Vol. 19 No. 7 · 3 April 1997
page 10 | 2176 words
No More Whining
Frank Lentricchia on the O.J. Simpson affair
‘The Los Angeles Police Department has framed a guilty man.’ Among the jokes spawned by the trials of O.J. Simpson, that one may tell the most truth.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 9 · 8 May 1997
From M.S. Burgher
Frank Lentricchia’s logic (LRB, 3 April) – endorsing the first Simpson jury while condemning the jury at the first trial of Medgar Evers’s murderer for exactly the same behaviour – escapes me. But then I am incapable of the fine calculation needed to judge the rival claims to justice of, say, a Catholic black victim and a disabled Native American defendant. The truly interesting thing about Lentricchia’s article, however, is his choice of representatives of the moaning and whining white American population. Ironically, he selects white feminists and Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor (as well as some magazines, journals and the police). None of the women in his article is named, not even the black female jurors whose ‘thoughtful’ demeanour is approved.
How can he be sure that white feminists are racists? They are ‘well dressed’ and ‘fashionably coiffed’ (and Marcia Clark appears to go to a health club). Blind to the symbolism so clear to Lentricchia, they focus on the facts of the case: a woman’s ‘nearly decapitated’ body and the ‘issue of male domestic violence’ that ‘may be the “real” story here’. True, a man playing the race card can trump the gender card played by a woman. White men originated this tactic with the Fourteenth Amendment. As a result, black men won the right to vote; women of all colours had to wait another fifty years, and the powerful alliance of people struggling for the rights of blacks and women was shattered. Recently, black men have played the race card in the same way: it has secured Americans a Supreme Court Justice and the Simpson acquittal.
M.S. Burgher
Copenhagen
From Jeff Smith
Apparently Frank Lentricchia believes that if one is unlucky enough to have a black celebrity as one’s killer, one forfeits one’s ordinary rights to seek redress in court – rights most civilised people prefer to the alternatives: vigilantism, vendettas and blood feuds. Would the Goldman family’s rights have been forfeit if they had been black themselves, rather than Jewish?
Jeff Smith
University of California, Los Angeles
