ESSAYS | Letters to the Editor



O.J., Culture Wars and the Criminal Justice System: How Race Polarizes Us All
Criminal Defense Weekly. Nov. 18, 2002

By Jordan Elgrably

Sometimes it behooves us to look back in hindsight, the better to look forward and see the forest from the trees. In October 1995, a predominantly black jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman; but in February 1997, a predominantly white jury held Simpson liable in the slayings.

A reductionist would conclude that these opposing verdicts are the result of racial bias, or at least group affiliation, but the truth is far more complex. How many of us are willing to argue that our identity is purely a matter of whether we are white, black, Jewish, Arab, Latino, Asian or some combination thereof? That we make most of our decisions as a result of our affiliation to our own group? Take a good look around you, and you’ll see that just about everybody you know has multiple affiliations and alliances. To judge a man guilty or innocent of a heinous crime, one draws on much more than a simple equation of white vs. black or black vs. white.

“It was easier for blacks to believe O.J. was set up by the police because of their own experiences,” says Dr. Sylvia Williamson, a trial observer. “Shared stories of police abuse have become collective hard ‘knowledge,’ while the white majority in the civil trial hold police in higher esteem. This polarization, in my view, is only indirectly linked to racial issues. A jury of former black police officers would probably have returned a guilty verdict.”

Of course, affiliation to your own group, to the exclusion of all others, can be dangerously myopic. Psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, author of The Evolving Self and other books fusing psychology and social science, argues that, “Excessive identification with a particular worldview inevitably leads to blindness to other cultures, and eventually to hostility toward the ‘other.’” And as the Sephardi critic Ammiel Alcalay has pointed out, “To make enemies by building layers of hatred through false assumptions and dichotomies, misrepresentation and ideology presented as history, is to commit the most atrocious acts of self-destruction, for we are all multiple and cannot pretend to be exlusively this or that.” [emphasis added]

With the exception of those who ascribe to the theories propounded in The Bell Curve (a ‘90s book affirming higher intelligence among whites), few of us today believe in racial determinism. Yet time and time again, America is polarized by Us. vs. Them politics—the O.J. saga being only the longest-running drama in a sordid history in interracial conflicts. Jews, for example, though a persecuted group, are not exempt from the tendency to look askance at those who appear different from themselves, as the Israeli schism between Ashkenazim (Jews of Eastern European descent) and Sephardim/Mizrahim (Jews of Spanish or Middle Eastern origins) illustrates even today. The light-skinned Jews of Israel, who have become accustomed to the dark-skinned appearance of many of their Middle Eastern cousins, still routinely mistake these Jews for Palestinians or other Arabs, and there are many stories of Mizrahi mistreatment and inequality before the law.

Even when ethnicity doesn’t erect barriers between one group and another, there are those who would challenge us to deny our differences for the sake of America’s “national culture.” In Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels takes the polemical view that our obsession with roots—with identities based on ethnic or cultural origins—is profoundly regressive. “Why does it matter who we are?” Michaels asks. “Why should any past count as ours?”

In an essay for The New Yorker, Alexandar Star invites us to embrace Michaels’ worldview. “Why insist upon drawing a thick line between those who bestow a cultural inheritance on us and those who don’t?” Star demands. “Culture isn’t a living tradition or a font of wisdom; it’s more like a phantom limb or a false memory.”

Try making that argument with the Whitney Museum or the Getty, or with any number of prominent American families—the Rockefellers and Kennedys among them. If culture isn’t a living tradition as Star insists, it may be, as Walter Benjamin believed, that our capacity to tell stories about ourselves is dying. Yet if there is anything that distinguishes one people from another, it is their memory—a community of language and shared experience, which form a valuable narrative. Every culture tells a story, in other words, and our expectations flow from those personal, familial and group narratives.

Michaels and Star, among other critics of the unfashionable multicultural paradigm, seem to be suggesting that we just jettison our cultural “baggage,” that we all ought to wipe the slate clean and reinvent ourselves as uber-Americans, from the ground up. But which ground? That recognized by Native Americans? Puritans fresh off the Mayflower? Mexicans in the northern Aztlan region of California?

I seriously doubt that it is possible to disregard one’s cultural-ethnic origins, and even if it were, what does the criminal justice system show us? Is justice truly blind? Why then the very real juggernaut of racial profiling? Why are all the defendants in the Central Park Jogger case kids of color, and how did it happen that the NYPD coerced confessions from all five of them, when another rapist/murderer’s DNA was all over the crime scene?

Even if we could deny our own past for some lilly-white or rainbow reality, what would the consequences to our psyche be? Some say that you only become whole when you become your experience, which is not only yours but that of the culture that shaped you. Just ask the O.J. jurors.

To critics of multiculturalism who demand we stop being different so we can be better Americans, one might ask whether all-white juries ruminating guilt or innocence in lynching cases throughout the South were not, in fact, participating in the cultural pride of their own group. Some among us may have the luxury of appearing to be like other “white” Americans, and perhaps feel some safety in this; but many people of color cannot erase their origins. Nor are they exempt from group stereotypes when they find themselves in the maw of the criminal justice system—the skewed story of the Central Park Jogger only one of thousands of cases in point.

To be sure, the identity of self is in constant evolution, and more and more of us recognize a hybridity that demands we learn how to integrate all the parts of the whole. In this sense we all, whatever our ethnic or cultural affiliations, inhabit a multicultural reality. To accept that means taking responsibility for a complex truth, which is that justice before the law, and truth before the jury, must be blind.

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