More Than Just Black and White

What an irony it has been that the vast brown city of Los Angeles has played host to the last great black-white conversation in America.

The arrest and subsequent trials of O.J. Simpson encouraged many observers to describe an America divided by race. Didn’t most blacks, after all, assume Simpson’s innocence, whereas whites assumed guilt? One heard it again and again for more than two years--the assumption that the nation exists in two shades only.

All my life, I have heard it. The notion there are only two races and they (like night and day) represent opposite poles--this idea has been as common among liberals as among the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan. In the late 1960s, I remember the Kerner Commission warning the nation was dividing, becoming two nations, one black, the other white.

So persistent has this black-white dialectic been, I often meet young African Americans who conclude they constitute half the population of the United States. And why not? During the first Simpson trial, week after week on NBC, the multidimpled and white Stone Phillips would announce, on “Dateline,” the latest black-white survey. Phillips never bothered to say what Chinese Americans or Mohicans or Arab Americans thought of Simpson.

And wasn’t it interesting that most commentators on the first Simpson trial described that jury as “mostly black,” while the second jury was described as “mostly white.” The implication, in either case, was that any Latino or Asian juror was irrelevant to the way we thought about the bodies at hand.

To be brown is irrelevant on the black-white checkerboard. The color brown is irrelevant to African Americans who remember well a racist logic in this country that judged them as “black” regardless of any racial mix in their blood. The “one-drop theory” it was called. “I am black because that is the way white America sees me,” one light-skinned young man recently told me.

The fixation black Americans have with the way they are perceived by white America, this fixation may be understandable enough, given the long history of racism. But it threatens African Americans today with provincialism, at a time when they are finding themselves a declining population in cities that are no longer white but Latino and Asian.

White America is flattered by the black-white dialectic. If black resentment forces whites to be responsible for sins of generations past, black obsession with white racism also places whites at the center of the racial paradigm.

Some of the most important racial relationships in Los Angeles today--Latino and African American, Asian American and Latino--have nothing to do with whites. Yet, from across the country, from New York and Washington, one hears of “black and white dialogues,” pompous theatricals like the recent confrontation between a black playwright and a white theater critic. Their dialogue on race relations was covered by TV, newspapers and magazines as though the fate of the nation hung in the balance.

Listen to African Americans talk about the Simpson trials and you will hear them speak of the ways in which blacks have been betrayed, often brutalized, by our criminal-justice system. Bitter memories extend back not just decades but centuries. This, of course, is what Johnnie Cochran Jr. knew. And Mark Fuhrman proved that African American grievances are not at all baseless today.

As a brown man, albeit middle class, I have learned to make an uneasy peace with passing police cars. In my yuppie neighborhood of San Francisco, for example, whenever I tried jogging before dawn, I would invariably be stopped by the police. The last time it happened, I was stopped by two officers, one of whom held a billy club at the ready while her partner demanded I produce some form of identification from my jogging shorts. The two police officers were black women.

We live in complicated times, more complicated than any black-white description of our nation might suggest. From prison, a Latino friend wrote to me after the first Simpson verdict. My friend will freely admit that he does not like blacks. And yet, he said, when the verdict--NOT GUILTY--was announced, he and everyone cheered in their cells: the African American inmates, but also white separatists, Latinos and Asians.

It is not only the black inmate, after all, who resents the criminal-justice system. Any police conspiracy against Simpson would have to contend with the fact that at least one member of the coroner’s office is Chinese and at least two judges are Japanese Americans, and who knows how many Latinos and blacks are members of the Police Department?

Europe’s ruthless sin against Africa was slavery, the relegation of human beings to chattel. But the white fear of Africa is not black revenge but lust: Whites feared the black man wanted the white woman. The “Othello factor,” a black friend of mine, a fireman, calls it. He insists, “Say what you will, O.J.’s trial was ultimately about a black man and a blond woman.”

Who can dispute him? Had Nicole Brown not been white--and beautiful--the trial of her ex-husband would not have excited so much attention. But it is also true that Simpson is more Fatty Arbuckle than he is a modern Othello. He is a celebrity.

Here is a profoundly uninteresting man who turned a brilliant football career into a smile. He became a very minor film star who ended up selling Hertz cars and appearing as one of the guys in “Monday Night Football.”

I’d seen him at swank hotels in New York or expensive restaurants in Beverly Hills. Always he was with a beautiful blonde who looked like she’d never heard of Desdemona.

How different he seems now, his face puffy, his mouth frozen in a meaningless half smile. Simpson climbs the several steps to the Santa Monica court house holding the railing, his shoulders hunched, his legs arthritic. Clearly, he realizes that the cheering has stopped.

He interests us now because he is a fallen celebrity, someone we thought we knew. It is because we are uninteresting people ourselves, grown bored with our lives, that we spend so much time watching his trials, considering his guilt or innocence, listening to the talk shows, reading the ghost-written books about the trial, listening to the jurors.

The two trials of a celebrity created new celebrities. Such is its allure: Stick around someone who’s famous and in the end you, too, will be famous.

We end up after two Simpson trials knowing people like Faye Resnick and Al Cowlings, Paula Barbieri, Marcia Clark, Alan M. Dershowitz. And those forgettable jurors with agents, peddling their books or exclusive interviews.

One sensed last week, after the second verdict, a depleted interest in the saga. Both blacks and whites were interviewed on TV--only blacks and whites--and they said they wanted to get on with it, to move on. After all, as a black and white parable, the trials of O.J. Simpson taught us as much about our real lives as a minstrel show.

There remain the two children of Simpson and Nicole Brown. What a terrible future awaits them if they are doomed to live in a black-white America. Their hope is Los Angeles, this Latin American capital. The rate of miscegenation in L.A. among all races--Latino, black, white, Asian--is five times the national average. One hopes, one prays, that the two Simpson children will find a true home in the great brown city.