More than a Tawdry Tabloid:
The Meaning of the O. J. Simpson Affair, Part II

3,733 words

The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story
Directed by Ryan Murphy & Anthony Hemingway
Starring, Sterling K. Brown, Kenneth Choi, Christian Clemenson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bruce Greenwood, Nathan Lane, Sarah Paulson, Steven Pasquale, David Schwimmer, John Travolta, Courtney B. Vance, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and others
2016

Jeffrey Toobin
The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson,
New York: Random House, 1996

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here. [This essay starts with ‘Part 3’; parts 1 & 2 are in the previous article.]

Part 3: Midwestern Whites and Negroes, the Two Solitudes of Los Angeles

Los Angeles claims to be the most diverse city in the world. This could be true – but in its civic culture, the regional English accent, and the backgrounds of much of its white population LA is an extension of the American Midwest. H.L. Mencken called the city “Double Dubuque.”[1] To further emphasize this idea, Nicole Brown Simpson’s father was from Kansas. Walt Disney was born in Illinois and grew up in Missouri. Ronald Reagan was from Illinois. Johnny Carson was born in Iowa and raised in Nebraska. John Wayne was from Iowa, as was Crystal Cathedral minister Robert Schuller. The woman who witnessed OJ Simpson fleeing the scene, Jill Shively, had roots in Indiana.[2]

Most importantly, the man who professionalized the Los Angeles Police Department, William H. Parker[3] was born and grew up in South Dakota. Parker cracked down on corruption, and worked with the Police Union to give the LAPD’s officers civil servant protections. Toobin writes,

Parker’s model for his force was the Marine Corps, and so the police became tantamount to an army of occupation for those in the city who did not share Parker’s ethnic heritage.[4]

Parker’s vision for the LAPD was that of the ultra-professional Sergeant Joe Friday (Jack Webb) played on the fictional TV show Dragnet. While Parker’s vision was Midwestern in its high-trust, orderly, and fair-minded way, there is probably nothing that the LAPD can do to not seem like an “army of occupation” for Los Angeles’s blacks. Midwestern whites are quite different from African-Americans and are less tolerant of black behavior than other white American groups.

For all the talk about Southern whites “oppressing” blacks, there is an underappreciated Midwestern white hostility to blacks that must be examined here without silly, politically correct judgement. During the US Civil War, units from the Midwest were hostile to blacks in a way the Confederate Army was not.[5] Year after year, in terms of whites-to-blacks in prison ratios, the Midwest states lead.[6] In Los Angeles, whites got their Midwestern civic leaders to provide a professional police department, and backed the police up in racial incidents – such as acquitting the police involved in the Rodney King beating despite the enormous media pressure to convict.

The anti-black hostility is probably related to the fact that Midwestern whites are the ultimate producing class. In following their cultural and racial impulses, they built the great Northern Cities, developed the industries, and turned burning deserts into wheat fields. They are orderly, polite, and concerned about others – they’re Minnesota Nice.

The ways of white Midwesterners must be contrasted to America’s black population. While the slave origins in the United States of blacks are entirely related to economic production, they are not a self-starting producing class. The problem is that black productivity doesn’t make up for black social costs. By the end of 1865, whatever economic benefits blacks had produced were consumed in the fire and blood of the Civil War. In the time between the Civil War and the “low speed chase,” black populations were moved around America like a hot potato — a municipality stuck with a large population, like Detroit today, went to ruins. By 1995, blacks in the Los Angeles had already caused a number of race riots, and were in the midst of a crack-cocaine fueled violent crime wave expressed culturally through the Compton School of Rap-Music. Essentially, Midwestern whites tire of black pathology quicker than others.

Also, from a Midwestern perspective, blacks, as a group, also have a lack of self-awareness about how their behavior appears to others. Furthermore, as a group they have an inability to practice self-control. The problem, wrote the late Lawrence Auster (1949 – 2013),

…[I]s the relative intellectual and moral passivity of blacks. While there are many decent, upright black people, there is a notable failure on the part of blacks effectively to resist the bad people in their communities. The result is that the bad people—the orators, the hustlers, the corrupt, the despots—always seem to rise to the top. That is why black countries, and black-run cities in America, are the way they are. There are good people living in those places, but for the most part they are only good in their private, familial sphere. They are not actively good in the social and political sense and thus rarely take leadership or succeed in creating a civilized political order. The number of morally courageous and principled blacks who actively resist the corruption and racialist conformism around them is very limited; in fact, such upright and intelligent blacks often separate themselves from the black community when they recognize how unwelcome they are in it.[7]

With the above statement in mind, in Los Angeles, the white, progressive Midwestern civic order, which the LAPD was part of, was at fierce odds with the black community. LA whites are saw the police’s truncheons as a protective shield. Blacks felt the police were the enemy. Thus the minds of most of the blacks in LA were closed from day one of the trial to hearing any evidence collected by the LAPD. Because the trial was expected to be so long, a process was in place that allowed exemptions for jury duty were allowed based on professional “hardship.” The hardship exemption “acted like a vacuum cleaner for educated, white, and male jurors”[8] leaving blacks as the plurality on the jury. The case was thus fought out with the most polarized members of the black half of LA’s Two Solitudes being in the position to decide. After the verdict, a black juror raised his fist in a Black Power salute to OJ.

Part 4: Johnny Cochran, Chris Darden, and Mark Fuhrman

Because the city was so polarized, OJ’s lead attorney Bob Shapiro (John Travolta) planned to “play the race card”[9] from the outset. Shapiro thus brought on Johnny Cochran (Courtney B. Vance),

… [B]ecause he could turn anything into a racial issue. Cochran knew that a black defendant could scarcely go wrong crying racism in the downtown Criminal Courts Building, and he exploited that phenomenon with singular determination and success.[10]

Cochran did his racial magic act and won the case. The book and mini-series both show the different tricks he used, including “tainting” the evidence in the minds of the black jury by showing some of the evidence spent a night in the trunk of a detective’s car in Simi Valley. This Greater LA suburb was the location where the Rodney King Case was tried so it had racist magic dirt.

Johnny Cochran didn’t just convince the black jury that OJ Simpson was not guilty, he also convinced most of the blacks in America. In retrospect, Cochran made it look easy. However, if one can imagine for a second that during the OJ Trial LA’s whites were Irish and Cochran was an absentee English landlord, such a figure would be a moral reprobate. Prior to the OJ case, Cochran’s career was as a racial hustler whose firm specialized in raiding the city’s treasury. One must wonder, why whites allow themselves to be so fleeced by such a person.

Chris Darden was the black prosecuting attorney. He was added to the case to diffuse any appearance of racism on the part of the prosecutors. He had some trial experience, but not the same amount as any of the other lawyers. Of all the lawyers in the trial, including Johnny Cochran, Darden was the only one to come from a genuine working class background. His father had worked at the shipyards in Richmond, California.

The mini-series portrays Darden in a better light than Jeffrey Toobin’s book. Both works show that Darden wore his emotions on his sleeves. While this often works in a social setting Toobin shows in his book that during the OJ Trial, Cochran was often able to provoke Darden into making mistakes. Judge Ito also had tangles with the hot-headed attorney. Like Marcia Clark’s hairdo, Darden’s temper became a distraction.

On the surface, Darden should be the perfect representative of what the “civil rights” program should have become. With any anti-black legislation struck down, a black kid from a black neighborhood, could become an agent of the State seeking justice in a colorblind way. However, he had to “resist the corruption and racialist conformism” of his own community. He got hate mail throughout the trial, and left his church afterwards.

However, Chris Darden was still deeply tied up in the Black Narrative. Toobin writes about an important part of Darden’s worldview,

A history professor in Afro-American studies, Gloria Alibaruho, had become a mentor to him. Darden later wrote that when he studied the world of his ancestors, “my eyes opened like slipped blinds and all of a sudden my own life was explained to me. Martin Luther King had taught me what was fair; the Black Panther newspapers screamed at me what was unjust; but it was Gloria Alibaruho who taught me who I was. It was like discovering gravity. It explained the universe to me. So, this is why people treat me the way they do. This is why women grab their handbags when I get on an elevator.”[11]

While understanding one’s racial origins is well and good, Afro-American studies is an uneven field of scholarship that holds within it both serious history and Afrocentrist nonsense about Negroes flying into space in rocket-propelled, Egyptian Pyramids.[12] Afro-American studies is also more of an expression of racial solidary and resolve than scholarship, indeed it is a moralizing force. As a result, Chris Darden was thus every bit as bedeviled by Mark Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word as the black jurors.

Both the book and the mini-series show that the big-ego lawyers on the Dream Team had a hard time getting along. However, it was in their collective self-interest to get along and other than some odd behavior by Bob Shapiro when he was replaced as lead by Cochran, the Dream Team proved to be an example of teamwork under pressure. The team that the LAPD and Prosecutors should have been didn’t materialize due to Detective Mark Fuhrman.

Johnny Cochran was able to work his racism magic act because the detective on the case that discovered the key evidence, Mark Fuhrman, “was a racist.” Detective Fuhrman had become, in today’s terms, “red-pilled” during his service as a Sergeant in the US Marine Corps.[13] After his enlistment was up, Fuhrman joined the LAPD and sued the city for a workman’s comp claim after he got tired of “noticing patterns” about non-white crime in Los Angeles. Dream Team investigators got wind of the suit and found the details, including Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word in the city’s archives. (Jeffrey Toobin discovered it independently.)

Once the suit was discovered other people came forward with their own story of Fuhrman’s use of the nigger word. Fuhrman had also been recorded by a screenwriter unwisely using the deplorable insult along with other venting of frustrations with the politically correct arrangements in the LAPD. All of this perfectly fit in to the Dream Team’s “race card” strategy.

It is strange why the LAPD and Los Angeles DA’s Office didn’t have a plan to deal with accusations of “racism” or the use of the nigger word. It was not a secret that accusations of racism sunk cases. As it happened, Clark and Darden, drunk on virtue, disavowed Fuhrman as the trial went along. They could have coached Fuhrman to admit he’d said nigger under cross-examination, they could have also claimed the worker’s comp suit was a “cry for help,” or even PTSD.

At the time, Fuhrman was disgraced and retired from the LAPD. However, Fuhrman went on to have his reputation rehabilitated. He became a bestselling author of several books. He reopened an investigation on a cold case murder that put away a cousin of the powerful Kennedy family (it seems race trumps Camelot as well as sex) and has been given many sympathetic interviews on female-centric talk shows including at least two interviews on the Oprah Winfrey show. An idea on why Fuhrman got redeemed can be found in the closing arguments below.

Closing Arguments

As mentioned above, the OJ Simpson Trial proved that the pro-black “civil rights” metapolitical narrative was the most powerful of the revolutionary social arrangements coming out of the 1960s. “Civil rights” allowed an irresponsible black jury to be picked, allowed Johnny Cochran’s antics to be tolerated by the LA government, and saved an obviously guilty man from prison. This narrative, this institution, this semi-religion would remain powerful for the next two decades. Indeed, in 2012 a black president would be re-elected based partially on claims of police misconduct and racism as spurious as that directed against the LAPD in the OJ Simpson case. Yet when human institutions appear to be most powerful, they usually have already taken a mortal wound. High water means a receding tide. The OJ Simpson verdict was a mortal wound for “civil rights.”

The enormous, still-growing pro-white movement that influenced the 2016 election has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere. Yet this movement didn’t come out of nowhere. It arose in part because the white response to black behavior during OJ Simpson Case.

To explain further, the “civil rights” revolution of the 1960s was not a lasting victory of blacks over a prostrate, vanishing enemy such as the US Cavalry’s victory over the Sioux. It was a new social arrangement based upon an unwritten contract between two races, and the contract requires the consent of whites to exist at all. The contract, very simply put, is the following:

• Black pathology is assumed to be due to segregation and other legal barriers arrayed against blacks by whites.
• Whites would take down those barriers. In turn, blacks would behave like whites, or at least participate in civics in a virtuous way.
• Part of the adjustment of black behavior is that blacks must justly evaluate evidence in a trial.

Although it has taken some time to recognize this, the OJ Simpson verdict voided the “civil rights” contract. In the 1990s the pro-white movement, such that it was, was very small – unusual people in the hills and dales. In 1995, the pro-white movement had little, if any, support from educated, civically-minded middle-class whites. After the OJ Simpson case, things quietly changed. The tiny white advocacy movement began to get the support of solid citizens. Magazines like American Renaissance got more dedicated subscribers. The website stormfront.org started up during the trial, it is now one of the top 10,000 websites on the internet. The OJ Simpson verdict was delivered on October 3, 1995. In the November 1995 issue of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor wrote,

On the day of the verdict, the AR office received the following message from a mainstream conservative who is not a subscriber: “Today I moved a little further to the right. Tomorrow I will go shopping for a good rifle and a good handgun. Never before have I felt so alienated from blacks or so doubtful of their ability ever to participate as equals in our society.” This man, like so many others, was chilled at the sight of blacks celebrating the acquittal of the man who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.[14]

This sentiment was not unique. In an article about how American Renaissance subscribers, “saw the light” on racial matters, Terrence Silva of Columbus, Ohio wrote,

My racial consciousness had been quietly forming for years before I became fully aware of the fallacy of egalitarianism and the folly of integration. What pushed me over the edge were the differing reactions of blacks and whites to the O. J. Simpson verdict.[15]

Dawn H. of Ventura, California expressed similar ideas,

I watched much of the trial on television. Mr. Simpson was obviously guilty but he got away with it because he was black, rich, and could afford to hire the best lawyers who blatantly used race to deflect attention from the evidence. As I watched blacks cheer the verdict, I realized that these people hate us. And they hate us because we are white.[16]

Lawrence Auster wrote a great deal about the OJ Simpson Trial’s aftermath. One of his email exchanges with a reader on the matter was published and said,

My [black] friend and I were at work together on the day the verdict came in from the O.J. Simpson trial. As soon as the verdict was announced he started dancing and cheering. I had already become extremely dismayed at the fact that this, supposedly educated man, a man I cared for, would believe that O.J. was framed. When he celebrated the acquittal, I was stunned. My good friend had just celebrated the acquittal of an obvious murderer. He was not just happy about the not guilty verdict. He was ecstatic. I could never reconcile this event with the loving, caring man I thought I knew.[17]

Lawrence Auster himself said,

After the Simpson verdict, the [mainstream media] line was, “Two Americas across a chasm, not understanding each other.” The assumption was that the two races had two different points of view. This implied that the blacks had a rational point of view. The problem was that they didn’t. They just had a racialist, resentment-driven, pro-criminal attitude that was unappeasable, not appealable to by reason, and that would justify any crime against whites as payback. This was the deep black “attitude” that whites “failed to understand.”

So the way you respond is by identifying the actual black attitude, showing its irrationality and worthlessness, and saying that whites make a fatal error by entering into “dialog” with blacks in which it is assumed that the blacks are rational actors like the whites, whereas in fact they are not rational, but have what is essentially a criminal mentality, wherein they identify with and support criminals, especially anti-white criminals (even if they are not criminal themselves). [18]

Of course, the “civil rights” idea is not yet dead and gone. The government still funds the Equal Opportunity Office, the 1964 Civil Rights act is still on the books, and there is still a park with a stone idol of Martin Luther King Jr. in DC. Yet “civil rights” is off the moral high ground.[19] Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman may be the price for the coming white Promised Land.

Notes

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-19/news/vw-4329_1_land-of-la-la

[2] Also: Famous Greater LA crime victim Denise Huber was from South Dakota and she lies buried in that state after her body was discovered in a freezer. In cultural works, Midwestern roots for fictional Los Angelinos are often deliberately written in. For example, Ruth Fisher, from HBO’s Six Feet Under drama, was said to be from Nebraska. White Advocate Ben Klassen learned the real estate trade in LA, and got there by way of Saskatchewan.

[3] https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5285

[4] Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 27.

[5] This hostility first appeared during the US Civil War (1861 – 1865). On one spectacular example of this, on 8th of December 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, the Union Army’s XIV Corps pulled up the pontoon bridge at Ebenezer Creek stranding thousands of blacks on the other side. Until that time, the Union XIV Corps had been followed by thousands of blacks that had left their plantations and followed the Union Army. The men of the Union XIV Corps got tired of the blacks. When the bridge was pulled, the blacks stuck on the other side of Ebenezer Creek knew they’d be captured by the Confederate Army and returned to slavery. Many blacks panicked, attempted to swim across the creek and drowned. An official inquiry followed.

All of the field artillery batteries in the Union XIV Corps were from the Midwest, of the 46 infantry regiments, all but three were Midwestern (north of the Ohio, west of the Appalachians). Of the three non-Midwestern infantry regiments one was from the Midwestern’s Eastern Seaboard cultural hearth of Pennsylvania. The regiment serving as the Union XIV Corps rear guard, the 2nd Minnesota Infantry, makes no reference to blacks trapped at Ebenezer Creek in its official history. It states, “This day [8 December 1864] we crossed the Ebenezer creek as rear guard, and were closely pressed by the enemy while our bridge was being taken up.” https://archive.org/stream/storyofregimentb00bish/storyofregimentb00bish_djvu.txt

[6] http://takimag.com/article/whats_the_matter_with_wisconsin_steve_sailer/print#axzz4ntpF0drN http://www.vdare.com/articles/mapping-the-unmentionable-race-and-crime

http://www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#detail?state1Option=U.S.%20Total&state2Option=0

[7] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001132.html

[8] Toobin, op. cit., p. 196

[9] Toobin argues on page 109 that the racial issue emerged as early as the Low Speed Chase. “Local reporters broadcasting live from Sunset found a stark racial division at the scene. The whites, a minority of the revelers, were curiosity seekers— ‘looky loos’ in the LAPD phrase—who had come simply to experience the bizarre scene. The African-Americans, on the other hand, had mostly come to show solidarity, and their chants and shouts made their feelings clear. ‘Free O.J.!’ they repeated again and again. Interviewed on KCBS, one of them said, ‘I feel that the black people ought to come together. They’re trying to make us extinct.’ A woman then added, ‘First it was Michael [Jackson] and Mike Tyson and Rodney King. I’m calling for the unification of the black race!’”

[10] Ibid, p. 180

[11] Ibid, p. 290

[12] http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/afrocentrism-ancient-astronauts-and-black-sea-africans

[13] It is baffling to this author why there is not a greater outcry about the racial problems in the integrated US Military. Race problems come up as a factor in every unit or ship history after World War II. In his account about the 1967 Israeli sneak-attack on the USS Liberty, James M. Ennes Jr, then an officer on the ship, wrote a long footnote about the racial issues aboard the vessel. He explained that the white enlisted men felt they were abused by the non-white petty officers in key positions of authority.

[14] https://www.amren.com/archives/back-issues/november-1995/

[15] https://www.amren.com/news/2009/07/how_i_saw_the_l/

[16] Ibid.

[17] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022173.html

[18] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005904.html#grant

[19] To add to this is the rehabilitation of Mark Fuhrman. The “racist” detective has had more than one interview with Oprah, and been sympathetically shown on female-centric daytime TV shows. He is also a respected commentator on Fox News. OJ Simpson is a pariah.