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334 Call me the last innocent in America, but the day the O. J. Simpson verdict came in, I thought a conviction was possible, even likely. Paradoxically, it was Detective Mark Fuhrman’s lurid tape-recorded spew that made me think so. Here was this guy, the personification or nightmare caricature of the law gone rotten, the cop as racist vigilante (with a name from the same root as “führer,” no less), and yet his exposure had failed—or so it seemed to me—to make a serious dent in the prosecution’s case. Simpson’s history of violence against Nicole was damning, even without the evidence Judge Ito had disallowed. There was simply too much physical evidence to be entirely invalidated by the bungling that had surrounded its collection; and deliberately falsifying that evidence would have required an elaborate conspiracy that required too much coordination and disciplined silence, among too many people with no discernible motive, to be remotely plausible. In any case, it didn’t make sense that policemen who had protected Simpson in the past, and hesitated to arrest him for the murders, would want to frame him. And in the absence of such a plot, the Fuhrman tape, however shocking, was irrelevant. Most juries, when it comes down to the wire, take their job seriously; surely, I thought, in a world-is-watching case like this, the jurors’ pride in their role, their sense of the gravity and public import of their decision, will prevail. Wasn’t it, in a genteel middle-class way, as racist as Fuhrman’s rantings to assume that black jurors would act reflexively to free a black celebrity or stick it to the LAPD? And when the decision came back so quickly, I knew it had to be “guilty.” True, quick verdicts were usually acquittals, but in this case it was inconceivable that twelve people could let their man off without a long and bloody argument . So I began mentally composing my Village Voice column, along the lines Rodney King’s Revenge Rodney King’s Revenge 335 of how whites had been carried away by racial paranoia and blacks by dreams of Rodney King’s revenge, but in the end the jury had chosen reality over fantasy and history over myth. In the column I actually wrote, I told this story. In response I got an angry letter from a black woman who accused me of wanting the Simpson jurors to “rise above race” to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about. I was embarrassed to realize she was right. That moment of recognition didn’t change my opinion of the verdict, but it made it clear that wherever one stood in relation to this Rorschach test of the century, there was little enough innocence to go around. Not that I had ever imagined my view of O. J. Simpson was unconditioned by my overall views of the world. In truth, the moment I knew he had beaten Nicole, I found him guilty. To me it was clear that the same mania for control that had led him to beat her had ultimately led him to kill her. I also thought he deserved to be put away whether or not he had actually committed murder. While various commentators, in the days after his arrest, suggested that people felt they knew O. J. and therefore wouldn’t want to see him executed , I found Simpson’s history of unpunished brutality so infuriating that I lusted to kill him myself (which I guess means I could hold my own in a presidential debate) and include a few cops, judges, and freeway cheerleaders for good measure. Of course, had I been on the jury, I would have made every effort to put my preconceptions aside and weigh the evidence; I believe in the principle of a fair trial. But that’s what they all say (and what, in fact, jurors said). The point is, I knew my story had a gendered spin. I shouldn’t have been surprised that it had a racial spin as well. In view of the acquittal and its aftermath, it’s easy to forget that racial fantasy was inseparable from the Simpson case long before Johnnie Cochran started spinning it—as early as the controversial Time cover with the “photo illustration ” of O. J. that darkened his skin a few shades. The “American Tragedy” Time proclaimed on that cover referred less to Simpson’s...

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