Authors: James A. Michener
In 1994 two reputable scholars, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, published a study of race and intelligence. Their book was called
The Bell Curve
, a term lifted from statistics. The curve is a beautiful device showing the probable distribution of almost any large body of data. With the flowing outline of a bell—tall in the middle where most of the numbers will concentrate—it tails away symmetrically at each end down to a flat termination. What
it illustrates is that on any testable subject, the bulk of the population will be average, with a few way below average at the flattened end to the left, a few high above average at the flattened end at the right.
When the data relating to human intelligence are compressed into a bell curve, most of us find a place in the respectable average area in the middle, but an irreducible number of us are imbeciles, at the flattened end to the left of the bell, compensated for by an equal number of geniuses at the flattened end to the right.
When Murray applied the discipline of the bell curve to military statistics, black soldiers tended to cluster in the left half of the curve, toward inadequacy, while whites clustered in the right-hand portion, indicating a modest superiority. Some of the statistics measuring the higher thought processes showed a huge difference between the able white soldiers and their less fortunate blacks.
When
The Bell Curve
hit the stands, a fiery debate ensued and there was a temptation for popular journals to say that the book proved that blacks are genetically inferior. It proved nothing of the sort, nor did it claim to have done so; it merely reinforced what we had already known back in 1917 after those first reports from the army tests: blacks do not do well in standardized tests on subject matters with which whites have a cultural edge because they learn about such subjects at home and in their superior schools.
The 1994–95 debates concerning
The Bell Curve
have sounded a warning against accepting or promulgating any easy conclusion that whites are genetically superior to blacks. Such false doctrine is dangerous to the health of our republic and should be protested vigorously. The fact that as late as the 1990s some people could still misinterpret statistics to support their beliefs in the genetic inferiority of
any
race proves how far we have to go.
It was in the same period that we saw a historic example of how deeply affected by racial tensions and hatred our nation’s supposedly color-blind judicial system is. The gruesome murder in a swanky Los Angeles neighborhood of a beautiful white woman in her early thirties and her casual friend, a handsome young man in his twenties, was to deeply upset our nation and our judicial system. When it became known that the dead woman was the ex-wife of the idolized black football star O. J. Simpson and that he was the prime suspect, I muttered to myself: Oh hell! This will put race relations back fifty years.
I had first met Simpson, that superlative athlete, when I opened a long television show with him with a horrible gaffe by asking about his football career at UCLA. He was a little taken aback by my error but he said genially: ‘It was USC. But don’t be embarrassed. A fellow last week thought it was Stanford. At least you have the right city.’ We had a lively interview, and his graciousness made me a fan.
I worked with him again in Florida when I was appointed the impartial czar of an unusual international competition, for big prize money, between the athletic stars of a dozen nations. Each contestant was eligible for ten events, but the swimming champion could not compete in the swimming races nor the tennis player in singles or doubles. The competition was furious; my friend O.J. tore the place apart in baseball, tennis and weight lifting. In the latter event foreign competitors besieged me, demanding that I rule against O.J. in a contested lift, and in retrospect I think they were right. But he had mesmerized me, and I handed down a decision in his favor that sealed the overall victory for him and helped him win a bundle.
The last time I saw him was on a blizzardy day in Shea Stadium in 1973 during a game against the New York Jets. I was a guest of the home team and, wrapped in blankets, had a superb view of the
snowy field. Excitement was high, because if Buffalo’s star running back, O. J. Simpson, had a good day, he would set an unbelievable record for rushing two thousand yards in a single season. Even though I sat with the Jets, I cheered for Simpson, and late in the day he made the final six yards, which put him over the two thousand mark. But on the next play a New York tackle banged through the line and threw Simpson for a loss, which put him back below the record. But he remained in the game and on a later play ripped off the necessary yardage, whereupon his coach pulled him out of the game to safeguard his record: 2,003 yards.
So I was more intensely interested in the murder case than the ordinary citizen. O.J. was my man, a true hero and a very pleasant man to work with. I hoped that he was not guilty, but as the gruesome details unfolded I was shaken by their implications. Bit by bit the cruel evidence accumulated until even I had to admit that he had probably committed the crime. But then I took refuge in a question that many people think will never be answered: How could one man kill two people and not get blood everywhere on his body? It must have been two assailants, not O.J.
The judicial system began to unravel when the sensible, soft-spoken John Macky, leader of the Los Angeles African American community, led a committee of fellow blacks into the offices of the district attorney, Gil Garcetti, and told Garcetti that he should not demand the death penalty for someone as distinguished and well loved as O.J. I was shocked when Garcetti kowtowed to their moral blackmail.
When the jury was impaneled, I wrote this note to myself: ‘If the jury, consisting mostly of African Americans, votes him innocent, it will suggest that no black defendant, regardless of what he has done, can be found guilty in racially divided Los Angeles; and, if he is by some miracle found guilty, the city will once more
explode in riots and burnings. If, as I feel sure will be the case, the jurors are unable to reach a unanimous verdict, so that a hung jury results, a fearful chasm will open between whites and blacks. We face a lose-lose-lose proposition.’
In the early days of the trial I felt that the lawyers on each side disciplined themselves to keep the animosities of race out of the courtroom. But slowly, seeping out like an evil miasma, race took its inescapable place in the courtroom. In poll after poll the results tended to be the same. Whites—75 percent thought the testimony condemned O.J.; blacks—75 percent believed the L.A. police had framed him. Few paid any attention to the two young people who had been murdered.
As the trial dragged to a conclusion the brilliant legal group defending Simpson achieved a miracle. They converted the trial of O. J. Simpson for a double murder into a wide-swinging attack on the L.A. Police Department, and suddenly Officer Mark Fuhrman, not Simpson, was on trial.
In the heated final moments, Johnnie Cochran, the legal eagle of the Simpson team, boldly brought race into the middle of the courtroom. In the words of his disgusted fellow lawyer Robert Shapiro: ‘Not only did we play [the race card], we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.’ Brazenly, Cochran begged the jurors to find Simpson not guilty as a way of sending a message to the L.A. Police Department that they must stop abusing black citizens.
When the jury retired to decide one of the most sensational legal cases in American history, they ignored the thousands of pages of testimony and the wealth of exhibits; nor did they review the arguments of the prosecution’s lawyers. With breathtaking speed they took one straw vote—10—2 in favor of a ‘not guilty’ verdict—then the ten proceeded to persuade the two recalcitrants to vote unanimously in favor of acquittal.
On the Tuesday when the vote was announced, I, like most of America, listened with nail-biting attention as the clerk announced
the—to me—appalling verdict. I may not have been 100 percent correct in my guesses on what the verdict would be, but I stand by my evaluations of the
effects
of the verdict, whatever it was to be. Race relations
were
at the crux of the case.
I was badly shaken by the vote and told my friends who had watched the proceedings on TV with me that we should keep our mouths shut because we don’t want to say anything that we’ll regret later. I then went to a faculty meeting, at which I made the same suggestion, and we all abided by it.
Later, watching television’s incessant treatment of the verdict with learned men and women commenting on its implications, I chanced to see the disturbing shot of the students’ union at Morehouse College, a black institution in Atlanta, where the students broke into paroxysms of joy when the verdict was announced. I was shattered to hear the Morehouse student union echo with boos and hisses when the cameras in the Los Angeles courthouse panned to the distraught white families of the two murdered victims.
In that awful moment I caught a glimpse of the years ahead. Blacks will make O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran their national symbols of revenge. Blacks who serve on juries will be expected to bring in not-guilty verdicts whenever a brother is on trial, and worst of all, those decent middle-class whites who have slowly made themselves able to see and understand the just complaints of blacks will harden their feelings.
Although initially I thought it would put race relations back by half a century, on reflection I think the Simpson trial has probably sped the denouement of our racial tribulations forward by fifty years. With the Simpson verdict, all that I had been writing about in this essay as a problem needing attention was transformed into a crisis of great urgency. May we have the courage and wisdom to deal intelligently with this crisis so that the climax is not a violent one.
In the aftermath of the trial the Reverend Louis Farrakhan astounded me by summoning the black men of America to a huge demonstration on the Mall in Washington, and about a million African American men of all ages convened peacefully to dedicate themselves to a more responsible public and family life. They behaved impeccably; there was not a single arrest; and, they tacitly made it clear that henceforth they were a political force that white America would have to respect. There was, however, also the implication that if adjustments were not made to correct racial inequalities, there would be serious disturbances.
One interesting aspect of the Simpson case involves the eventual possibility of General Colin Powell for the presidency; until Johnnie Cochran and O.J. exploded in their faces, an encouraging number of Americans,
white
Americans, indicated they were prepared to accept an African American president or vice president. Now how will they react? Even though Powell has indicated he is not yet ready for a national campaign, will voters in the future intensify their support for him on the grounds he might prove a healing agent, or will they have serious second thoughts about raising any black into a national symbol and shy away from Powell?
That Colin Powell appears to have retired from the 1996 campaign is the nation’s loss. (As of June 1996, Dole reportedly was still courting Powell for the Republican ticket.) A team of Bob Dole and Colin Powell might prove unbeatable, and Powell could run as president in 2000. If sometime in the future Powell does become president, he might go far in healing the breach between the white and the black races.
America’s looming racial crisis, intensified by the Simpson trial and verdict, leads us to the crucial, inescapable question regarding race in the United States: ‘Have relationships deteriorated so badly that interracial conflict has become inevitable?’ I believe
the answer is Yes. All signs point to an oncoming clash, and I estimate that it will occur in the early years of the next century. I assess the inevitability this way: First, I can see no likelihood that white society will modify its economic practices so as to provide employment for black males in the inner cities. They will remain an unintegrated mass and a source of deep troubles and dislocations. Second, our national leaders not only appear unable to devise a system that is not anathema to the taxpaying citizenry for giving spending power to our lower-level citizens, but they are also indicating that our government is actually going to back-track on our already insufficient previous efforts. Third, current proposals intended to diminish the number of illegitimate births, particularly among black teenagers, are laudable insofar as taxpayers are concerned, but will be ineffective among the blacks and whites on welfare. The proposals I’ve seen penalize the children, and fail to educate their bewildered parents. Fourth, improbable as this may sound, there may be an inherited hatred between blacks and whites, simmering far back into the days of slavery, and if this is true, it militates against any efforts to eradicate it now.
I am convinced that the ugly gap between white and black cannot be easily bridged. I expect the animosities to intensify into social, political and particularly economic rebellion as blacks experience the hopelessness in the inner cities, areas that will grow in size and in their ghetto quality. I think there will one day be irredentist movements in which black communities will want to govern themselves, and I suspect that vigorous protest of some kind will erupt, as it has in so many societies in the past when attempts were made to keep an underprivileged class perpetually downtrodden.
And now, when the political trend of our national life is already skewed against our African American citizens, various government
agencies are beginning to reverse gains the blacks have painfully achieved in recent years. The Supreme Court, which no longer contains an African American justice philosophically disposed to defend their rights, hands down one verdict after another clearly signaling that the days of progress toward equal justice are past. Governor Pete Wilson in California focused his run for the presidency with a powerful assault on affirmative action, and the vaunted contracts of the Republican victors in the 1994 elections brought only bad news to blacks. Every cheap politician is able to gain points by shouting that talented white men in all fields are being deprived of jobs by African Americans through quota systems. It seems as if our entire society is kicking the black man and growling: ‘Get back in line. Remember your place.’ And all this is taking place without any serious effort to create new jobs or help the inner cities.