ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 9, 1996 TAG: 9602090114
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY
FOR THE past 18 months I have tried to keep the name Orenthal James Simpson out of anything that I wrote, lapsing only once. But I watched his interview on Black Entertainment Television. I wasn't expecting any revelations from Simpson. I just wanted to hear and see how the walking metaphor for all the social ills of America was holding up under house arrest and damnation from every quarter imaginable.
What provoked me to put my feelings into words was the post-interview commentary from a panel comprised of a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, the editor of Emerge magazine and a BET talk-show host. The female host of the live call-in discussion invited racial stereotyping by centering the program on sex and sexual myths.
Then the panelists informed their viewers that what Simpson was really guilty of was miscegenation, or race-mixing. This placed them in accord with a founding tenet of the Ku Klux Klan.
The magazine editor suggested that he wanted Simpson to ``atone'' for his interracial marriage. After the Million Man March, most people know from whom the term atonement emanates: Louis Farrakhan. The communications professor put forth the proposition that those who married outside their race were in some sort of psychological denial of self and race.
I know that publicly accusing other black people of racism is considered off-limits by those presenting themselves as race experts. They mistakenly conclude that, since blacks have little power in this society, they are incapable of perpetuating or generating racism.
In fact, racism is simply the belief that one race is superior to the other. And, unfortunately, racism is exactly what was spewed after the Simpson interview. The views expressed partly explain why racism is so hard to conquer.
The panelists showed no inkling of the life-and-death consequences that their blathering might have. Their unthinking condemnation of the 964,000 interracial marriages in this country was abhorrent. They allied themselves, inadvertently, with the hatred that killed a black man in Taylors, S.C., who was shot while driving with his wife, who happens to be white. They gave comfort to the assailants of the black man in Savannah, Ga., who was stabbed for keeping company with a white woman. They fostered the environment in which a black furniture-store manager in Knoxville, Tenn., could be killed in a car explosion simply because he was rumored to be dating white women.
These tragic events did not happen in 1935 or 1965. They all happened in 1995. To imply that O.J. Simpson's problems are rooted in his association with a white woman is to condone racist violence.
My reaction, I admit, is based on personal experience. My late father was a black man from a little community in South Carolina, ironically called ``Little Africa.'' It was a small enclave of blacks situated at the foot of the mountains, where most folks worked the big, white-owned farms.
At age 15 he joined the Navy and, while in Canada, met my mother, a fair-skinned black Canadian of Jamaican and Welsh descent. He later returned to the South after his father's death to deposit his wife and five kids before putting back out to sea. I vividly remember the night the Ku Klux Klan came to our house after assuming my father had married a white woman. The image of the cross burning and my mother shooting out the bedroom window with her little
I don't doubt that some will attempt to cast me as treasonous for expressing my opinion in the ``white folks'' paper, but the racial poison in media coverage of the Simpson circus comes from blacks and whites alike. It ought to be of concern to both.
Too often, reporters ask the wrong questions and fail to pursue the answers. The Simpson jurors, for example, are frequently asked two standard questions, ``Did race play a part in your decision to acquit Simpson,'' and ``Does O.J. need to thank the black community in general, and black women in particular, for the not-guilty verdict?''
The BET panelists focused on the latter question and wasted no time in providing viewers with a unanimous ``yes.'' They also denounced blacks who achieve success and ``leave the black community.'' They insisted that the verdict represented the black community's willingness to take O.J. back after his failed attempt at ``whiteness.''
This was consistent with the panelists' belief in a black code of behavior that requires them to emphasize race above all other attributes, including character. They even criticized Simpson for living in Brentwood, an exclusive white community, implying that blacks who make a lot of money should be restricted in where they choose to live. Following this kind of logic, we might as well repeal the Fair Housing Act because blacks should stay in their place.
For all their professed loyalty to the black community, the commentators left unchallenged one of the most pernicious results of the Simpson verdict: the mainstream media's advocacy of jury reform.
With scarcely concealed ardor, reporters have promoted this cause by relentlessly asking people the question, ``In light of the O.J. Simpson verdict, do you see a need for jury reform?'' The responses to this question, like everything else in American life, are split down racial lines.
When this fact is reported as hard news, politicians respond to the polls in one of two ways. They either propose changing the current jury system to allow for less-than-unanimous verdicts, or even worse, they propose giving prosecutors more flexibility to strike prospective black jurors.
The implications for the black community should be obvious. As the president and the Congress scramble to enact more ``get tough'' crime legislation, there will be a lot more black faces down at the courthouse and a lot fewer black jurors. But instead of taking up the implications of jury reform, the sages of BET devoted themselves to ``the Barbie syndrome,'' i.e., the idea that black men are obsessed with white women.
BET used the Simpson interview to promote its own brand of cultural demagoguery and spurious nationalism at the expense of all persons who have fallen in love with someone of another race.
Kevin Alexander Gray is a national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
- The Washington Post|
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