The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (13 page)

Let’s face it. Beating women is a manly sport in America. It is not a widely reviled practice, at least not before the Simpson trial. (It is helpful to remind ourselves that for years many white stars in every major American sport have beat their wives, too. But without a history of stereotypes to support white male beastliness, the wife-beating issue failed to catch on among the cause célèbre set.) Simpson’s treatment of Nicole—manhandling, stalking, surveilling, beating, and tyrannizing her—was vicious. It was the extreme but logical outgrowth of deeply entrenched beliefs about the worth of women’s bodies in our culture. Sadly, such beliefs persist in the face of feminist activism.

Part of our problem is that we think we can have it both ways. We think we can detest feminists while lauding the “good” women, those who wouldn’t call themselves feminists to save their lives. And often don’t. But most men are ignorant of flesh and blood feminism and the lives of the women who fill its ranks. Feminism is what women do when they realize they must struggle to protect the rights and privileges most men take for granted.

Still, Gloria Steinem’s appearance on the
Charlie Rose
show immediately after the verdicts—where she recounted taking solace in an apology offered to her, and, presumably, all whites, by an elderly black man who assured her that “not all of us feel this way”—was disappointing. It showed a lack of appreciation for the trial’s complexity from a feminist who has heroically struggled for human rights. Steinem’s lapse was topped, however, by the pit bull meanness of NOW’s Los Angeles head, Tammy Bruce. She was later removed from office because of her relentlessly racist attacks on Simpson.

Steinem’s and Bruce’s behavior underlines why it is difficult for even battered black women to imagine themselves as feminists. They played the dangerous game of ranking suffering without regard to context. They made their pain, and the greater pain of abused women, the almost exclusive focus of their fiery outrage. Domestic abuse is a legitimate and largely neglected plague. But what Steinem and Bruce overlooked was how race gives white women’s pain, and the bodies on which that pain is inflicted, more visibility than the suffering bodies of black women. There are thousands of black women who have gone to their graves at the hands of hateful men. Some of their deaths were more heinous than
Nicole’s. (True, they didn’t have the dubious advantage of having a famous man charged with their murder.) But these women remain invisible. Even to folk like Steinem and Bruce, who are bravely committed to keeping the memory of abused women alive.

No doubt some of this resentment of unspoken white privilege—of ranking black bodies lower on the totem pole of distress—slid onto the tongues of black women who claimed the Simpson case was not about domestic violence. Technically, that’s true. But neither was it, technically, about race. The important ways this case was about race are the same ways it was about domestic violence. And about the benefits and liabilities of class, wealth, fame, and gender. The disavowal of domestic abuse as an issue in the Simpson case by black women reinforces the tragic refusal of many blacks to face the crushing convergence of issues that shape black life. Their disavowal was not simply a way these women remained loyal to the script they’ve been handed—race first, race finally, race foremost. It was a telling example of how that script writes out their lives as well, often in their own handwriting. The dispute between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill showcased the futility of thinking about our problems in strictly racial terms.

There is damning evidence too, that Nicole contributed to the brutality that broke her. And in all likelihood, killed her. I’m not arguing that Nicole should have simply left, got out at the first whiff of trouble. The destructive dance of complicity and shame, of cooperation and resistance, of instigation and retaliation, is too complex to blame victims for the brutal behavior of their abusers. And the psychology of identifying with one’s abuser is too well established to mock the difficulty of leaving. But Nicole was also obsessed with O.J. Her huge appetites for cash, cocaine, and convenience tied her to a destructive lifestyle that rivaled her relationship to Simpson.

Equally tragic, Nicole’s suffering was partially aided by her family’s silence and inaction. Time and again Simpson hurled Nicole’s body across the room. He crashed her face with his fists, leaving telltale signs almost as large as his anger. Her family surely knew or suspected that there was big trouble between Nicole and O.J. The Browns’ not knowing is just as plausible as Simpson not having murdered Ron and Nicole. After Nicole’s death, her sister, Denise, insisted that Nicole wasn’t a battered woman. That’s an excusable lie if we admit that silence, secrecy, and shame choke domestic abuse victims and their families.

Nicole’s martyrdom can certainly aid other victims of domestic abuse. Her martyrdom might also help restore her family to wholeness. The Browns’ helplessness and willed ignorance about Nicole’s abuse—their neglect of her living body, bought in part by O.J.’s generous patronage—helped to make her a symbol of domestic violence. Her bloodied body obviously gave the Browns the energy they needed to speak up, to act. Martyrdom lifts a person’s life beyond her body. Her suffering supports those who draw strength from her life’s purpose—even if that purpose is only fully realized after death. The Browns must now join with others who identify, beyond blood ties or biology, with the fight against domestic
violence to which Nicole’s life and martyred body have become connected. Without the Browns’ acknowledgment of complicity in Nicole’s suffering, her martyred body becomes an empty tablet on which her family’s guilt is written.

As serious as the Browns’ failure was, Simpson’s was by far the greater sin. His beating of Nicole marked a vile sexual obsession. Simpson apparently believed he owned Nicole. She was a trophy. She was a commodity O.J. bought with his considerable earnings. Such logic might suggest that Nicole was interchangeable with most of the other women to whom Simpson was attracted. Like her, they had blonde hair and big breasts.

But sexual obsession is not offset by potential—by what one might have or get in the future to replace what one lost or can’t have. This makes it difficult to defend Simpson by saying that he didn’t have to kill Nicole because he could have had any woman he wanted. Sexual obsession can never be satisfied. The obsessor fixes on the object of desire as a way of realizing his own desire. Hence, sexual obsession is a disguised form of narcissism. It ultimately refers back to itself. Such self-reference contains the seed of the obsessor’s dissatisfaction. By projecting his desire onto an erotic interest, the obsessor surrenders the means of achieving fulfillment to a force outside himself. Hence, the obsessor employs various forms of control, including seduction and violence, to bring the erotic interest in line with his wishes.

The obsessor ultimately requires the collapse of the erotic interest into himself. This feat is rarely possible, and certainly not desirable, at least not from the erotic interest’s point of view. It means that the erotic interest will have to surrender her self and identity completely to the obsessor. In the obsessor’s eye, to be rejected by the erotic interest is to be rejected by himself. This is a narcissist’s nightmare. Such rejection is perceived as a form of self-mutilation. Or, more painfully, it is a form of self-denial. Nicole’s final rejection of the sickness of her own, and O.J.’s, obsession a month before she died was the doorway to her freedom and her martyrdom. If the same act of independence led to her liberty and her death, it suggests something of the lethal obsession that millions of women live with and die from.

A similarly lethal obsession—compounded by an even more sinister and convoluted history—shapes the course of race in this country. The responses to the verdicts were misrepresented in the media as an avalanche of emotion determined exclusively by color. Such simple scribing must never be trusted. Nevertheless, the responses showed just how sick and separate race makes us. O.J.—the figure, the trial, the spectacle, the aftermath—was a racequake. It crumbled racial platitudes. It revealed the fault lines of bias, bigotry, and blindness that trace beneath our social existence. The trial has at least forced us to talk about race. Even if we speak defensively and with giant chips on our shoulders. Race remains our nation’s malevolent obsession. Race is the source of our harmony or disfavor with one another. Black and white responses to O.J. prove how different historical experiences determine what we see and color what we believe about race.

For instance, even as many blacks defended O.J., they knew he had never been one of black America’s favorite sons. He didn’t remember his roots when his fame and fortune carried him long beyond their influence. (Or, as a black woman wrote to me, “O.J. didn’t know he had roots until they started digging.”) On the surface, the black defense of Simpson can be positively interpreted. It can be viewed as the refusal of blacks to play the race authenticity game, which, in this instance, amounts to the belief that only “real” blacks deserve support when racial difficulties arise. But black responses to O.J. can also be read less charitably. They can be seen as the automatic embrace of a fallen figure simply because he is black. If you buy this line of reasoning, Simpson has a double advantage. He is eligible for insurance against the liability of racism, and he is fully covered for all claims made against him by whites, including a charge of murder. But all of these readings are too narrow. Black responses to Simpson must be viewed in light of the role race and racism have played in our nation’s history. Race has been the most cruelly dominant force in the lives of black Americans. Racism exists in its own poisoned and protected world of misinformation and ignorance. Its fires of destruction are stoked by stereotype and crude mythology.

That history may help explain black support for figures like O.J. and Clarence Thomas, who have denied the lingering impact of race. Many black folk know that, in the long run, such figures remain trapped by race. Still, it is unprincipled for blacks like Thomas and Simpson to appeal to race in their defense when they opposed such appeals by other blacks in trouble. Many blacks support such figures because they think they discern, even in their exploitative behavior, a desperation, a possible seed of recognition, a begrudging concession even, that race does make a difference.

The ugly irony is that such figures get into a position to do even more harm to blacks because of the black help they receive. (Look at Thomas’s judicial opinions against affirmative action and historically black colleges and universities.) For many whites, the example of race exploiters symbolizes how black Americans use race in bad faith. The problem is many whites see this only when their interests are being undermined. Simpson’s offense—allowing race to be used on his behalf—is as obvious to many whites as Thomas’s injury to blacks is obscured. By contrast, Thomas looks just fine to many whites. His beliefs and judicial opinions protect conservative white interests. But Thomas’s cry of “high-tech lynching” when he was seeking confirmation to the Supreme Court choked off critical discussion of his desperate dishonesty. Thomas’s comment was a callous, calculated attempt to win Senate votes and public sympathy by using race in a fashion he had claimed was unjust. Thomas’s dishonest behavior—gaining privilege because of his blackness only to unfairly deny the same privilege to other blacks highlights the absurdity of race for black Americans.

A small sense of the absurdity of race came crashing down on many whites when the not-guilty verdicts were delivered. A surreal world prevailed. Clocks melted. Time bent. Cows flew over the moon. The chronology of race was forever split: Before Simpson and After Simpson. October 3, 1995, became a marker of tragedy. For many whites, it is a day that will live in the same sort of infamy that Roosevelt predicted for the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. It is hard to adequately describe the bewilderment many blacks felt at white rage over the verdicts. As difficult, perhaps, as it is for whites to understand how so many blacks could be deliriously gleeful at Simpson’s acquittal. For perhaps the first time, the wide gulf between legality and morality became real to many whites. At least real in a way that most blacks could see whites cared about. That gulf is one blacks have bitterly protested for years, with only moderate support from most whites. The day of the verdicts, many white people were forced to think of themselves as a group—one denied special privilege rather than guaranteed it—for the first time. As a group, these whites tasted the dread, common to blacks, that follows the absolute rejection of the faith one has placed in a judicial ruling’s power to bring justice. The fact that the decision officially took four hours only heaped insult on the injured souls of white folk.

In reality, however, that decision was much longer in the making.
That jury
decision was set in motion the first time an American citizen, acting on behalf of the state and
supported by public sentiment, made a legal judgment about a human being where an interpretation
of the facts was colored by a consideration of race.
The O.J. verdicts are an outgrowth of the system started in that moment. They are, too, a painful exposure of, and a stinging rebuke to, the unjust operation of the judicial system for blacks throughout the history of our nation.

One might conclude from what I’ve just said that I believe the jury’s decision was a rightful thumb in the justice system’s eye. That it was sweet black revenge for white wrongdoing. I don’t. Nor do I believe that that’s the best way to read the jury’s verdict. The confusion surrounding the verdicts, indeed the entire trial, reflects the confusion about the meanings of race in our culture. As far as I can see, race is being used in at least three different ways to explain the trial, especially the meaning of the verdicts. But since we haven’t taken the time to figure them out, we end up collapsing them into one another in ways that are confusing and harmful. That confusion exaggerates the differences between blacks and whites. It also masks differences within black and white communities, especially where class privilege and gender are concerned.