No Race Card for O.J.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

New America Media,
Commentary

Editor’s Note: In the first trial,
blacks and whites argued over whether Simpson was a victim of racial persecution in his double murder trial. But in his Las Vegas robbery trial, there is no race card to play, writes NAM commentator
Earl Ofari Hutchinson. Hutchinson is author of the book “Beyond O.J.: Race, Sex and Class Lessons for America.”
His new book is “The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House” (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).
O.J. Simpson and his attorney complained
that the jury in his Las Vegas robbery trial has no blacks on it. But there was never much doubt that it would. That’s the kind of jury that most minority defendants
get in Clark County courts. He’s fortunate, though, that he did get two black juror alternates. Only 5 percent of the potential jurors among the 500 in the Simpson juror panel were blacks. African Americans
make up about 10 percent of Clark County’s population.
But even if blacks were on his jury, it wouldn’t change the fact that this time around, there is no race card to play. In the first trial, blacks and whites argued over whether
Simpson was a victim of racial
persecution in his double murder trial. But immediately after Las Vegas prosecutors hit Simpson with multiple charges,
polls showed that the racial divide was only a marginal issue.
There were still more than a few blacks who complained that an African American couldn’t get a fair trial in any court in America. They even said that was the case with Simpson in Las Vegas.
However, there is no hint that blacks are willing to expend
an ounce of emotional capital railing that Simpson is a victim of a racist system. Virtually
none of the prospective jurors, black or white, uttered anything about race during the jury selection process.
Too much has changed in the decade since the ill-fated trial of the century for that to happen. At the center
of that change is Simpson himself; or rather his antics. He hasn’t exactly been the picture
of the humble, empathetic former sports icon, and much vilified double murder suspect. Simpson has had multiple encounters
with the police and courts, been sued, and has appeared
to take every opportunity
he could to thumb his nose at the civil court that found him liable for the death of Ron Goldman and his ex-wife and slapped him with a multi-million
dollar judgment.
This hardly does much to win Simpson friends, let alone convince anyone that he was indeed the victim of a malicious, racist prosecution.
Then there are the Las Vegas charges.
There’s absolutely no evidence that Simpson was framed or that Las Vegas police
licked their chops at the thought of getting him back in a legal noose. He was at the hotel, the goods were taken, and a robbery complaint was filed. There is no evidence that police in any of the cities that Simpson traveled to peddling sports cards and memorabilia routinely subjected him to a special get-Simpson profile. The best or worst that can be said is that Las Vegas prosecutors
have taken great pains not to give any hint that they were giving him any special treatment
because of his celebrity status. If anything, they may be piling the extra-heavy felony charges on him precisely to avoid giving the impression of celebrity favoritism.
Simpson should have known that any allegation of his involvement in a crime would get him the fast collar. That still has everything to do with his murder trial acquittal. Polls still show that a majority of the public think that he is a murderer who got away, and that the trial and his acquittal were a farce and a blatant travesty
of justice.
Simpson didn’t invent
or originate this ugly divide
in public opinion about celebrity guilt. It has always lurked just beneath the surface. But his case propelled it to the front of public debate and anger. The horde of Simpson media commentators, legal experts and politicians that branded the legal system corrupt
fueled public belief that justice was for sale. His acquittal
seemed to confirm that the rich, famous and powerful have the deep pockets to hire a small army of high-profile attorneys
and investigators that routinely mangle the legal system
to drag out their cases and eventually allow their clients to weasel out of punishment.
Whether the police
did rush to judgment as Simpson claims -- and there’s some wiggle room to debate the magnitude of the charges -- the chatter from most is that a killer is finally getting at least some of his due. Others will say that even Simpson can be a victim of a vindictive and unforgiving
criminal justice system.
The truth, as always, may lie somewhere between the two views.
But one thing is certain:
Race isn’t on the table of public opinion this time around. And that’s not a bad thing.

______________________________________________________ 

NABJ SPECIAL COMMENTARY
By NABJ Founder and Past President Les Payne
NABJ Responds to Pat Buchanan Column, “Whitey Need Not Apply”

Were our racial politics
played out within the pages of DC Comics, Patrick
J. Buchanan would likely be cast as the twisted Joker of Gotham City. This erstwhile politician, for reasons not entirely
clear in a multicultural society, is allowed to haunt the panel of almost every TV talk show discussing the politics of the day.
Television hosts on Fox and MSNBC are careful not to label the race-based menace that Buchanan
pedals, tagging him benignly
as a “political analyst.” The TV pundit, however, is as subtle as a clenched fist about his “white folks” superiority crusade. In his “Brief for Whitey,”
a March 21 blog posting, Buchanan argued that slavery was the best treatment for African-
Americans, whose “lift up” was executed by Christian “white Americans.” Bearing up under this burden even now, whites, he claims, sacrifice mightily to ensure blacks their “freedom and prosperity.”
“Where is the gratitude?” this Joker asked with a straight face. His piece of vendetta was aimed at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his Chicago parishioner,
Sen. Barack Obama, who is running for U.S. president. The polemics of Buchanan, in print and on air, earned him the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual “Thumbs Down” award. The 4,100- member group cited Buchanan’s
crudely insensitive, racist, and stereotypical commentary that craters the landscape of racial
discourse. Past recipients include columnist Armstrong Williams, former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, and most recently, Black Entertainment
Television.
Careful not to cite his recent NABJ recognition, Buchanan countered with a 900-word posting entitled, “Whitey Need Not Apply.” This essay criticized
the efforts of UNITY-a national consortium of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American journalists-to promote
racial and ethnic fairness within media. Buchanan took particular exception to the plan of the “10,000 members of UNITY” to persuade 10 major
media outlets to promote at least one additional, non-white, senior manager to their individual staffs by 2010.
So what’s Buchanan’s problem
with this modest goal?
The UNITY campaign, the Joker rages, does not include “journalists of Irish, English, Polish, Italian, German or Jewish
ancestry, since they are white.” Well, now. It just so happens that, far from being aggrieved, the combination of these groups are precisely the owners, CEO’s, producers, senior managers and publishers
being petitioned. White group privilege, exclusive as it has been for 222 years, has empowered these media titans who oversee an industry that Unity feels should more reflect the America of the 21st Century.
Buchanan will have none of this. This dour pundit sees a slight against “white folks” behind
every non- white advance. “Race,” he wrote in his recent “Whitey” piece, is the only reason
Obama got nearly 90 percent
of the black vote against Hillary Rodham Clinton in a few state primaries. Such black voting patterns, however, are not at all unusual even when the candidates are all white.
President Clinton, for example,
received 83 percent of the black vote in the ‘92 election; 84 percent in ‘96. Topping this, Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; followed in ‘04, by Sen. John Kerry, who, according to CNN exit polls tallied 88 percent
of the black vote.
Were he not blinded by bigotry,
Buchanan might notice that, despite suffering through slavery, Jim Crow and de facto segregation, African-Americans
vote what they perceive as their interests--not their race. In the ‘04 Democratic presidential
primary, for example, Al Sharpton got less than 17 percent
of the black vote in South Carolina, the overwhelming majority going to white candidates.
In his home state of New York, Sharpton managed about the same tally, with Sen. John Kerry attracting more than 60 percent, the remainder going to other white candidates.
Incidentally, Mr. Buchanan, in all the general presidential elections held throughout all the years of the republic, African
Americans have voted for white candidates more than 99.99 percent of the time. Such facts, of course, would make no impression on this “analyst” given to false reasoning.
Earlier in Buchanan’s life, as with the Joker of the DC Comics,
perhaps some macabre, life-altering tragedy twisted his racial view into a lily-white phobia. Clarence Mitchell III, the black, former state senator, grew up a childhood friend of Buchanan in Maryland. Over the years, Mitchell has been repeatedly
astonished at his former
buddy’s venomous “insensitivity
to the plight of black Americans.”
Mudslinging is a specialty of the blunt-speaking Buchanan
who perfected this art after his journalism school days at Columbia University. Just as avoiding the military draft hardened him into a chicken-hawk on the Vietnam War, his journalism degree set him against the Jeffersonian idea of the press as a watchdog on government.
Instead, this nothing of a reporter went young into the craft as an editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe Democrat. Earlier, he had caddied for the sitting U.S. vice-president; so when Richard M. Nixon passed through town, the conflicted
journalist put an arm on the politician for a job. “If you’re running for president,” Buchanan reportedly asked “I’d like to get in on the ground floor.” The ersatz journalist quickly transformed himself into a truncheon for politicians soft on civil liberties.
As researcher and speech-writer for President Nixon, Buchanan sharpened the teeth of the conservative hacksaw used against the press. Along the way, he passed up no opportunity
to wield his power against those seeking a free, fair and racially integrated society. In 1974, when Nixon resigned ahead of an impending
impeachment, his scrappy dirty-trickster, with all the survival skills of the Joker, regained
his feet as a syndicated columnist, lecturer and co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” In 1985, Buchanan ventured back into government, this time as the communications director for the Reagan White House.
The point man’s bluntness earned him a front- row seat at one of Reagan’s major PR blunder: laying a wreath at the graves of Nazi storm-troopers in Bitburg, Germany. Among the 49 Waffen SS troops in the cemetery was one Otto Franz Begel, awarded the German Cross for killing 10 American GI’s. The cemetery contained no U.S. soldiers. According to Lou Cannon’s biography, “Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,” the visit “was the seminal symbolic disaster of an administration that placed great store in symbolism.”
As a staunch supporter of the Presidential honor for the Nazi troops, Buchanan once passionately
lectured a group of opposing American Jews visiting
the White House, including author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. As if the wreath-laying for the Nazi troops was a patriotic
act, Buchanan cautioned those accompanying Wiesel that they were “Americans first.”
Compounding the insult, Buchanan was reportedly observed
to have written “over and over again in his notebook: “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews.”
Buchanan’s primal racial fears have repeatedly surfaced in his determined efforts to conserve an America defined strictly along lily-white racial and ethnic lines. “There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing the issue that we are a European country,” he said in opposing the entry of blacks from South Africa. During the apartheid era there, the columnist
and White House tactician strongly opposed the democratic
process that would give Africans the vote. He argued that the U.S. “Founding Fathers”
withheld the vote from the Indians, restricting “the franchise to property- owning [white] males, believing that not every man was qualified to rule, nor every people prepared for self- government.”
Buchanan’s bold flirtation especially with anti- Semitism sparked even the National Review,
the magazine bible of William F. Buckley Jr.’s hard right, to worry aloud about his rough style. “Some of his writings
raise serious questions about his judgment and his underlying philosophy,” the magazine wrote in an unsigned commentary. “[He] must sometimes
wish he could call back the hasty word, the logic gone subtly wrong, the rash epithet, the savage retort.”
Buchanan himself, however, has never shown any inclination
to back away from verbal, racial assaults.
If anything, he has drawn his “white folks” covered wagons into an even tighter xenophobic,
Euro-centric media circle. “The American majority,” he wrote in his book, “Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War,” is “not reproducing itself,”
and thus allowing “Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see.”
Such racial narcissism blinds Buchanan to the reality that these newly arriving immigrants--
coupled with the rise of Native Americans and black descendants of slaves-need not be a decline of America--but indeed its very salvation! Conveniently,
he forgets that not so long ago his Irish-Catholic
ancestry, as well as that of the Italians and the Slavs of Eastern Europe, was similarly condemned by earlier arriving white Americans as signaling the doom of the republic as a viable world power.
Despite Buchanan’s backward
know- nothingness, he reigns nightly as a TV presence on political chat- shows. His countenance recalls nothing so much as that of the Joker, lacking only the red lip smear and the dark eye paint. Flip on almost any channel tonight and there is this scared and scary Buchanan, chopping the air with his hands-pedaling his gospel of hate.
Les Payne is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and columnist for Newsday. Payne is a Founder of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), served as the association’s president from 1981 to 1983, and was recently inducted into the NABJ Hall of Fame.
An advocacy group established
in 1975 in Washington, D.C., NABJ is the largest organization
of journalists of color in the nation, with more than 4,100 members, and provides educational, career development and support to black journalists worldwide.

____________________________________________________