PERSPECTIVE ON THE SIMPSON CASE : The Race Card, From Bottom of Deck : Cochran calling the press biased is an exercise in black racism. But now journalists know how cops feel being labeled.

So how do you like it, you members of the Fourth Estate? You are now lumped in with LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman and all of his fellow “conspirators” who have aided and abetted in the injustice being done to O.J. Simpson.

Johnnie Cochran, leader of the Simpson defense team, according to many accounts told a meeting of the National Assn. of Black Journalists last Saturday that there is only one explanation for your biased presentation of the case against his client: that O.J. Simpson is black and the victims are white. There it is. Unvarnished. Simply put, you are racists.

Of course, the allegation of your racism is based on what lawyers call “information and belief.” In the Simpson case, that means no information but a lot of belief. Cochran’s belief has an ugly stepfather. Let’s not sugarcoat it: It’s called black racism.

After three decades of laboring to reduce white racism in America to the point where grown-up professionals fastidiously refer to an “n-word” rather than use the ugly epithet (like preschoolers saying “doo-doo”), we have wakened to discover that black racism has proliferated to the point where most black Americans believe that Simpson is innocent, and most whites believe that he is guilty. This is not a gap in perception--this is a chasm.

How fearful are white Americans of this thing that we dare not speak its name? Plenty fearful. Look what happened after the 1992 riots when black racism reacted to perceived or real white racism. All three presidential candidates promised to retry the cops until the jury got it right! This, even though critics of law enforcement, such as the ACLU national board, admitted that no matter how one felt about the verdict, a second trial under another name was clearly double jeopardy.

There is one crucial fact in the O.J. Simpson case that mirrors the Rodney King case: Neither crime had anything to do with racism. Given the dynamics of the King matter, any cop who is being honest will admit that after a long and dangerous pursuit by cops leaking adrenaline from fear and anger, the driver would be well-advised not to resist. Had the drunken, combative driver of that car been Robert Shapiro of Beverly Hills, there is no doubt in my mind that a supervisor with the peculiar, self-righteous personality of Sgt. Stacey Koon would have directed the same baton blows in an identical fashion. The verdict would have been the same, but L.A. would have remained intact.

The bottom line is this: Although the crimes perpetrated in the King and Simpson cases had nothing to do with racism, the aftermath of those events has everything to do with racism. Johnnie Cochran has not only played the race card, he’s dealt it from the bottom of the deck.

Cops have been players in this kind of rigged game for a long time, but their outrage has never counted for much. Now that our friends in the media have been dealt the same hand, I wonder how they like it.