Playing the Race Card: ‘The People V O.J. Simpson’ Episode 5 Recap

“You know, it was actually about race.”

That’s the quip you often hear today, especially from a certain type of person (a certain type of person that comprises most people, including me, Marcia Clark, and the creators of this television show), when asked for an opinion on the O.J. Simpson trial. The shibboleth has become pervasive, a watered down insight as poignant as saying “dreams contain latent desires” or “Gatsby is actually about human vanity.”

But in this case, the dogma is also accurate, or at least partially so. The jury selection process was indeed an identity politics seminar. And both legal teams really did exploit embedded racial prejudices. And the n-word theatrics certainly created some sort of a mediated minstrel show. And a juror actually did raise his fist in a black power salute when the verdict was read. And the protagonist, who once had a cameo in Roots, sincerely defined himself in confounding post-racial terms — “I’m not black, I’m O.J.”

But to say that the Simpson case was “about race,” as seemingly every commentator now does, also misses a certain nuance. Race was used and abused during the trial, without a doubt. But the phrase “about race” suggests a hidden meaning lying below the events waiting to be revealed by an intrepid cultural analyst. Race wasn’t the subtext of the plot, as much as the plot itself. Yes, the O.J. Simpson trial was about race, but it was also against, within, beyond, and through race.

During the course of this installment of The People v. O.J. Simpson (episode 5, “The Race Card”), the clock invisibly ticks into a new year, from 1994 into 1995. Like a tribal African sculpture on display in a Brentwood mansion, this was an era of highly conflicting messages about race.

On the one hand, Rodney King received partial vindication around this time, when the City of Los Angeles was ordered in to pay him $3.8 million for violating his civil rights (i.e., beating the hell out of him). But not long after, a race warrior detonated three tons of fertilizer below the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people. Nelson Mandela was inaugurated president of South Africa in 1994, but Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution demolished Bill Clinton in that year’s midterm elections.

If one news event could symbolize the confounding racial messages of the day, it might be when Mississippi finally (and confusingly) ratified the 13th Amendment. Even though slavery was abolished in 1865, Mississippi withheld its official stamp of approval on the amendment for 130 years, suddenly deciding 1995 was the time. Celebrate, brothers and sisters?

To make matters even more complicated, Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam, loomed over the era. In October 1995 — the same month the O.J. verdict would come down — Farrakhan held the Million Man March in the nation’s capital. The event drew close to a million black men, but was marred by persistent controversy including A) the exclusion of women and B) the casual anti-Semitism of its founder.

Seeing artistic potential in the turmoil, Spike Lee quickly produced and directed Get on the Bus, a film about a dozen black men who take a cross-country bus trip to the March. Along the way, they debate topics like A) the exclusion of women and B) the casual anti-Semitism of its founder, but also C) the n-word. On all topics, they passionately disagree, except for one: O.J. Simpson.

In Simpson, the characters see a man who might be guilty of double murder, but his acquittal represents a “payback” for an ingrained racism against black Americans. A sample of its myriad topics, this brief scene riffs on Colin Powell, Mark Fuhrman, Uncle Tom, O.J. Simpson, Johnnie Cochran, and the n-word:

Seen today, the subject matter and structure of Get on the Bus will strangely evoke another racially-charged talky road film, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. (Just replace the bus with a stagecoach.) Both films lack narrative subtlety, but Get on the Bus makes up for it with an intriguing financial metanarrative. The film’s entire budget (a relatively modest $2.4 million) came from the investment of 15 black men. The Hollywood funding squad included Danny Glover, Will Smith, Wesley Snipes, and…

…why yes, that’s investor Johnnie Cochran, second from the left:

Reflect on that: just months after the trial, O.J.’s lead defense attorney helped finance a movie which argued Simpson might be guilty of murder but justice was served in acquitting him.

While Spike Lee was mixing racial themes and contemporary politics in talky road films, John Singleton was creating a more dramatic and visceral cinema. Higher Learning, his film about racial tension in universities, was released at the exact moment we are now experiencing in The People v. O.J. Simpson. (In all likelihood, Johnnie Cochran went to the premiere.)

John Singleton just happens to be the director of this episode. He crafts some of the best material of the series so far, including the clash between two frenemy black attorneys, Christopher Darden and Johnnie Cochran. In a pretrial hearing, Darden argues that racial language used by LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman (or Mark “De-Führer-man”, as Dana Carvey’s bit from that time would call him) should not admissible in the court, because it will cloud the reality of the courtroom:

The n-word is a dirty, filthy word, your honor. It is so prejudicial and inflammatory that the use of it in any situation will invoke a response from any African-American. We’re talking about a word that blinds people. That word to this jury will blind them to the truth.

It’s a subtle argument — that the utterance of a word can alone create a hostile environment.

But Singleton’s Johnnie Cochran will have none of that weak bullshit. Like everyone else, he probably just saw Pulp Fiction in the cineplex a month prior, and the “dead nigger storage” scene stuck. “I would be remiss,” says Cochrane, slyly loading the ammunition, “if I did not respond to my good friend, Mr. Chris Darden.” Then he unloads:

Finally, he whispers: “Nigger, please.”

This moment instantly evokes the very first scene of the episode, a flashback to Cochran being pulled over by a cop for seemingly no reason. After being cuffed to the hood of his car, his daughter asks, “Daddy, did he call you a nigger?”

“No, he didn’t,” says daddy-mode Cochran. “He didn’t have to. And don’t you girls ever use that word. Ever. It’s a terrible word.”

This episode might be called “It’s a terrible word” vs. “Nigger please.”

The other magnificent scene in this episode involves the redecoration of O.J. Simpson’s house for a jury visitation. When Cochran gets to the house, this sort of tawdry ’80s ephemera is hanging on the walls:

While Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” booms in the background, Cochran replaces all the gaudy white people portraits with socially conscious art. Here’s one of the new pieces being toted in, “on loan, from the Cochran collection”:

In O.J.’s backyard, below the towering golem of the Heisman winner, Marcia Clark rolls her seething eyes:

These two paintings — old O.J. next to new O.J. — are indeed a hilarious contrast:

Packed with history, the Rockwell painting depicts a defining moment of desegregation from 1960, when a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges, was escorted by federal marshals into an all-white elementary school in Louisiana. That very painting — with the n-word clearly sprayed across — now hangs in a different house: The White House.

The phrase “playing the race card” was popularized during the O.J. Simpson trial, partially because Robert Shapiro accused Cochran of dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck.”

A few years later, South Park would coin a different term for Cochran’s legal style: Chewbacca Defense. In an episode from the show’s second season, Cochran goes on a courtroom rant about how it “makes no sense” that Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor “with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks.”
“If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit. The defense rests.”

The deliberately confusing argument — the Chewbacca Defense — wins the case for animated Cochran.

A national Gallup poll in 1995 asked whether the not guilty verdict delivered by the jury was accurate. 47 percent of white people said yes; 78 percent of blacks.

You know, it was actually about race.

Miscellaneous Historical Notes:

• When Chris Rock interviewed Johnnie Cochran in the first episode of The Chris Rock Show in 1997, Rock’s first question was “Does O.J. owe you money?”
• Just months before the trial, Johnnie Cochran represented Michael Jackson and orchestrated a multi-million dollar payoff to 13-year-old boy’s family to avoid molestation charges.
• Johnnie L Cochran has something in common with Harry S Truman — they both have one-letter middle names. Because their monikers aren’t technically abbreviations, their middle names are often written without periods.
• In his opening statement, Johnnie Cochran quotes MLK: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” which is from his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
• Around the time of this episode, a video game called O.J.’s All-American Race to Acquittal was released. Entertainment Weekly graded it a D.
• As Mark Fuhrman’s Nazi memorabilia unfurls in the final scene, the ditty playing is Richard Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Next week: Episode 6: Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!

Rex Sorgatz plays from the bottom of the deck @fimoculous.