Saturday 9 October 2004

O J SIMPSON

This is the kind of legal verdict Whites must learn to expect because of their inability to renounce racism.

It’s clear that a violent man like OJ Simpson murdered his wife and her lover in a fit of jealousy, Ă  la Shakespeare’s Othello. The brutality of the murders clearly points to an emotional rather than any financial criminal motive. Add to this the fact that OJ Simpson was the only possible suspect and you have an open-and-shut case.

The fly-in-the-ointment, of course, is White Racism.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) put a blatantly racist officer on the case, which immediately calls into question its and his integrity. This produced the reasonable doubt sufficient for the jury to return a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict.

The fact that Mr Simpson was trying to flee the murder scene isn’t necessarily evidence of guilt, as Whites love to assume. Only that he knew perfectly well that he would – as a Black man in a racist society – be the first and only person to be blamed. The reason Whites want to think flight equals guilt is that they’re scared to admit their society is endemically racist and such an assumption is always safely within their political and social comfort zone.

If the LAPD (& police everywhere) had been more vigorous in rooting out their own endemic racism, such injustices would be less likely. This verdict is a tacit warning to Whites of one of the most important dangers of their refusal to renounce racism and of how what goes around, comes around. It effectively means that any Black criminal who can demonstrate that a policeman is racist will become not only effectively unconvictable but also probably even unprosecutable. This, to add to the fact that few Blacks co-operate with a racist police in the first place; making policing harder than it need be because of the police’s failings as human beings. This can only mean an increase in overt White Racism coupled with an equal and opposite response of Black racism.

Contrary to the defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran’s claim that it is in the gift of the jury to redress institutional White racism, in truth, they can only balance it with an equally pervasive Black racism. Black racism is justified for the purposes of defence against White Racism but cannot be seen by rational men as a true solution to the problem of White Racism, as such. This vindictive verdict was also intended as a vicarious punishment for those White police officers that beat Rodney King. However, it’s unlikely to make Whites think being racist is bad, only that they should be more subtle about it in future. None of this will ever end the present race war.

Where Johnnie Cochran is right is in claiming that the race card and the credibility card are identical. The central issue here is White credibility when it comes to trying cases against Black men and whether they can do this without racial hatred. Clearly, they cannot - as this trial shows - and this is why Whites whinge-on about justice not being served because they define justice as being strictly a Whites-only prerogative – and always will. Just as Whites believed lynching Blacks was their prerogative; resulting in all-White juries acquitting them. Such complaints are, in themselves, racist because they fail to appreciate the obvious racial dimensions of this particular case. When a White man is on trial, racism will rarely enter the debate; when a Black, it tends to be stage centre – one law for the Whites; another for the Blacks. This ultimately means that when Whites claim Blacks are playing the race card it is, in fact, only Whites who are doing this.

Such verdicts merely formalise distrust and lack of communication between the races, which will never disappear, but can be reduced only over many generations.

The reason Whites still choose to practice racism is that they believe there are no negative consequences for them. The O J Simpson trial proved otherwise – the bleating and the whinging of the families of the victims notwithstanding.

(Whites claiming Blacks play the race card [ie, you’re only saying that because you’re Black] is itself racist. It means Whites robotically judging Blacks by their skin colour first and not Blacks’ substantive argument when, logically, it should be the other way around. It means automatically side-stepping the argument by claiming any statement made by a Black lacks substance because of his skin colour. This gives Whites the freedom to not listen to Blacks precisely because they’re Black, not because they’re wrong in anything they say. This formally entrenches how Whites have always behaved toward their supposed racial inferiors. Whites don’t have to prove Blacks are playing the race card only to posit the idea that they are; while Blacks are left in the inequitable position of having to prove White Racism. This allows guilt-ridden White Racists to evade their guilt and continue being racist.)

No comments: