prosecution. Fuhrman’s reputation as a racist must have been well known in police and prosecution circles, and Darden had to know that lead prosecutor Marcia Clark was going to present Fuhrman as a latter-day choirboy.
Ever since my NAACP days I had been angered when African American attorneys joined what had always been all-white defense teams in race cases. In the few prior times where that had happened, the black attorneys had said nothing: Their very presence was the point. They were there for show. Darden, however, had taken an active role in the OJ prosecution. Also, in all my cases in which a black lawyer had appeared, I had no doubt that our side was in the right. Here Darden was prosecuting a man whom I considered guilty. If not for Clark’s portrayal of Fuhrman, I could have accepted Darden’s presence. But I saw his being there as serving little other purpose than supporting Clark’s spin on Fuhrman. It was brave of Darden to defy black sentiment by seeking to convict OJ, and I could see the value of his participation if the prosecution had clean hands. It didn’t, though. Exposing police racism to me had a higher value than seeking the conviction of another black man whose life would be wrecked no matter what the jury verdict. On the other hand, who was I, a white man, to lecture a black man on how he should conduct his professional life? Since the settlement of the American colonies, white men had controlled how black men could lead their lives. It was long past time for white men like me to butt out.
* * *
It was October 3. In our office lawyers and nonlawyers alike huddled around a tiny television set waiting for the verdict. The phones had stopped ringing. Our whispered antsy comments covered our anxiety as Judge Ito dragged out the final moments. Like white Americans everywhere, we were disappointed at the not guilty verdicts, but most of us had anticipated the outcome, so there was little emotion in the room.
Instead of thinking about OJ I thought about Rubin Carter and John Artis. They were just as innocent as OJ was guilty. Yet a white-dominated jury found Rubin and John guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, while a black-dominated jury found OJ not guilty. The white jury had accepted a bogus racial revenge theory to overcome what should have been obvious reasonable-doubt evidence. By contrast the OJ jury had allowed racial prejudice among police investigators to overcome evidence that should have answered any reasonable-doubt questions. To blacks the Carter-Artis verdicts were business as usual, and the OJ verdict was something to cheer about, as Howard law students did on camera for the evening news. Whites, on the other hand, assumed the correctness of the Carter-Artis verdicts and were frightened by the OJ acquittal. For blacks the OJ acquittal offered the illusion of justice. To whites, blacks were out for their own kind. To me, with few exceptions, everyone favored their own kind, and until we as a nation could even things out, there would be chaos in our hearts and on our streets.
How would I have voted if I had been a black man sitting on the OJ jury? Not guilty.
Don’t talk to me about guilt when there’s all that blood on the hands of your police, I would have said. Don’t ask me to accept that you have treated this or that black man justly when your police and courts treat my people so badly. When your hands are clean, I’ll listen to your calls for justice.
As a white man fantasizing about saying these things as a black man, I had to shake my head in sadness. If my fantasy bore any relationship to reality, it meant that we had allowed the chasm between black and white in America to grow so wide that even with our common culture and language, we had come to the point where we processed information in entirely different ways. The saving grace for me, however, was that I started to rethink my disappointment with the verdict as a white man. Why not go all the way? I said to myself. Why not see the not guilty verdict as a righteous vote? Indeed, why not? I asked myself. It is a thought I still have.
* * *
On November 6 Kitty and I attended a lecture celebrating Derrick Bell’s sixty-fifth birthday. Derrick had become an icon among progressive law students and lawyers. A visiting professor