Powell’s Popularity Gives Us Hope

At last, it’s over. The trial that saturated the media landscape like an oil spill has finally ended. The national drama that began with television cameras following O.J.’s white Bronco along a California freeway, closed with another set of cameras following his caravan home.

On Tuesday, a phalanx of television networks simultaneously broadcast the news to a country that had virtually shut down business in anticipation.

Not guilty, they announced. Not guilty of murdering Nicole Simpson. Not guilty of murdering Ron Goldman.

The jury of 12 citizens, who had been incarcerated for 266 days, was swift and unanimous. The jury of nine African-Americans, two whites and one Latino saw eye to eye. The jury of ten women and two men set O.J. free.

Today O.J. Simpson is free to lead his life, free to promote the O.J. trademark, free to cash in on his fame. Free to reunite with the two young children left motherless by murder.

And with this freedom, the raised voices of racial division seem ever more strident.

After all, there was a 13th juror in this trial - the television audience, the American public. Together, Americans followed the twists of evidence and the turns of emotion.

They heard Johnnie Cochran plead that freeing Simpson would be a strike against “genocidal racism.” “If you don’t stop it,” he asked, “who will?”

They heard an industry of O.J. experts debate how the verdict would be colored by racial experiences, whether African-American jurors could see beyond Mark Fuhrman’s hate and the LAPD’s sloppiness.

They read polls that showed opinions about O.J.’s guilt and innocence as starkly divided as white and black.

Like it or not - and I did not - the trial switched from being a case about domestic violence to a case about race. Now, many white Americans - including this one - are as sobered by this decision as black Americans were angered by the Rodney King verdict.

For weeks, I have been struck by two African-American men who dominated the news. One was O.J. Simpson. The other was, of course, Colin Powell. One was a former football hero and the other a retired general. One was on trial for murder, the other on a trial run for the White House.

Colin Powell called his autobiography about his rise from humble Harlem public school origins, “My American Journey.” O.J. Simpson’s story is also an American journey, about the rise and fall - and now rescue - of a “hero.”

I kept thinking how these two men, who occupied Page One so often and so differently, both have become symbols. They are conduits or icons for complicated emotions about race.

O.J. once said that his “greatest accomplishment” was getting people to “look at me like a man first, not a black man.” Yet in the past year, he was an icon for racial polarization.

Meanwhile Colin Powell, who talks of himself easily as a brother, is being talked about as the heir to Ike’s mantle. A “black kid of no early promise,” as he describes himself, has become a great hope. Not a black hope or a white hope, but a hope. His not-yet-candidacy has already become an emotional magnet for racial healing.

These two men have nothing in common except their skin color and our attention. But these are names and stories that we attach to a tough ongoing dialogue about race.

The country that looks at this verdict is deeply divided, an apartheid of perceptions, an America of separate realities. But the same country that looks to Powell is not blinded by color. It’s united by overarching values and indeed longs for the reconciliation he personifies.

The point is that both possibilities coexist in this best-of-times, worst-of-times moment in race relations. The possibility of an irreconcilable wedge and of a bridge, the potential for vast misunderstandings and for connections. Two Americas and one.

I regard this verdict as unjust. The jury traded Nicole Simpson for Mark Fuhrman. This yearlong misadventure has brought out our worst. But there is a less-segregated frame of mind in America that’s represented by the likes and the liking of Powell.

So I refuse to see America as hopelessly polarized. On that, there is more than enough room for reasonable doubt.