Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(13)
“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.”
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.