The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (14 page)

The three uses of race I have in mind are race as
context
, race as
subtext
, and race as
pretext
. Race as context helps us to understand the
facts
of race and racism in our society. Race as a subtext helps us to understand the
forms
of race and racism in our culture. And race as a pretext helps us to understand the
function
of race and racism in America. Of course, these categories are not absolute. They are impure and flexible. They often bleed into one another. But if we’re aware such distinctions exist, we have a better chance of reducing the anxiety around a highly charged subject. I’m using these categories as a tool to analyze race and as a way to describe how race and racism have affected American life. I’ll briefly explore these uses of race before explaining how they might help us sort through the racial mess that the verdicts revealed.

Race as context shows how arguments have been used to clarify the role race and racism have played in our nation’s history. To view race as a context leads to
racial
clarification
. With racial clarification, we get down, as nearly as we can, to the facts of race. When did the idea of race emerge? Why did America choose to make distinctions among people based on race? What happened during slavery? What was Reconstruction really about? What were Abraham Lincoln’s motives in freeing the slaves? How did the civil rights movement get started? What was the role of black women in the black freedom struggle of the ’60s? How was black sexuality viewed during the early part of this century? How many black men were lynched before 1950? When did affirmative action start? And so on. By having these facts in hand, we’re more likely to weave them into an accurate account of how race has shaped our culture. Such an account helps us tell the complex, compelling story of how race influenced ideas like democracy, justice, freedom, individuality, and equality. It also helps us to understand how racism began and spread. The most valuable use of racial clarification may be the vibrant historical framework it gives our discussions about race. It is stunning how much ignorance about what really happened in our racial past poisons present debates about race. Of course, we don’t benefit from a Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” perspective of the past. There will be disputes about the facts and what they mean. But we certainly need to work as hard as possible to figure out what happened as we interpret the history of race.

Race as subtext highlights how arguments have been used to mystify, or deliberately obscure, the role of race and racism in our culture. To view race as a subtext aids our understanding of racial mystification. With this view of race, we can describe the different forms that racism takes, the disguises it wears, the tricky, subtle shapes it assumes. Race and racism are not static forces. They mutate, grow, transform, and are redefined in complex ways. Understanding
racial mystification
helps us grasp the hidden premises, buried perceptions, and cloaked meanings of race as they show up throughout our culture. (I realize that race and racism are not living organisms. But they have, besides an impersonal, institutional form, a quality of fretful aliveness, an active agency, that I seek to capture.)

For instance, terms like “enlightened” and “subtle” racism have been used to describe one transformation of racism: the shift from overt racism to covert forms that thrive on codes, signals, and symbols. And racial mystification was certainly at play when Charles Stuart in Boston and Susan Smith in South Carolina deflected attention from murders they had committed—Stuart of his wife, Smith of her two sons—by claiming a black man was at fault. What made their stories believable was not the fact, but the perception, of black crime. Statistically speaking, blacks overwhelmingly murder blacks, just as whites overwhelmingly murder whites. Since black males have become racially coded symbols for pathological, criminal behavior, the Stuart and Smith stories found millions of white believers. Such beliefs about black males are subtle updates of an ancient belief about black men as beasts and sexual predators. Race understood as a subtext allows us to get a handle on the changing forms of racist belief and behavior in our culture.

Finally, race as pretext shows how arguments have been used to justify racial beliefs and to defend racial interests. If the context of race is tied to history and the subtext to culture, then the pretext of race is linked, broadly speaking, to science. Race viewed as a pretext increases our understanding of
racial justification
. The stress in racial justification is on how race functions to give legitimacy to racial ideas. The proponents of racial justification drape their arguments about race in the finest garbs of science: objectivity and neutrality. After all, they are dealing in the realm of the empirical, those things that can be proved true or false by experiment and observation. Their work is often developed in the name of the sciences, natural or social. In some cases, racial justification simply seeks to supply a reasoned argument for racial preconceptions. Such arguments form a pretext to justify deeply rooted racial passions, and often give a scientific glow to racist beliefs.

For instance, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s
The Bell Curve
claimed to be a work of science, a work of cool, dispassionate reason. Murray and Herrnstein simply translated racist beliefs into empirical arguments about the limits of black intelligence. Their book has been widely debunked as pseudoscience. But the enormous interest that greeted it suggests the intellectual appeal of the claims they make. The case of black psychiatrist Frances Cress-Welsing is instructive as well. In her book,
The Isis Papers
, she argues for the Cress Theory of color—confrontation and racism. She links the development of white supremacist ideology to white fear of genetic annihilation. It is a biologically based argument, linked to the superiority of black skin because of its ability to produce melanin, to explain the rise of white supremacy. Cress-Welsing’s theory is certainly an example of contorted reasoning used to justify racial beliefs. Viewing race as a pretext helps us to identify scientific, empirical work that attempts to justify racist beliefs.

These three uses of race and racism might help us figure out key elements of the trial. Take the bitter dispute over the “mountain of evidence.” For most whites and some blacks, there was more than enough evidence to convict Simpson. Simpson had brutally battered Nicole. The blood of the victims was in his Bronco. Simpson’s blood was at the crime scene. A bloody glove was found at the crime scene, its match on Simpson’s estate. And above all, there were highly sophisticated DNA tests that seemed to prove Simpson’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But for most blacks and some whites, there was substantial doubt about the validity of the evidence, for several reasons. The reckless manner in which the evidence was collected and tested. Defense experts who testified that the evidence was questionable, inconclusive, or plain contrary to the prosecution’s interpretation. And above all, the star prosecution witness, police detective Mark Fuhrman, a major collector of evidence against Simpson, who turned out to be a bigot of the worst sort.

Most whites and blacks conceded that Fuhrman’s bigotry was awful. Both whites and blacks admitted that the police work was sloppy. But for most whites and a few blacks, these factors didn’t matter enough to keep them from believing in Simpson’s guilt. Most blacks and some whites believed that Fuhrman’s mean-spirited bragging
about harming, possibly killing, blacks in the past—plus the fact that he collected crucial evidence—was reason enough to doubt Simpson’s guilt.

What are we to make of how black folk viewed the evidence?

Right away, race as pretext, or racial justification, makes it clear that evidence never speaks for itself. Evidence never exists in a vacuum. It is used for particular purposes.

In the Simpson case, as in any case where race is a source of contention, how we see evidence is shaped by ideological and racial interests. Evidence must be viewed through a lens of interpretation. Such a lens is surely colored by the history of race. Race as context, or racial clarification, helps us understand the facts of race that might influence how blacks view the evidence in the Simpson case in sharply different fashion from whites. There are many. The unjust treatment thousands of blacks have received at the hands of the justice system. The manufacturing of evidence against black defendants in the past. Judicial indifference to compelling evidence of a black defendant’s innocence. The unequal application of punishment to black and white defendants convicted of the same crime. And repeated instances of police brutality in black communities.

Of course, the Rodney King case had already made Los Angeles blacks, indeed blacks throughout the nation, skeptical about the uses of evidence in the judicial system. Particularly when black bodies were at stake. There was, as far as most black folk were concerned, indisputable proof—if not quite the mountain of evidence amassed in the Simpson case—that police brutality was the plague they claimed it to be. After all, nobody saw Simpson murder two people. But the world saw King getting his skull smashed over and over and over again. Millions of black folk, along with the outrage they felt at the King beating, breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, here was the case that would ring the death knell for police brutality and bring the curtain down on the terror that millions of blacks feel when they’re stopped by a white cop. But it was not to be. With a barrage of shrewd legal arguments, lawyers for the cops accused of King’s beating made the white jury disbelieve what they saw with their own eyes. Neither could millions of blacks believe what they saw. At the trial where King’s molesters were acquitted, the roar of evidence barely whimpered. Objectivity was crushed. Reason was sullied. Racial justification abounded.

To be sure, Los Angeles didn’t catch fire because of a highfalutin debate about race as a pretext for the brutal treatment of blacks. It didn’t erupt over intellectual disputes about the twisted uses of reason, objectivity, and evidence in the justification of racial violence. Yet these factors surely played their part in the L.A. riots of 1992. The seams of black civility finally burst because black folk concluded that even when they played by the rules, they could expect nothing in return—when the evidence was clear as day, it could be explained away. Of course, race as pretext and subtext converge at King’s body. King was termed “bearlike,” “hulklike,” and “like a wounded animal” by his molesters. In view of King’s assault, these terms revealed a racially mystified description that appealed to old beliefs, as I’ve argued above, about black males as animals. And of course, by portraying him in such racially mystified terms, the cops were able to justify their vicious treatment of King: treatment befitting a beast.

This history must be kept at the forefront of any discussion of how black folk—including the jurors—viewed the evidence against Simpson. Black response to the evidence in the Simpson case might be viewed as an example of reasonable black suspicion of the uses—really misuses—of the Enlightenment and its towering offspring: objectivity and reason. Both have been used to justify black suffering and death around the globe. Both, or at least twisted versions of the two, have led rational white folk to treat rational black folk in irrational, inhumane ways, or to overlook evidence of such behavior in their fellow whites. Plus, many blacks are suspicious of medical technology. Think of the infamous Tuskegee Study begun in 1932, when three hundred black men were used as guinea pigs to test the longterm effects of untreated syphilis. Of course, there’s no direct link between such cases and the Simpson case. But such cases leave millions of blacks suspicious of the uses of sophisticated scientific technology. Especially when it is employed to prove black inferiority or to experiment with blacks as animals. A potent mix of reasonable suspicion, conspiracy theories, and paranoia thrives in pockets of black America. In the light of real abuse and suspected offenses, it is not difficult to understand how highly educated blacks could believe, for instance, that AIDS was invented to destroy black folk. Or that evidence cooked up by sophisticated science could be manufactured, distorted, or tainted to nab an innocent black man. As remote as it might seem to whites, that possibility loomed large in the Simpson case for millions of blacks. There are a thousand Mark Fuhrmans in black history. Race as context makes that fact crystal clear.

The three uses of race I’ve sketched might also clear up confusion about the socalled race card. The “race card” invariably referred to Johnnie Cochran’s introduction of race as a factor in Simpson’s trial. It referred especially to the defense’s intended blasting of Mark Fuhrman, and to Cochran’s statements outside the court about the pervasive nature of race in our nation. But we should make distinctions. First, the charge that Cochran played the race card is a charge of racial justification. That is, it is a charge that he used race as a pretext to argue Simpson’s lack of guilt because of Fuhrman’s racist behavior. That charge against Cochran is a separate issue from the validity of his point about the pervasiveness of race, which is a question of the context of race—of whether the facts, or at least an interpretation of the facts, warrant Cochran’s assertion about how pervasive race is.

During the trial, and in commentary since the trial ended, the two meanings have been blurred. Cochran’s point about racial pervasiveness was taken as a justification for his use of race in Simpson’s defense. In fact, I think it was an attempt at racial clarification, an attempt to clarify the huge impact of race in our culture. By discussing the pervasiveness of race, Cochran sought to do a difficult thing: to talk about white racism and the privileges and penalties it bestows. It is certainly possible to disagree with Cochran’s use, or interpretation, of the facts. One can
argue that Cochran used legitimate facts in a distorted way. But one cannot ignore the truth of his statements about the prevalence of race in our culture. By keeping the two meanings of race separate, we won’t automatically confuse speaking about the facts of race or racism with an attempt to justify unprincipled arguments or exploitative behavior.