"O.J. turns out to be a nigger, after all. He's the boogeyman who will murder your blond daughter." A young black man told me this, with sarcasm.
These last weeks have been an unseemly time in America. A murder case has turned into a parlor game. On the 11 o'clock news the maneuverings of lawyers are analyzed as though they are strategies of football coaches. A friend who works as a fireman, who looks very much like O.J. Simpson and lives in white America, says, "You want to know why white folks are so fascinated by this story? It's because O.J. is black."
About a week ago I began to hear black voices (mainly male) talking this way. The O.J. story has race written all over it, they said. Some white journalists disputed the idea: O.J. is front-page news because he is an athlete celebrity like Pete Rose. Americans talked past one another.
A 24-year-old black writer: "The proof that this is a racial story is their silence. Why is everyone reluctant to say, `Yes, O.J. is black and Nicole Simpson is white'?"
At the center of the racist's madness was an erotic projection: Africa is savage. Brute. Male. Everything that the racist feared in himself was projected onto the black male. The black Othello, uncontrollable, murdering innocent whiteness. A black teenage boy recalls this: "Don't you realize that O.J. was only a couple of decades away from Jackie Robinson? America is not that far from the time when it was OK to say publicly that male Negroes were animals."
Last week, the editors of Time magazine darkened the cover photograph of O.J. Simpson. The art director denied any racial intent. The effect, however, was that O.J. appeared suddenly darker than the hero he was and more like the black man many fear. The regret on the talk shows was that O.J. had made it that far from the projects of Potrero Hill in San Francisco only to fall. A teenage football player: "O.J. lived in their world. He was created by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. He was the token they loved to love. Suddenly he slips and everyone starts talking about Potrero Hill."
Americans last week listened to the 911 tapes. And on TV came feminists (often black women) talking about spousal abuse. I said to my friends, "Listen, what feminism has done is to liberate all of us from the old racist projection. Now all men are being forced to face their potential for savagery." My friends say no. I am naive. In the white imagination the black man is savage. Still.
I wonder. Are my black friends caught in a time warp, haunted by a racism decades after white America has exorcised the old demons? Either that or else my black friends are right and we are the ones mired in the ancient past -- and the proof is that America is infatuated by the story of a black athlete who may or may not have murdered his blond wife.
