Even without the pundits’ help, however, many observers were bound to fix on race. Simpson, after all, is black, and his alleged victims (let us not forget, there are two) are white. Those facts alone guaranteed that racial murmurs, even if muffled, would be widespread and relentless.
As is often the case in racial matters, views of whites and blacks diverge. Many blacks see Simpson’s problems as the latest instance of America bringing a proud black man down, or as a harbinger of a backlash against blacks in general. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of “The Assassination of the Black Male Image,” claims that “the entire race is made to pay when a visible black person does wrong.” Alison Taylor, a freelance writer in Los Angeles, makes the point more poignantly: “O.J. leaves us armed with nothing but our tears and sighs to make the case for the black man,” she laments.
To accept that proposition is to believe that even if Simpson, as a celebrity, could escape the confines of race, his race cannot escape the consequences of his sins. So among many of his fellow African-Americans, there is a desperate hope that he is innocent. It is not happenstance that 74 percent of black Angelenos told Los Angeles Times pollsters that they were very or somewhat sympathetic to Simpson, compared with only 38 percent of whites.
Many whites had invested other hopes in Simpson, and those who once pointed to his success as a tribute to their own colorblindness now see their faith in him as having been misplaced. He was widely seen as an affable, nonmenacing paragon of black manhood, and a reassuring example of an African-American accepted in the mainstream world. He once told a reporter that his “biggest accomplishment” was getting people to “look at me like a man first, not a black man.” But as the details of the double murder emerged, his complexion became increasingly germane.
Now Simpson’s efforts to minimize race are widely mocked. Sports Illustrated portrays him as a man who made himself so “self-effacing and eager to please that he was deemed unthreatening to whites.” Playthell Benjamin, a columnist for the New York Daily News, dismisses him as “what the old folks used to call a “white folks’ Negro’.” One of his country-club friends confides to a Washington Post reporter, “See, O. J. Simpson thought he was white. He acted white. . . . He married a white woman.”
That marriage has driven some blacks (especially women) to fury. “Why do so many successful black men have to marry white women?” they ask, sometimes adding, “If he had stayed with that black woman, he wouldn’t be in all this trouble.” Even blacks who don’t question Simpson’s taste in women wonder about his struggle to blend into the white world.
Sharon Collins, a University of Illinois sociologist, speculates that Simpson never really felt at ease as a race-neutral token. She compares him to black senior corporate executives she has studied – many of whom, like Simpson, in her view, “consciously shed . . . any remnants that would remind people” they were black. Several months ago, when I was researching a book on black middle-class discontent, Collins explained the toll that effort could take. “Think of how much a black person has to sell of himself to try to get race not to matter. . . . You have to ignore the insults. You have to ignore the natural loyalties. You have to ignore your past. In a sense, you have to just about deny yourself,” she had said.
The buzz around the Simpson case makes it clear that, despite his all-American image, he never really succeeded in making race irrelevant. Yet it is reductive to view his story as a simple parable of a man who tried to slip out of his place but was finally forced back in; a man who talked white, dressed white, married white (even played golf), but collapsed under the pressure of trying to carry it off.
If there is an obvious racial story in the Simpson case, it has less to do with the particulars of the tragedy (a sensational case of the all too common phenomenon of spousal abuse) than with what it reveals about our own stereotypes and anxieties – many of them unacknowledged – about violent black men, about interracial sex, about the price of admission to the mainstream world. It is folly to believe that Simpson’s life can be reduced to a simple racial equation. None of our lives is so one-dimensional. Unfortunately, that seems to be a lesson we are forever having to relearn.
