Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995                   TAG: 9510100044
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

REALITY

Now, why not follow up the Simpson editorial, he suggested, with an editorial decrying the fate of a Los Angeles police officer convicted, on civil-rights charges, in the clubbing of Rodney King?

I stared in disbelief. I struggled to remain civil. Long after he left the office, I couldn't suppress my agitation. I was disgusted.

This man had read into our editorial a presumption that we might be interested in defending the racist detective who oversaw King's beating. Where had we gone wrong?

I sought consolation in philosophy. A point implicit in our O.J. editorial, I reassured myself, is that facts exist somehow in their own right. They possess weight and form independent, to a degree, of how we react to them or feel about them.

That is the presumption, anyway, behind the notion that a jury's perception should include not just the sum of its members' experience, but also the objects of their consideration: facts that, if established with sufficient rigor, should be recognizable more or less to everyone.

One fact that remains is a double murder. The jury's verdict - that prosecutors failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt - does not mean that no one hacked to death Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Nor did the acquittal in the initial Rodney King trial (by a jury with no blacks on it) mean that police officers didn't beat King as he lied prostrate on the ground. We could see it with our own eyes, via the magic of video.

Nor, I hope, does the pleasure my visitor derived from reading our Simpson editorial mean that the editorial itself must be racist. Whatever one might read into them, the words themselves don't change. You say what you think is right, however it is taken.

As it happens, I also had been troubled by another visit to my office, earlier that day. This other visitor applauded Simpson's acquittal and suggested the media all along had viewed the trial ``through white eyes.''

Perhaps. But must different eyes always see different things?

As every commentator has noted, reactions to the verdict - cheering in some quarters, incomprehension in others - dramatically highlight our nation's racial divide. Polls showed that three of four white Americans thought Simpson was guilty, while an equal portion of blacks believed he was innocent. It's a terrible commentary.

The gap has been explained, reasonably enough, by different life experiences and the burden of history. It is not surprising that blacks, especially in cities like Los Angeles, are less likely to trust police and the criminal justice system.

Nor did race-conscious trials begin with O.J. In assessing their own reactions to the verdict, whites would do well to imagine how black people must feel when justice seems a mockery.

For most of our history, whites who lynched or raped blacks have gone free, while all-white juries have convicted blacks on far less evidence than what California had against Simpson. Traditionally, when a jury "sent a message," a black man died.

We can't perpetuate indefinitely the settling of racial scores, of course. But is it enough to acknowledge the racial gap and retreat to separate camps? Martin Luther King Jr. didn't think so. Neither should we.

Here, though, is where it gets hard. To bridge the divide, to come together to talk, we have to be sitting at the same table. We have to work from a common frame of reference. As the reactions to the O.J. trial make plain, this frame is at risk of disappearing from the picture.

Which is why we need candid talk, public and private, between blacks and whites - about feelings, which are real, but also about trying to come to grips with things as they are, whatever we might feel about them.

Forgive the philosophizing, but understand here I'm not talking about agreeing on objective truth, which is forever elusive. Because an observer can't help but influence the observed, because new and conflicting evidence may always emerge, our perceptions can deal only with probabilities.

I can never know for certain that my gentleman visitor last week saw the same cluttered desk that I saw between us while we spoke. But I believe it's very likely he did. Similarly, juries needn't be free of doubt to convict - just free of reasonable doubt.

My point is that, while we can know nothing absolutely if it comes through our senses, we have to act and make choices on the assumption that some sort of reality does exist outside our subjective experience - a reality common to all of us, whatever our perspective.

This is an article of faith that people need to live by, that societies need to survive. It also buttresses the scientific method: Different researchers replicating the same experiment will achieve the same result.

So it must be with criminal justice. To achieve the dream of a society transcending ethnicity, we need to believe that a defendant's or police officer's or judge's or juror's skin color (probably) won't bear on a legal outcome.

To find common ground of confidence in the system, we have to clean out racist institutions like the L.A.P.D., and show no tolerance for bigotry wherever it appears. We have to respect constitutional rights, such as were broken (in my view) from the very beginning in the Simpson case, when police jumped a wall to search his estate.

We have to counter the reality that justice is for sale - perhaps with procedural reforms including limits on the duration of trials. Besides sparing jurors, such limits might make it slightly more difficult for wealthy defendants of whatever race (hint: most of them are white) to spend more months and millions obfuscating facts.

For the sake of our common sense, we also need to believe that what we see with our own eyes is (probably) a workable approximation of what everyone else sees.

We cannot afford to stretch respect for diversity or celebration of feelings to the point that any view is as valid as any another. We cannot allow a culture of paranoid distrust to overwhelm our reasoning capacity, to block us from accepting what our senses and logic tell us is true.

Just as we need to trust our eyes when we see Rodney King beaten and our ears when we hear Mark Fuhrman's racist diatribes, we need to learn to see what happened to Nicole Simpson. To do otherwise is to consign to unreality her death and the domestic violence that goes on, unseen, every day in homes across the country.

In his novel "The Fall," Albert Camus wrote: "We are all exceptional cases. . . . Each man insists on being innocent, even if it means accusing the whole human race, and heaven." Without accountability, we can't go on.

The images flickering on our TV sets and idolized in the cult of celebrity are like electric shadows dancing on a wall. Disconnected over time, changeable by the turn of a knob, they are unreal. On television, says author Neil Postman, "all assumptions of coherence have vanished."

Yet we need assumptions of coherence to live our lives. We have to believe something real casts the shadows on the wall. As Americans sharing aspirations and values and enthusiasms - regardless of the color of our skins - we have to talk about and look honestly at what the shifting patterns in black and white reveal.