You learn to be skeptical

Sporting News, The, August 15, 1994 by Thulani Davis

On the evening that O.J. Simpson took his famous ride in the white Bronco rather than face arrest for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman, I was in a fairly remote spot named Lone Wolf in the corner of Oklahoma. I turned on CNN with the single mission of finding out how the Knicks had fared against the Rockets and there I was in the midst of one of these moments of electronic togetherness that Americans seem to love. Evidently the folks who run the networks have also figured out that we enjoy sharing even the worst of tragedies by satellite. And polls have begun to replace, and perhaps to shape, the sampling of opinion one could get with ease on the stoop, at the hairdresser or in the subway.

I am an African American and I thought he looked guilty, displayed behavior I have learned to associate with both battering husbands and privileged, wealthy celebrities. But the polls tell me that I am in a true minority, blacks who think he might have done it. I have seen six polls assessing public opinion on O.J.'s possible guilt or innocence along racial lines. The results are very simple: Most blacks think he is innocent and most whites think he is guilty.

Newsweek found that 60 percent of blacks think he is innocent, as opposed to 23 percent of whites; a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll said that 60 percent of blacks think he is innocent and 68 percent of whites think he is guilty; and an ABC News survey came up with 63 percent of whites saying guilty and only 22 percent of blacks. Then there is the additional, and perhaps more important, finding that most blacks think he does not stand to get a fair trial, while whites think he can. Time-CNN says 64 percent of blacks think he won't get a fair trial, as opposed to 41 percent of whites.

I would say there is good news here in the small numbers: At least some whites are skeptical of how the criminal justice system works for blacks, and at least some blacks are optimistic that it can work. But the bad news here is not that we don't agree, but the suggestion that there is no debate in people's minds. There is bad news also in the downright flabbergasted voices of newsmen like Ted Koppel who are surprised that blacks don't see what appears to be the obvious incriminating evidence. This shock discounts our daily experience with the criminal justice system and the press.

When I was a child growing up in Virginia, both my father and my teachers taught me not to believe everything I read in the papers or in my textbooks. This was a necessary step both in teaching me to think for myself and in aiding me to thrive in the face of the virulent treatment of my race in my schoolbooks, and the calculated maliciousness of local newspapers. The habit of skepticism is still taught by parents who watch television with their children or share the newspaper. It is not that we ignore the facts. On the contrary, we are looking at them very, very closely. Life has taught us that we should perhaps assume a man's innocence until his guilt is proven because the larger public will not.

I will not be the first to say that most whites have a positive view of the judicial system stemming from respectful treatment by police and private lawyers, sentencing patterns that tend to keep middle-class whites out of jail, and juries made of their peers. Among blacks it is common not only to hear reports of police like those who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles, but also of untruthful tesimony in court, a lack of concern for proper identification of suspects, reliance on jail time rather than alternative sentencing and problems with finding peer juries. Many whites, even former President George Bush, were shocked by the Rodney King videotape and most blacks were not. These same Americans, probably including Bush, believed that the tape assured a conviction; we did not.

Our distrust also extends to information gatherers. We have been mistrustful since slavery of people gathering information, even pollsters. Because life often depended on it, information was not given easily to anyone from outside the community. And I believe that our response to official enquiries about blacks in trouble is a similar, basically public response. Whites do this, too. When Mayor David Dinkins was up for re-election in New York, white voters gave polls their public position on a black candidate -- "Sure, we would vote for a black." The polls were a public answer; the votes were a private one. And the votes did not agree with the polls.

But survival for whites does not necessarily require long memory on the question of blacks wrongly accused, and/or convicted, or maybe just trotted out to show a plague of black criminality. Why should they remember the Scottsboro boys or Willie Horton or the poor guy in Boston set up when Charles Stuart said some black guy killed his wife? And whites will probably never have to live in dread of a TV headline I heard a few weeks ago: "First there was Mike Tyson, then Michael Jackson, now O.J. Simpson. What does the O.J. Simpson case say about the condition of blacks?" No show will ask what Mickey Mantle's or Pete Rose's troubles say about white people. It is not O.J.'s Heisman Trophy or his recent TV/movie celebrity that makes his case important to blacks. If you polled blacks five years ago on heroes, I doubt his name would have come up. It is the sheer celebrity of this murder that makes his face so relevant. It endangers us for O.J. Simpson to be demonized across the world.