








 the Cen-'s h U^ ^Ouse, this was unusual. The makeup of recent ju-ack^o16611   n th6 avera8e> 46 percent white, 25 percent )g/ Percent Latino, and 10 percent Asian. The pool of hite ^Wh*ch the Simpson jurors were drawn was 40 percent sian H Percent black, 17 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent he D  w ^en did the final panel become 75 percent black? Krcis0^0111018 made scant use of a jury consultant, failed to race	PeremPtory challenges, ignored the question
  Scused instead on picking women in the belief
32. From Scottsboro to Simpson that they would listen with particular sympathy to the domestic-violence evidence.
It was a gamble, and it worked out badly. A mostly black jury was an invitation to racial mischief, readily accepted by the defense. The race card wasn t just played; it was played from the bottom of the deck,  as defense attorney Robert Shapiro lately acknowledged. In fact, Cochran s closing statement eerily echoed a defense attorney s final argument on behalf of the two white men accused of the brutal murder of a 14-year-old black youngster, Emmett Till, after he  wolf-whistled  at a white woman in 1955:  I am sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to acquit these men. 
There were actually two racial cards in Cochran s hand. In equating detective Mark Fuhrman with the LAPD and with Hitler, he brilliantly indicted the entire LAPD for the racism of a single individual and appropriated the Holocaust for his own ends. The suffering of blacks in Los Angeles in 1995 became the moral equivalent of that of Jews under the Third Reich. And he placed all those who sought Simpson s conviction (including the family of Ronald Goldman, conveniently Jewish) on the side of the Nazis. The Goldman parents and their son, not to mention Nicole Simpson and her family, were thus stripped of their moral standing as victims. In their place stood O. J., now a symbol of black suffering.
Cochran s appeal to racial solidarity was ugly and perhaps unnecessary. Most members of the jury had apparently made up their minds before the closing arguments, as had the public outside the courtroom. After the preliminary hearing, about 60 percent of whites in a national sample said they believed Simpson to be guilty, and the same was true in March 1995, two months into the trial. For blacks, by contrast, 68 percent of those polled that March believed Simpson innocent, and the percentage expressing an opinion of actual guilt had declined from 15 percent in November to 8 percent four months later. At the end of the trial, 83 percent of blacks agreed with the verdict, while only 37 percent of whites did. Between the public at large and the jury, however, there was obviously one important difference. The racial split on the outside was not reflected in the final verdict of those on the inside, although with nine blacks on the jury and the threat of another riot (implicitly made by Cochran), perhaps a simple desire for self-and public-preservation made unanimity inevitable. Indeed, one of the white jurors has since stated her belief in Simpson s guilt.
The racial divide split television pundits as well; black commentators were almost uniformly cheerleaders for the defense, while the white attorneys were more balanced in their views. Reactions to Cochran were similarly divided. He was hailed in the black community as  our new Joe Louis.  In August, he gave the keynote speech at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and, a month later, stole the spotlight from both President Clinton and General Colin Powell at a conference of the Congressional Black Caucus attended by 5,000 participants. After the verdict, former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley called him a  national hero. 
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5. AFRICAN AMERICANS
White perceptions of Cochran s style have, let us say, not been as favorable.
Two races, two views
Two nations, separate and unequal, was the Kerner Commission s description in 1968. The inequality has been dramatically reduced (the good news that the media largely ignores). The median income of black married couples with children is only somewhat less than that for all American families; 12 percent of all college students are now black a figure proportionate to the black population.
It s the sense of separation quite a different matter that is truly worrisome. The Simpson polling data was a wake-up call, but ominous signs had been flickering on the landscape for some time. In a 1970 Harris poll, 64 percent of blacks said that the Black Panthers gave them a sense of pride. In a 1989 ABC/Washington Post survey, 26 percent of blacks signed on to the notion that the majority of whites shared the racist views of the Ku Klux Klan, with another 25 percent of blacks believing that at least one-quarter of whites were in the KKK camp. A 1993-1994 Black Politics Survey found that 50 percent of African-American respondents thought a separate black political party was a fine idea.
After a grand jury dismissed Tawana Brawley s totally groundless 1988 claim that she had been kidnapped and raped by a gang of white men, including a couple of policemen, 73 percent of white New Yorkers understood that she had fabricated the entire story, while only 33 percent of blacks did. Gallup Organization and other analyses indicate that up to 40 percent of African Americans believe that some sort of white conspiracy accounts for the scourge of drugs, guns, or AIDS in black inner-city neighborhoods and, even more ominously, that educated blacks hold views that are as conspiratorial as those of the uneducated. Virulently anti-white voices like that of Khalid Muhammad and Leonard Jeffries are regularly heard on college campuses because that is where they find a sympathetic audience.
The National Association of Black Social Workers has declared that  black children should not be placed with white parents under any circumstances.  In recent years, the percentage of blacks who approve of interracial marriage has been dropping, while white acceptance has been going up. Likewise, some data from Detroit suggest that black enthusiasm for integrated neighborhoods has been declining. In the years from 1978 to 1992, Detroit s whites increasingly accepted having black neighbors, but blacks became less willing to live in predominantly white parts of the metropolitan area.
 It s a black thing, you wouldn t understand  was the slogan on a T-shirt popular among black youth a few years back. In many of the nation s urban schools, racially divisive messages permeate Afrocentric and other curricular materials. Racially determined perspectives are much celebrated. Fundamental differences between whites and blacks are emphasized; agreement is viewed as racially and culturally coercive. It s no wonder that race consciousness is rising. We ve been hard at work
encouraging it, and not only in our schools. Every affii action policy delivers the message that white folks ar folks really are not the same, that blacks have much from that perceived difference, that color consciousne: ticket to success. The Simpson acquittal is affirmativ gone over the cliff: Such racial double standards h< infected juries and perverted the administration of jj tragic denouement to the half-century-old quest to e bias against blacks in the legal system.
The Simpson acquittal was not unique. No ont how often black jurors have cast a racial protest vol face of overwhelming evidence that a black defei guilty. Courts do not keep records indicating the bre of juries by race. But, in the Bronx, black defend acquitted in felony cases almost one-half of the nearly three times the national rate. In Washingto 95 percent of defendants are black, as are 70 percei jurors; in 29 percent of all felony trials last year, the went free. In addition, post-verdict letters and state a number of cases draw a clear picture of jury nulli Thus a Baltimore jury that included eleven blacks to convict Davon Neverdon of murder last July, de presence of four eyewitnesses; the lone Asian-Ame ror blew the whistle. In Washington in 1990, an Jury acquitted Darryl Smith of murder; a subsequ* from an anonymous juror to the court said a mir the panel who  didn t want to send any more You, Men to Jail  had swayed the rest.
A sense of racial grievance infecting the crimin system whatever its source is not benign. The n heightened distrust of the law, the vital foundation up justice, order, and racial harmony depend. Color-blii is the American ideal; color-consciousness is its en as the Simpson case highlights so starkly, seems to increase. From such color-conscious justice, there is, no appeal no redress. Acquittals (unlike conviction end of the legal road, except in those rare instances federal prosecutors can start anew.
From Scottsboro to Simpson
Interviewed for a symposium in a September 199' Ebony, author Nikki Giovanni described the Simps* Scottsboro redux. Johnnie Cochran, in his closing also referred to the Scottsboro nine. There is a sim it is not the one that either Giovanni or Cochran i have in mind. In both the Scottsboro and O. J- 03 were asked to go beyond the evidence in the interest societal purposes.  Show them, show them that Al< tice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money York  was the 1933  send-a-message  appeal, on* just as successful as Cochran s.
But there the similarity ends. Recall the Scotts' On a March morning, nine black youths were rous
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>ht train in northern Alabama by a hastily assembled posse accused of rape by two white women. After a narrow es-> from lynching, the nine, ranging in age from 13 to 20, e rushed to trial in a Scottsboro courtroom within two ks of the arrest. Represented by an unprepared out-of-state nsel who had no more than a half-hour consultation with clients, eight of the defendants were summarily convicted sentenced to death by all-white juries who deliberated iin earshot of large crowds surrounding the courthouse, ering each guilty verdict. After seven subsequent trials, two  reals by the Supreme Court, and a recantation by one of two women, five of the men served varying prison terms, last released only in 1950.
So leisurely police escort, phone calls to mom, calming ! of orange juice, black jurors, celebrated black attorney, or icitous judge for the Scottsboro nine. In that case, the duly horized legal process made a mockery of due process, ely something that cannot be said about the Simpson trial, atever its other flaws. And yet, such ludicrous comparisons e real currency. With the Republican ascendancy in Con-
32.	From Scottsboro to Simpson gress, Jesse Jackson regularly refers to the end once again  of Reconstruction, while Representative Charles Rangel has equated today s conservatives with yesterday s KKK.
The rhetoric of racial grievance carries a high cost. The views of Jackson, Rangel, and other black leaders help shape the perceptions of ordinary blacks, raising the level of despair and anger, inviting just the sort of hunger for retribution that was on display in the post-verdict days.  I think he did it,  said a black Los Angeles musician.  But I don t think he s guilty. There is an unpaid debt in black history, and we [pulled] for O. J. because of past injustices to blacks.  Among African Americans, it was clearly a widely held view or at least so it seems from media reports.
 It was a great day for African Americans,  a former Simpson juror said on the day of the verdict. That  great day  was followed by another: an unprecedented rally of black masses led by an extremist messenger of separation and bigotry. Whites and blacks ever more apart: it s a black catastrophe and an American tragedy. The storm warnings are up; we ignore them at our peril.
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j
> Asian Americans
The following collection of articles on Asian Americans invites us to reflect on the fact that the United States is related to Asia in ways that would seem utterly amazing to the world
