Trials Leave Emptiness All Around

I was on a highway in Illinois when I first heard the news that the ex-wife of O.J. Simpson had been butchered.

My first thought - without knowing the evidence, circumstances or details - was that Simpson was the likely suspect, only because spouses and other family members often are.

The thing could test our racial maturity, I thought - a black man accused of killing a white woman. Could we seek justice without also seeking redress of grievances and validation of biases that predated this case by nearly four centuries?

We all know how that came out. Could have predicted it. Where race and justice collide, justice usually goes away smashed.

As it happens, I was en route from Milwaukee, where I had interviewed an elderly black man named James Cameron. I was on the way to Marion, Ind., the small town where he nearly was lynched by white people more than 60 years ago. His alleged crimes: the murder of a white man, the rape of a white woman. But Cameron was guilty of neither (the woman said she never had been raped); he had fled the scene moments before the violence occurred.

Though Cameron escaped lynching at the last moment, two of his acquaintances did not. A famous picture shows them hanging, bloody and broken, from a courthouse tree while whites are milling about as if at a church picnic.

No one ever was arrested for the crime. Despite photographic evidence to the contrary, the murders officially were blamed on “persons unknown.”

What’s that have to do with the Simpson odyssey? Depends on whom you are, I suppose.

I know white men who would say it’s beside the point. I know black men who would say it’s precisely the point.

And I know that in just the 2-1/2 years we’ve been arguing about it, dozens of black churches have burned in the South, white soldiers have executed a black couple in North Carolina, a black man has killed Jews in Harlem, Susan Smith has told us a black man had taken her children because she knew we were conditioned to believe it, and untold hundreds of black children have died, murdered by other black children.

And Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman still are dead. Always will be dead.

“We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole,” declared Fred Goldman after the civil trial verdict came in this week. And though one is loath to contradict the grieving father, it seems important to point out that what he got wasn’t justice, but vindication, the satisfaction of finally hearing a court of law declare that O.J. Simpson had murdered his son.

Vindication is good, but what a fine thing justice would have been. Except that it was beyond us.

Justice would have required that media and pundits, black people and white, not position a rather routine murder case as a grand referendum on race.

Justice would have demanded an efficient police investigation, competent criminal prosecution, a businesslike judge. Justice would have mandated brisk and dignified proceedings in which the case did not wend forward forever, becoming by turns a cheap circus, a garish farce and a multimillion-dollar industry in which every peripheral player gets an agent and a book deal.

Finally, yes, justice would have put Simpson in prison.

But there was no justice here. Justice collided with race, then ran smack into class, the ability of a rich, well-connected man to spend himself free.

We are left with no justice and no peace - only a nagging sense of irresolution. Even the cheers that went up from the mostly white crowd outside the courthouse this week once the civil verdicts had been read seemed somehow anti-climactic and desultory, as if to say: Is this all there is?

We saw similar cheers from black people in October 1995, and it was equally unseemly then. Felt equally empty. The slaughter of two human beings had been reduced to the winning shot in a meaningless game: “Score one for our side!”

And now it’s over, and you are chased by the nagging sense that you made it too important, that it was diverting while it lasted, but that in the end, nothing changes, nothing that needed addressing ever was addressed. There were better ways to spend our time.

Instead, we spent it watching the collision of justice and race with morbid fascination as if we ourselves were riding on the outcome.

Now it is over, finally over, and I wonder what we’ve won. Or lost. Or if any of us - any one of us - truly can say it was worth it.

xxxx