*
You must remember, beloved, that this was a year after O.J. Simpson had been acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Race relations between black and white folk were tense. The Simpson acquittal was a “racequake” that revealed the fault lines that stretched beneath our national life. O.J.’s trial came on the heels of a tragic acquittal of four white policemen in 1992 for the savage beating in 1991 of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King. Black folk felt that they couldn’t get a fair hearing in America’s courts even when there was visual evidence of lethal whiteness. This may be read as an instance of dueling judgments: the not guilty Simpson verdict answered the not guilty verdict for the white officers. But the stakes were even higher. The King verdict, as it is known—funny how it is called that when it was the white cops being tried, suggesting that blackness is always on trial, always the object of dispute—was answered by a violent urban rebellion. More than 11,000 people were arrested, more than 2,000 were injured, and 55 people died.
The King and Simpson verdicts left America emotionally raw and at a brutal racial impasse. White folk got a rare chance to experience the sense of absurdity that black folk routinely feel when a clear case of injustice doesn’t get resolved in court. Many of you were outraged and shocked that Simpson could get away with murder. A lot of you were miffed, even heartbroken, that black folk cheered Simpson’s acquittal like it was Christmas in October. But you must see that the bitter taste left in your mouths was but a small taste of what black folk have swallowed from our first moments in this nation.
Maybe enough time has passed for us to admit that the Simpson verdict made liars of white and black folk alike.
But the lie began long before the Simpson trial. It has roots in whiteness itself, in whiteness that is a construct, an invention, that keeps white folk ignorant of black life. It makes so many of you, if we’re honest, largely indifferent to black life. Admit it: you go on your merry white way as if the police aren’t routinely hammering black folk without cause, aren’t daily brutalizing us in front of your faces, aren’t murdering black folk without so much as blinking an eye. You didn’t care then. And tell the truth—many of you don’t really care now.
Beloved, it’s true that some of you are ashamed and embarrassed, but that is hardly enough. It looks bad to the rest of the world for all this havoc to be going on in America. It’s not that the world loves us so much; it’s that they feel you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for treating us this way. Now, I’m old enough to not be too fussy about how change comes about. What starts as shame may end as transformation. But even that can’t be depended on. Whiteness grows more shameless, more cruel, more uncaring by the day. How many of you have really tried to put yourself in our position? It’s hard to be white and empathetic to others. That sounds harsh, but that’s a lesson that whiteness has taught its victims. Many of you were stuck, in 1995, and, sadly, even now, in a whiteness that didn’t have to know, that wasn’t punished for not knowing. It is hard for you to give up this willful ignorance. It is a drug. It is privilege and addiction. Your whiteness is a shield that keeps you from knowing what black folk must always know. Not until the Simpson verdict did many of you claim that you were finally awakened to what black folk had to know every day. But if so, you went back to sleep pretty damn quickly.
The Simpson verdict made black folk lie too. I’m not just telling you this now, my friends. I said it then to O.J.’s impossibly beautiful lawyer Johnnie Cochran. I know a lot of you hated him because he beat you at your own game. He sold his vision of history as the one that made the most sense to the group of people, his group of people, on that jury, whose decision, for once, mattered most. That’s usually how whiteness operates in a nutshell. But this time, for a glancing moment, whiteness got coopted by a devilishly handsome chocolate barrister whose smooth words and hypnotic cadence left the jury and nation spellbound. I gave Cochran my full two cents when I ran into him after a weird and distressing phone call.
“Hello,” I said as I took the phone from my wife.
“Should I call you reverend, or professor, or Dr. Dyson?” the familiar voice asked me. I nearly swallowed my spit. It was O.J.
I had just appeared that morning with infamous O.J. hater Geraldo Rivera on a national television show observing the fifth anniversary of the murders of Nicole and Ron. I had minced no words. I said that before the verdict there had been nothing black on Simpson but the bottom of his shoes. I also said that when O.J. took that long, slow ride down the L.A. freeway in A.C. Cowlings’ iconic Bronco it wasn’t the first time he used a white vehicle to escape a black reality. My words bit me in the butt that evening.
“You can call me Mike,” I said in a voice that was an octave or two higher than my normal baritone register. Okay, the truth is I sounded like Mickey Mouse. O.J. had me scared and nearly speechless. My wife was in tears laughing at me.
“Speak like the courageous critic you’re supposed to be,” she teased me.
I gave her the “cut it out” gesture with my free hand slicing the air around my throat. She only laughed harder. It tickled her that I was squirming.
“I just want to clarify some things for you, Mr. Dyson,” Simpson continued.
Simpson proceeded to relitigate the case. On and on he went for nearly 45 minutes. He even offered to come to my class at Columbia University and present his side of things. That made me especially nervous. He had one more thing to tell me.
“Geraldo said I only date blondes,” O.J. said to me. “That’s not true.”
There was a beat. After the pause came his follow-up. It was vintage Simpson.
“I date redheads, brunettes, all types of women.”
I didn’t have the heart, really the courage, to say to him that wasn’t Rivera’s point. I didn’t say to him that blonde hair was a synecdoche for the string of white women he dated, one of whom he married.
“Thank you for calling, Mr. Simpson,” I said, hanging up the phone in shock, even as my wife’s guffaws drowned out my thoughts.
A few days later I saw Johnnie Cochran.
“Hey man, why in the hell did you give O.J. my number?” I asked in only half-feigned outrage. I knew that Johnnie was the only way his most famous client got those digits.
“Professor, he just wanted to speak to you,” Cochran said as he flashed that million-dollar smile of his.
“He had me shook,” I told Johnnie, lapsing into black vernacular. “I know he kill white people, but do he kill black people too? I know you his lawyer, and you can’t say nothing, man, but you know he killed them people.”