Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case

by Toni Morrison, T. Morrison, Claudia Brodsky Lacour (Editor)

Overview

Co-edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Birth of a Nation'hood elucidates as never before the grim miasma of the O.J. Simpson case, which has elicited gargantuan fascination.

As they pertain to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through twelve powerful essays that have been written especially for this book by distinguished intellectuals—black and white, male and female. Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend our society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair.

With contributions by:
Toni Morrison, George Lipsitz, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh, Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Ishmael Reed, Leola Johnson and David Roediger, Andrew Ross, Patricia J. Williams, Ann duCille, Armond White, Claudia Brodsky Lacour

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679758938
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/04/1997
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	710,807
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of ten novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to A Mercy (2008). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.

With contributions by:
Toni Morrison
George Lipsitz
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., with Aderson Bellegarde Francois and Linda Y. Yueh
Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Ishmael Reed
Leola Johnson and David Roediger
Andrew Ross
Patricia J. Williams
Ann duCille
Armond White
Claudia Brodsky Lacour

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey, and Manhattan

Date of Birth:

February 18, 1931

Date of Death:

August 5, 2019

Place of Birth:

Lorain, Ohio

Place of Death:

New York

Education:

Howard University, B.A. in English, 1953; Cornell, M.A., 1955

Read an Excerpt

The Official Story:
Dead Man Golfing
 
Introduction by Toni Morrison
 
We have been deceived. We thought he loved us. Now we know that everything we saw was false. Each purposeful gesture, the welcoming smile, the instant understanding of how we felt and what we needed. Even before we knew what was in our best interests, he seemed to anticipate and execute it right on cue. He gentled us toward our finer instincts; toward the medicine that would cure us; toward the rest we needed. He imitated our language in structure and content. And all with the most charming good nature—joy even. So obvious was his fidelity we had no doubt he would lay down his life for us. It seemed inherent, in his nature, so to speak. It was what he was born for.
 
It was not so. Not only did he not love us, he loathed and despised us. All the time he was planning to kill us. And if he is let go, he will do it again; kill more of us. Why? Because he is an animal. Cunning, manipulative, subtle, but savage nevertheless. How could we have been so deceived? How could we have let our vigilance become so clouded? Was it the coast—dulcet, permissive, delusional? The weather—a narcotic calm, enervating heat? The long journey to get to where we were? Or was it perhaps our need to be deceived? Desperate to be that effortlessly and deeply loved, had we fashioned and secured our own blindfolds?
 
Sitting in the courthouse at the trial watching Justice sway her scales; listening to sworn depositions; seeing the witnesses relive their horror, the survivors of the San Dominick could have pondered along those lines over the trial of the Senegalese man who, with a dagger and ferocious single-mindedness, took by murder control of a vessel in order to reverse his fortune, and who, in so doing, disrupted for a little while the routine business of the trade that bought and sold him. That trial took place in 1799 at the close of the eighteenth century, but an end-of-century population of watchers anywhere in the United States (or the world) has had similar thoughts concerning on the shock of deception; the sudden transformation of the unbelievable into belief.
 
Like the readers of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” contemporary “readers” of the Simpson case have been encouraged to move from a previous assessment of Mr. Simpson as an affable athlete/spokesperson to a judgment of him as a wild dog. He is clearly, according to mainstream wisdom, the latter. And the wild dog portrait layered over him contains a further incompatibility: cool, cunning, even intelligent malfeasance or raging, mindless, brutal insanity. The language developing around him portrays a thoughtful, meditating murderer capable of slick and icy-cold deliberations and/or a mindless, spontaneous killer—a kind of lucky buffoon. That each cluster of adjectives cancels out the other is of no moment since contradiction, incoherence and emotional disorder “fit” when the subject is black. A single, unarmed black man on the ground surrounded by twelve rioting police can be seen as a major threat to the police. A beaten up, sexually assaulted black girl wakes up in a hospital and is “convicted” or raping and defiling herself. To ask why? how? Is to put a rhetorical question—not a serious one worthy of serious response. Difficult explanations are folded into the general miasma of black incoherence.
 
In the Simpson case the prosecution put forward a motive (jealous rage) to explain Mr. Simpson’s alleged feral behavior, but with the accumulation of hard evidence they did not have to prove its credibility. They needed a coherent case, not a coherent defendant. “Senseless” is the term most often applied to crime (and criminals) anyway.
[ . . . ]
 
The gargantuanism of the trial—its invention of wild dogs and angels, stick figures and clown, its out-lawry—aroused immediate suspicion. Examining the wright the case has come to have, one is struck by how quickly guilt was the popular verdict. It may have been this early gigantism that made Mr. Simpson’s guilt increasingly remote to some African Americans. Not because they knew or loved him (not even because he is black); not because they suspected foul play. Early on it began to look like white mischief—the kind that surfaces when the opportunity to gaze voluptuously at a black body present itself. The narrative of the entertainment media and their “breaking story” confederates was so powerfully insistent on guilt, so uninterested in any other scenario, it began to look like a media pogrom, a lynching with its iconography intact: a chase, a cuffing, a mob, name calling, a white female victim, and most of all the heat, the panting, the flared nostrils of a pack already eager to convict. For many, black and white, the passion they felt in the wake of the media onslaught was real, hinging as it did on violence and treachery. Mr. Simpson became the repository of fear. Every woman who had felt or witnessed the insensate brutality of men, who had tenderly touched her body where bruises, swellings and breaks limned the violence she had suffered, saw in him the lover she had (or should have) fled. Men who had let their guard down and actually loved this charming black man, men who relished the comfort they felt in his company, or remembered the beauty of his runs—forever, it seemed—across fields long and wide must have felt they had loved the wrong kind of man. The media’s instant and obvious preference for a guilty man created an early if not immediate public rage at having been deceived, of having profoundly flawed judgment. Mr. Simpson was accused of multiple murder. But he was guilty of personal treason.
 
A woman opens her door, steps out and has her head chopped off. A man performs neighborly gesture and is cut to pieces. The media response to this obscenity was excessive, manipulative and generally obfuscatory. But the blood it smelled belonged not to the victims but to the prey—a potent sensation aroused by the site and sight of a fallen, treacherous, violent black body, and sustained by the historical association of such a body with violence as dread entertainment.
 
Within the fecund, self-perpetuation meta-narrative that has followed, not only has the gravitas of the crimes in themselves been lost and forsaken in favor of excitement and frivolity and profit, not only has the resolution of the trial been declared inoperative, the race-based nature of the narrative is reduced to a footnote, an aside, a secondary debate about whether race mattered in the case and if so, how deplorable. There seems to be a universal sorrow that these proceedings were distorted, sullied by race, that its intervention was false, even shrewd, that it should have been (and but for the isolate Mr. Fuhrman and an “uneducated” [read black] jury, could have been) race-free—confined wholly to non-race-inflected evidence, a disinterested legal process in which even to mention race as a major factor rips away the blindfold that Justice wears and forces her to make decisions based on visual bias. Such massive denial of the social (even the material) world, a denial which found its best and worst expression in the “race card” phrase, still has the capacity to astonish.
 
Although some of the media made an effort at restraint, flecks of saliva regularly soiled its reportage. The predictable pounce of every scrap, every leak, every mucus thread of lie or gossip associated with these proceedings revolted and mesmerized. And while media avarice and shamelessness were remarked upon and condemned by the avaricious and the shameless, and while the aggression of the journalists, photographers, commentators and hucksters was routinely deplored by the aggressors themselves, the reporters (collectors and distributors of the narrative) seemed somehow as helpless as fawns in the industry headlights with as much choice as bullets in the barrel of corporate media guns. If there were journalists eager to get other stories before the public, their disappointment at seeing their efforts repeatedly collapse must have been deeply painful. The marketing of every iota of the case had its own relentless power and there was no competition between dollars and disinterested analysis. Between dollars and a rival story. Dollars won.
 
Yet something more was going on; something more than a hot property of mayhem loaded with the thrill that a mixture of fame, sex, death, money and race produces. That something more was the construction of a national narrative, an official story. One of the most alarming aspects of the Simpson case is the shotgun wedding of the commodified, marketplace story and the official story.
 
A national narrative is born in and from chaos. Its purpose is to restore or imitate order and to minimize confusion about what is at stake and who will pay the price of dissension. Once, long ago, these stories developed slowly. They became over time national epics, written, sung, performed and archived in the culture of memory, ideology and art.
 
[ . . . ]

Table of Contents

The Official Story: • vii
Dead Man Golfing
Introduction by Toni Morrison
 
The Greatest Story Ever Told: • 3
Marketing and the O.J. Simpson Trial  
George Lipstiz
 
The O.J. Simpson Trial: • 31
Who Was Improperly “Playing the Race Card”?
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Aderson Bellegarde François, and Linda Y. Yueh
 
Dismissed or Banished?: • 57
A Testament to the Reasonableness of the Simpson Jury
Nikol G. Alexander and Drucilla Cornell
 
Color-blind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: • 97
Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
 
Bigger and O.J. • 169
Ishmael Reed
 
“Hertz, Don’t It?”: • 197
Becoming Colorless and Staying Black in the Crossover of O.J. Simpson
Leola Johnson and David Roediger
 
If the Genes Fit, How Do You Acquit?: • 241
O.J. and Science
Andrew Ross
 
American Kabuki • 273
Patricia J. Williams
 
The Unbearable Darkness of Being: • 293
“Fresh” Thoughts on Race, Sex, and the Simpsons
Ann duCille
 
Eye, the Jury • 339
Armond White
 
The Interest of the Simpson Trial: • 367
Spectacle, National History, and the Notions of Disinterested Judgment
Claudia Brodsky Lacour
 
About the Contributors • 414

Editorial Reviews

[T]hese 11 eloquent essays, by academics and writers from various backgrounds, offer thoughtful, sometimes brilliant insights on the cultural fractures that the trial and its media frenzy both spotlighted and distorted. Standout pieces . . . redeem the complex human issues behind the button-pushing hype.”
—Entertainment Weekly

From the Publisher

It may seem, after more than two years of reporting, speculation, argument, and courtroom drama, that everything that could be written about the Simpson case has been written. Yet this collection of 12 essays, edited by Nobel Prize-winning author Morrison and Princeton professor Lacour, proves there is much more to discuss. From George Lipsitz's careful analysis of marketing and the perception of race in the media to Ann Ducille's discussion of the public perception of Nicole Brown Simpson, these commentaries will pique the interest of even the most weary reader. These pieces provide stimulating challenges to the easy answers and widely held assumptions so readily embraced by many Americans, black and white, about the "trial of the century." Scholarly, provocative, and engrossing, this is highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/96.}-Nora Harris, Marin Cty. Free Lib., Cal.

Library Journal