Cochran just laughed.
I didn’t take any surveys, but I believed that most black folk knew deep in our hearts that O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole and Ron. There’s more evidence against O.J. than there is for the existence of God. It’s not that Marcia Clark and her team didn’t do their due diligence. O.J.’s accusers and prosecutors lost before they stepped into the court. The hurts and traumas against black folk had piled so high, the pain had resonated so deeply, and the refusal of whiteness to open its eyes had become so abhorrent that black folk sent a message to white America. No amount of evidence against Simpson could possibly match the far greater evidence of racial injustice against black folk. And you can’t claim ignorance here, my friends. If a videotape recording of a black man going down under the withering attack of four white police couldn’t convince you of the evil of your system, then nothing could.
The celebration of the not guilty verdict was a big “fuck you” from black America. It was the politest way possible to send a message you had repeatedly, tragically, willfully ignored: things are not okay in the racial heartland. Black folk weren’t necessarily aware that they were doing this. Here blackness operated like whiteness does. The black perception of what was convincing, or not, was shaped by jurors’ experiences. It was molded by the black community’s heartbreak. It seemed to black folk that the only way to combat white privilege was with the exercise of a little black privilege.
And even though the egregious errors of the criminal justice system existed long before Simpson, the constant refusal ever since to even charge most white police in the killing of unarmed black motorists is a kind of collective payback for O.J.
Can’t you see, my friends, that whiteness is determined to get the last word? That it is determined once again to make its unspoken allegiances and silent privilege the basis of justice in America? Don’t you see it’s your way or no way at all? Please don’t pretend you don’t understand us. You didn’t get mad when all of those white folk who killed black folk got away with murder in the sixties. Byron De La Beckwith bragged for years about killing Medgar Evers in 1963. He was finally convicted in 1994. The men who killed Emmett Till got off scot-free, even though everybody knew they lynched that poor child. That’s ancient history to you. But that history got a hearing in the Simpson verdict: Medgar; the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi; the four girls bombed in the Birmingham church; poor 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was brutally shot down in a store in Los Angeles in 1991; and every instance of police brutality unanswered by the state, every unjustified killing of black flesh. The Simpson verdict was your forced atonement.
O.J. awakened your collective white rage. That or you’re obsessed with him because he’s the one that got away, the one who challenged your view of whiteness, made you madder than anybody—that is, until Obama. But there’s little real justification for Obama hate, except that he was a black man in charge of our country, and many whites wanted to take it back and make it great again. Hence, the election of Donald Trump as president.
And let’s be real: O.J.’s betrayal hurt worse than Obama’s ascent. O.J. shared your worldview. O.J. took full advantage of the privilege you offered him as an honorary white man. He accepted the bargain in a way Obama never did, never could. Your anger for O.J. is that he was, finally—like you fear all black folk could potentially be—an ungrateful nigger. O.J. seemed to fully revel in whiteness and gladly deny that he was black, that is, until he got in trouble. Then that racial reflex kicked in: back against the wall, black against the wall.
You shouldn’t be too angry with O.J. He’s as white a black man as there’s been in the last half century. Even Clarence Thomas is blacker than O.J. It is true that Thomas is a darker version of Simpson. But Thomas was reviled by black culture for his dark skin. He repays us with decisions on the Supreme Court that mock our humanity and lower his dignity with each stroke of his pen.
What the Simpson case makes clear is that even though whiteness is an invention, it is nontransferable, at least to black folk. No matter how we try we still can’t be white, can’t truly enjoy white privilege. Many of you were willing to chalk up the black belief in Simpson’s innocence—well, truly, black folk never claimed Simpson was innocent, just not guilty, a distinction that whiteness has taught us—as an instance of black denial, of black delusion. It never occurred to you that that is just how whiteness operates at all times. It’s been that way ever since it was created a few centuries back to justify treating black people like dogs. It has stayed that way right up until this moment.
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I must say to you, my friends, that teaching in your schools has shown me that being white means never having to say you’re white. Whiteness long ago, at least in America, shed its ethnic skin and struck a universal pose. Whiteness never had to announce its whiteness, never had to promote or celebrate its unique features.
If whites are history, and history is white, then so are culture, and society, and law, and government, and politics; so are logic and thinking and reflection and truth and circumstances and the world and reality and morality and all that means anything at all.
Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history.
You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible.