Deceived: The Unreadability of the O.J. Simpson Case

Canadian Review of American Stu dies/ Revue canadienned'etudesamericames Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 177-188 Deceived: The Unreadability of the O.J. Simpson Case Rinaldo Walcott 177 Toni Morrsion and Claudia Brodksy Lacour (eds.) Birth of a Nation 'Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Pp. 418. The O.J. Simpson case is really about how we "read." Reading practices are so central to the case, that any discussion of the case without attention to how we "read" would be futile. Furthermore, it does not matter which side of the debate you stand on, your reading of the case can be understood through some notion of deception-you either believe Simpson to be guilty or not. Either reading is a reading fraught with deception. But reading the Simpson case is not an easy reading-if ever reading was easy. Rather reading the Simpson case is about the inability to not read or the unreadability of the O.J. Simpson case. But the very unreadability of the case is the condition of its readability. The Simpson case is all about reading(s). Misreadings, deceptive readings, insightful readings, televisual readings, legal readings, raced readings, gendered readings, sexual readings, feminist readings, readings of class, etcetera. 178 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadtenne d'etudes amhtcames A proliferation of readings both make and unmake our relation to how we read the case and therefore read ourselves into the script of what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and disturbing spectacles of latetwentieth -century culture. Birth of a Nation 'Hood is a collection of essays which read various aspects of the O.J. Simpson case while simultaneously reading how the case is a symptom of American racial-sexual-gender politics. The title of the collection is particularly striking with its reference to G. W. Griffith's notorious film Birth of a Nation (1915). A film which inaugurated a particular representation of the black male body and its sexual and violent desires in relation to the white woman's purity and need for protection from black men. The cinematic inauguration of the trope of the black rapist. The reference to Griffith's film is not merely play, it is deeply implicated in the ways in which the schism of race plays itself out in American culture-both popular and judicial. Birth of a Nation cements the two-popular culture and the judicial. The use of the film signals the ways in which the vigilante justice represented in Birth of a Nation might not be very far removed from what has transpired in the context of the Simpson trials and his criminal acquittal. The reference is even more poignant in the context of the post-Rodney King beating and trials and the Los Angeles riots. But the title of the collection also seeks to interestingly undermine and differently "blacken" the reference to Griffith by making use of the "black" signifier "hood." Hood, the amputated form of neighbourhood made popular by the kinds of imagined black (male) youth that the Time Magazine cover of Simpson tried to tie and turn him into, functions as a kind of resisting racialization. If black inner city youth shorten neighbourhood to hood we might ask ourselves what has occurred there that an adjustment in naming was necessary . The incidence of shorten life expectancy rates? The lack of employment opportunities and meaningful employment? Longer and more frequent incarceration rates among black men? Such questions take us into the murkier and more troubling confines of American society. In the use of the signifier hood is an interesting set of questions, posed but not necessarily answered. Was the court room in the Simpson trial(s) the hood? Is America one big hood as far as black people and the legal system are concerned? Was the O.J. Simpson case a cultural "drive-by" on African Americans? The kind of thing the hood Rinaldo Walcott I 179 is supposed to be notorious for? The stereotype of the hood is that it is a place infested and affected by all forms of black depravity. Maybe the use of hood in the title of this...