Tiger Teeth Around Their Neck: The Cultural Logic of the Canonization of African American Literature

WILLIAM LYNE Tiger Teeth Around Their Neck: The Cultural Logic of the Canonization of African American Literature Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass, 1857 'arx's remark that history always happens twice—the first time -as tragedy, the second time as farce—takes an odd twist in the case of the O. J. Simpson trial. The farce of the Simpson proceedings is anticipated by a tragic fiction—Richard Wright's Native Son. O. J. Simpson is certainly a more celebrated native son than Bigger Thomas, but there are many striking congruences. The overdetermined questions swirling around a dead white woman and an accused black man, the spectacular chase scene (Bigger Thomas' chronicled in the newspaper , Simpson's on television), and the carnival ttial focused on gtuesome evidence and stat lawyers are all part ofWright's 1940 novel. The juxtaposition of these two texts is interesting not only for the ways in which the details of the fiction predict the Simpson saga, but also fot the way in which it highlights how out institutions of representation circumscribe the ways we talk about African American politics and culture. Johnny Cochran and the rest of Simpson's legal "dteam team" did not choose to portray theit client as an American native son. Faced with Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 3, Autumn 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 ?ooWilliam Lyne evidence that was arguably more extensive and more compelling than the evidence the state's attorney could offer against Bigger Thomas, Simpson's lawyers could have deployed the same sort ofsocioeconomic analysis used by Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max. Where Max talked about the capitalist forces that converged on the south side of Chicago to create Bigget, Cochran could have told the jury about Simpson's childhood in a San Francisco ghetto, the misogynist culture of American collegiate and professional sports, and the attitude fostered by the authorities ' willingness to ignore spousal abuse in general and Simpson's wife-beating in particular. Among the many reasons not to deploy such a strategy, one of the best would surely be that it did not work for Bigger Thomas. Not only did Boris Max's Marxist analysis not lead to Bigger 's acquittal, it did not even keep him off death row. But while Cochran chose not to discuss the larger forces that may have shaped O. J. Simpson, he did not completely abandon social and institutional analysis. His plea for the jury to "send a message" invoked a histoty of criminal justice oppression and police force brutality that stretched well beyond the boundaries of the People vs. O. J. Simpson. Despite the fact of a racially mixed jury, most commentators on the case (including one of Simpson's own attorneys, Robert Shapiro) read Cochran's remarks in black and white, as a simple matter of "playing the race card." This reading was reinforced with continual reference to polls that showed blacks and whites deeply divided on the question of Simpson's guilt, and with the constant video replay of crowds of black people cheering the verdict juxtaposed with crowds of white people looking dismayed and angry. No one in the mainstream media suggested that the white and Hispanic working-class members of the juty may have empathized with Cochran's indictment of power and police on grounds othet than tace. This atgument would not have sold commercial time, not just because it does not fit comfortably into a sound bite, but also because we have no context, even in those spaces less frenzied than television and the mainstream media, to heat such an argument. This is perhaps the most important point ofcomparison between the O. J. Simpson trial and Native Son. The reception of these two texts takes place in a matrix ofreadings and interpretations that shapes what we heat and how we hear it. As Eric Cheyfitz points out, "The books we read in school and the way we learn to read them socialize us" (541, my italics). The canonization ofNative Son makes it at least part of the mix Tiger Teeth Around Their Neck??? that creates the fotms and...