In his updated 1995 version of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,
Andrew Hacker has a chapter about the O.J. Simpson trial, and the
difference of opinion between many whites and many African-Americans
about it. Incidentally, Hacker states that one of the lawyers for the
prosecution, Christopher Darden, appealed to a passage in the earlier
edition of Hacker’s book to argue that the n-word should not be spoken
in front of the jury, due to its inflammatory nature when whites utter
the word.
Overall, Hacker argues that the authorities were irresponsible in how
they handled the evidence, and he also defends the jury that found
Simpson to be not-guilty. For example, while some argue that the few
white people on the jury were pressured to vote not-guilty, Hacker notes
that one of the white jurors was the lone holdout in a previous trial
and managed to win over the rest of the jury: this was not the sort of
person who could be easily swayed, Hacker was arguing.
On page 62 of Losing the Race, John McWhorter has a
paragraph about what he considers to be evidence for Simpson’s guilt:
Simpson’s dog not barking when Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered,
indicating that the dog knew the murderer; fibers from the carpet of
Simpson’s Ford Bronco at the scene of the crime; “fibers from Simpson’s
shirt and hairs from his head…found on Ronald Goldman”; a bloody
shoe-print at the crime scene matching a type of shoe that Simpson may
have owned; cuts and scrapes on Simpson’s left hand; “a blood trail from
the murder scene…from a left hand”; Simpson not answering his home
phone when a limo driver was calling him around the time of the murder;
Simpson sweating in the limo, notwithstanding the air-conditioning; and
Simpson not asking about his children when he heard that his wife was
dead. Hacker does not address a lot of this, but he does go into the
pros and cons for certain arguments about Simpson’s guilt: how to
explain the dearth of blood on Simpson’s Ford Bronco and at his home,
for example.
On pages 220-221, Hacker speculates that whites may seek revenge for
the Simpson verdict and the humiliation of their justice system: perhaps
they’d vote against affirmative action, or adequate funding for
inner-city hospitals, or districts that can provide African-Americans
with more political power. This may strike some as a conspiracy theory,
but I think that Hacker makes a legitimate point: what would happen if
the majority of whites believed a certain way, and whites happened to be
the ones with power?