RACE II

Part Two:

Race. William Faulkner writes, or has a character say that the only solution to problems of race will be the inevitable "bleaching out" that will result from interbreeding. We are witnessing that. The tension in race relations are obvious in big cities; CRASH might not seem interesting to white people living in rural America, but it is riveting to those living where the story is set, Los Angeles. The "Best Original Screenplay 2005" ends on the note that today people are literally still being bought and sold. It is staggering to me that any immigrant from Europe would dismiss the movie because it doesn't have any plot. (See Comment on previous entry.)

The nearly all Black women jury that found O. J. Simpson "Not guilty" did so for reasons prosecutor Marcia Clark gives on page 389 of her book Without A Doubt, Viking 1997:

"Experience had shown me that Black female jurors are perfectly capable of convicting a Black man who brutalizes his wife or girlfriend. As I've said before - and I'll say it as many times as I have to - The Simpson case was an anomaly. What was perceived here as apathy on the part of black women jurors toward Nicole's suffering seemed to me rather a deliberate form of denial. I truly believe that our black female jurors knew in their hearts that O. J. Simpson was no better than the average asshole who gets drunk on Friday nights and  throws his woman against a wall. But I think they felt they couldn't afford to act on that knowledge. Too few black men succeed in penetrating the ranks of upper-class white society for them to allow one to be taken out in such an ignominious way. Looking back on it, I think I'd have to say that blacks of both sexes were moved to breathtaking feats of denial in order to keep the Juice from going down."

That's a strange piece of writing. Notice that the word 'black' is not capitalized. Today Black and African American are interchangeable and both are capitalized. It's not simply a matter of color, it's race in all aspects: voice, movement, attitude, and the  baggage of history. Nevertheless some of what Marcia says is true.

What Marcia leaves out is the deliberation with which Nicole sought to torment her former husband. She virtually flaunted her affairs knowing that her stalker husband would, in effect, 'watch.' Nicole had an affair with the restaurant Mezaluna's Manager, not just with the 'boy' waiter OJ murdered. Simpson actually went to the table where Nicole and the Manager were dining and made threats up close, nose to nose. The other branch of the restaurant which the Manager also ran was in Aspen. Nicole bathed first in a tub festooned with candles. She could have charged admission.  

Isn't there an Othello psychology at work in the dreadful drama? with the difference that Desdemona was innocent while Nicole definitely was not.

The Black women jurors played God: they knew OJ was guilty, but they hated the method adopted by the prosecution in order to prove he was guilty. Race was the lens throught which all parties to the trial prepared their Defense, and their Prosecution, and deliberations by the jury. Even the city of Los Angeles was at fault in failing to make available a larger and more varied jury pool. In Santa Monica, where such a jury pool was provided, the
Civil case prosecution was successful and OJ was found guilty.

As was shown so thrillingly in the movie CRASH race in Los Angeles has a direct influence on the life of all of us. In one inner city area it has been shown that 69 different languages are spoken.

Barry