THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Stereotypes Leave a Subtle Mark on Case

Last weekend on KCET’s “Life and Times,” African American commentator Kerman Maddox said something surprising about the O.J. Simpson trial.

“One of the things I’ve noticed is that this trial is creating racial polarization of the city once again,” he said.

Most people I know think the exact opposite. These people, who tend to be professional or semiprofessional people like me, view it as a murder trial, more sensational than others, but still a murder trial. They see O.J. Simpson as a rich man who’d rather play golf and cards at the high-class Riviera Country Club than involve himself in African American community life. Because of that, they don’t think race has any part of this case.

I don’t agree with that. To me, the racial aspect, while not dominant in the case, is part of it.

Although Simpson wasn’t an African American activist, he was a black sports hero. He was arrested by a Police Department still regarded as an occupying army in Los Angeles’ African American neighborhoods. Then he was prosecuted by a district attorney’s office viewed with suspicion by many blacks.

But I didn’t see this case as polarizing. So I called Maddox, an old friend, and asked him what he’d meant. It turned out he wasn’t talking about the racial polarization we remember from the Rodney G. King trial and the riots. What Maddox had in mind was something much more complex.

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Of all the subjects I write about, race is the most difficult. The Latino, Asian American, African American and other cultures with which I deal are outside my personal experience. Although I understand the broad outlines, I miss the subtleties.

Maddox brought up a subtlety that has escaped the attention of many white commentators on the Simpson case. It was the trial’s impact on the image of African American men.

Would the lurid testimony about Simpson bolster the racial stereotypes held by taxi drivers who refuse to pick up African American men? Would it add to the fear of women who become nervous and clutch their purses when they find themselves alone in an elevator with an unknown black man?

“There are a lot of people who think we (black men) have this rage inside of us that is going to explode at any moment,” Maddox said, “that black men are full of rage and anger and the question is when are they going to explode.”

The Simpson case, he said, has reinforced these feelings among whites inclined toward bigotry. “That is something that black men go through. We talk about it. That is what we see in white people when they talk to us.”

I had a similar conversation a few days earlier with Earl Ofari Hutchinson of Los Angeles, a sociologist and author of “The Assassination of the Black Male Image.”

“Racial stereotyping is a key because of history,” he said. “Black men have been targeted because of these stereotypes-- derelicts in society, rapists in society. . . . There is a mind-set. It is deep. It is embedded. When you see black men, you see them as stereotypes.”

By chance, I had read much the same thing in an interview in Ebony magazine with Walter Payton who, like Simpson, was a Hall of Fame National Football League running back.

Ebony asked Payton how the Simpson case affected him personally. “I think it has affected me from within,” he said. “(Football players) are always apprehensive about the way people perceive them, especially when there’s the association of football and being a black man. You wonder if people are looking at you and wondering, ‘When is he going to snap?’ I get the feeling that some people look at us as if we’re time bombs just waiting to explode.”

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This is on point with the current phase of the trial. Beginning Tuesday, the D.A.’s office launched an effort to demolish the good guy image Simpson has cultivated since he put on the cardinal and gold USC football uniform many years ago. In its place, they will substitute another O.J., a sexually promiscuous wife beater who exploded in rage when he could no longer control his former wife.

Thus, the prosecution tossed a late-afternoon bombshell when Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher Darden was questioning John Edwards, the Los Angeles police officer sent to Simpson’s Brentwood mansion when Nicole Simpson reported she was being beaten.

Edwards testified that Nicole told him that, shortly before she was beaten up, O.J. had sex with a woman, a personal secretary, who was living in the home.

It was just the kind of image-breaking testimony that Kerman Maddox, Earl Hutchinson and Walter Payton have feared.