or at the least looked at with a skeptical eye,” Hawkins said. “This need to challenge the system at every turn, especially when a black man is on trial, comes in contrast to the white society which has greater trust in the system because it works, by and large, in its favor.”

It often comes without regard to the specifics of the legal issue in question.

“There is a sensibility in some quarters of the black community that we are under siege in so many ways that we can’t understand or articulate,” said Kimberly Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA. “Enough black people believe there is enough animus and ill will directed toward us in employment, in health care institutions, in housing and especially in the criminal justice system, that they believe nothing is beyond the pale.

“So when they see a black man standing in handcuffs or being hauled before a court,” she added, “they are ready to believe that brother is innocent without even hearing the charges against him.”

Similar feelings of estrangement are directed at the media.

“Black people don’t trust the white media,” said Mary Helen Washington, a professor of African American literature at the University of Maryland. “The mass media is important because it makes (America) a small community where everyone, black or white, sees the same things. But for black people there is a huge blanket of humiliation that the media spreads over our lives, so we just don’t believe what it says about us.”

Rather, she says, “blacks just don’t buy the reality that’s sold to us by whites. If some of those institutions were headed by people we trusted I don’t think we’d be in this spot.”

Often when African Americans are in positions of power, some black people doubt their legitimacy. “That’s the paradox of desegregation,” said Manning Marable, professor of history and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

Many black people perceive black leaders in traditionally white institutions as “black faces in high places” who have to serve white interests to maintain their status, Marable said.

Marable believes the answer for the conundrum lies in the distant future when white America senses its well-being is threatened by prolonged neglect of black views toward society and shares political and economic power with people respected by the broader black community.

“Nobody gives a damn right now about the national concerns of African Americans,” he said. “Take the Los Angeles riots. It was a terrible, costly example of what is wrong with the society, but no public policy has been put forth to address the underlying problems. The problem hasn’t gone away; it’s gone underground.”

Sonia Jarvis, executive director of the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, a Washington-based voting rights organization, says black attitudes concerning legislation aimed at social problems often reflect a deep despair or resignation that white institutions will not deal fairly with blacks.

For example, she said some are reluctant to support the Administration’s efforts to pass crime legislation that proposes spending $30 billion in federal money on prison construction, law enforcement and social programs targeted to crime prevention. Many fear the money will not help prevent crime in their communities and is more likely to be spent to enable police to lock up more black men, she said.

Jarvis said her research also shows that many African Americans suspect the reason the White House has waffled on its policies aimed at restoring democracy to Haiti is out of fear of having an influx of black people entering the nation.

“We hear people saying all the time, ‘Just compare what happened when boatloads of white Cubans came over with what happened when the Haitians came,’ ” Jarvis said, adding that many African Americans believe fair-skinned Cubans are more accepted and politically aligned with conservative whites than with darker peoples in America.

“When you look at it that way it seems reasonable for (African Americans) to conclude (whites) don’t want the Haitians because they are black,” Jarvis said.

Patricia A. Turner, author of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture,” says comments such as the ones Jarvis reports take on credibility among African Americans estranged from the white mainstream.

Rumors, often broadcast over talk radio serving black audiences or in places where black people congregate like barber shops and beauty parlors tend to spread through black communities from coast to coast in times of perceived crisis to counteract the information contained in the white media.

“Rumors serve as a way of reconciling an event with (African Americans’) sense of black history,” said Turner, an associate professor of African American and African studies at UC Davis. “We know that conspiracies have occurred to the disadvantage of African Americans; we are often reluctant to believe that they can’t happen again.”

But Turner cautions that blacks aren’t the only group harboring distrust of the Establishment, noting that class and gender differences often compel whites to mistrust other, more privileged whites.

“If you were to have white-collar crime that places an affluent white corporate executive on trial, I’ll bet some Depression-era (white) person might have a different perception than someone born in the ‘70s,” she said. “Mistrust comes from differences in cultures and perspectives, not just from differences in color.”