Mark Fuhrman, the only man convicted of a felony in the O.J. Simpson trial, died this week of throat cancer at age 74. He was also a crucial player in my book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From The Seventies to Obama, for his part in the case that inadvertently gave us a 15-year intermission from perpetual race-mongering. That Xanadu could last only as long as most Americans still had a piercing recollection of the nearly universal jubilation of black people when O.J. was acquitted.
From that point on, the race card simply stopped working, like a subway card that won’t open a turnstile anymore. Fuhrman’s obituaries didn’t explain his part in helping secure this brief respite, so I thought I’d write my own.
The evidence that O.J.—a star football player, actor, sportscaster, and product spokesman—had murdered his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman was overwhelming. O.J.’s blood was found on the ground next to the mutilated bodies, on a walkway from Nicole’s house, on her driveway and on her back gate. Blood from all three was inside O.J.’s white Bronco and on a pair of gloves, one at the murder scene and its match on O.J.’s property. Nicole’s blood was in O.J.’s foyer, master bedroom, driveway and on a pair of socks in his bedroom. All samples were collected before police had a sample of O.J.’s blood and showed no one else’s DNA.
For the icing on top, O.J. had a documented record of beating up Nicole, and, within hours of his arrest warrant being issued, attempted to flee in his white Ford Bronco with cash, a passport, a disguise and a gun.
But none of that mattered to the jury because Fuhrman, a Los Angeles police detective, had used the N-word nine and a half years earlier. He was the investigator who first spotted—but did not touch—the glove on O.J.’s property, a tiny pebble in a mountain of incriminating evidence. That was the fig leaf used to explain why a mostly black jury acquitted O.J. on all counts, for an attack so brutal he nearly decapitated Nicole.
Despite its monumental irrelevance to O.J.’s guilt or innocence, the judge allowed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey to ask Fuhrman if he had—I quote—“addressed any black person as a [the N-word] or spoken about black people as [N-words] in the past 10 years.” A normal person would understand that question to mean, “Do you call black people the N-word?” not, “Has the word ever passed your lips, including the way I—F. Lee Bailey—just used it?”
Fuhrman said he had not. A year later, his denial was pretty well corroborated in a New York Times article quoting his many black partners, colleagues, and friends. The Los Angeles public defender’s office investigated the detective “aggressively,” but found “virtually no complaints” against him, and not a single accusation of racial misconduct. To the contrary, the investigation turned up “compliments paid to Fuhrman by arrestees,” including minorities.
The main witness against Fuhrman on the vitally important question of whether he’d ever used the N-word—in what was, again, a double-murder trial—was a woman he’d had a sexual relationship with, Laura Hart McKinney. She had tapes of Fuhrman using the N-word in 1985, nearly—but not quite!—a decade before the O.J. trial. The reason she had tapes was that they were working together on a screenplay. Hollywood producers, he explained, were not going to want a nice, warm and fuzzy movie about good cops. He said he was trying to make the screenplay “dramatic and commercially appealing.”
Coincidentally, almost the same week that Fuhrman was testifying, in March 1995, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was winning “Best Original Screenplay” at the Oscars for a movie that uses the N-word, on average, once every 7.5 minutes.
But Fuhrman’s fictive use of the N-word provoked O.J. defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran to thunder that he was “this perjurer, this racist, this genocidal racist,” to compare him to Hitler, and to tell the jury that Fuhrman wanted to “take all black people out and burn them, or bomb them. That’s genocidal racism.”
It seemed unremarkable that in the trial of a black man for slaying two white people, the only person called a “genocidal racist” was a cop who’d used a bad word for a screenplay.
Cochran added that Fuhrman was “America’s worst nightmare.” Whereas having a hulking 6-foot-2 running back sneak up to your house late at night and cut your throat down to the cervical vertebrae is more of a nocturnal disturbance.
The defense needn’t have bothered with all the theatrics. There was no way the jury was ever going to convict. When jurors came back after about 6 minutes of deliberation, 150 million Americans stopped whatever they were doing to watch the reading of the verdict. Not guilty on all counts. One juror, a former Black Panther, gave O.J. the Black Power salute.
Across the nation, black people erupted in cheers. There was dancing in the streets, horns honking, tears of joy. Howard University Law School students “whooped and clapped like they had won a national championship,” as put by one black reporter. At a McDonald’s in Clayton, Missouri, the all-black staff burst out in cheers and high-fives, while the mostly white customers watched in disbelief. At one high school in St. Louis, being filmed for TV, black students cheered for five solid minutes. Three days before Cochran’s summation, the black congressional caucus, seeing the writing on the wall, had given him a standing ovation.
White Americans took it all in and said, That’s it. The white guilt bank is closed. When it was considered a graver offense to use “the N-word” than to cut off a white woman’s head, the “legacy of slavery” crap had run its course. (But if you’re black, you can use the N-word nonstop, risking only the possibility of winning a Grammy or an NAACP Image Award.)
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Liberals gamely tried to continue their role as Chief Patronizers of Black America. Well, of course he mugged the old lady! You didn’t give him a cookie. But even they didn’t have their hearts in it.
OJ’s acquittal, followed by Fuhrman’s conviction for perjury, stamped out white racial guilt for more than a decade. It was one of the best things that ever happened to black people. They were finally welcomed into the circle of adults, accountable for their behavior. But liberals never quit; they just lie in wait. Memories faded, and now we’re right back to infantilizing this one group of our fellow Americans.
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