Black politics gone haywire.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.

So what's going on? Why are so many people, especially black people with left affiliations and reputations, treating the O.J. Simpson trial verdict as a political victory, boosting Colin Powell's neocolonialist, Reaganite Presidential candidacy, and falling in line behind the dangerous, fascistic Louis Farrakhan and his victim-blaming Million Man March?

The answer lies in the desperation and programmatic bankruptcy of current black politics, the racial perfidy of American liberalism, the cynicism of the corporate media, and the hideous rightwing shift in the political culture.

There no doubt were statistically significant differences in the ways that white and black American populations reacted to the Simpson saga from the beginning. At the least, black people tended to be more sensitive to the incident's potentially allegorical use in service to the hoary tale of sexualized black bestiality.

The first racial-perception gap appeared as black people reacted to the historical truth that in the court of public opinion, white criminals are individuals, whereas blacks' crimes always imply collective guilt. Claus Von Bulow was just a rich man who killed his wife for her money and got off, thanks to a high-priced legal team that overlapped O.J.'s. No public fretting about whether he represented a homicidal lust for gratuitous wealth among white men. Many blacks, though inclined to see the Simpson case as simply another celebrity murder, were worried that it would be treated as much more. Experience can be a master teacher.

Before long, the spin began to take shape. Black New York Times reporter Don Terry has complained about the media's invention of O.J. as a "black icon," noting that black Americans didn't even watch his films on video rental. References to Othello began popping up, and Newsweek diagnosed him as suffering--because of his social prominence and ghetto origins--from racial "double consciousness," a condition made trendy in recent years by English professors.

As both political scientist and citizen, I'm deeply suspicious of public-opinion polling. It's as much a device for creating as for measuring popular attitudes. And the Simpson case exemplifies how cynically our mass media play the opinion game.

Early in the saga, there was considerable evidence of multiracial fan support for O.J., as there is for any celebrity on the verge of falling from grace. To some extent, it reflects one of the culture's appropriately perverse accommodations to the kinds of insecurity and hollowed-out lives generated in this era of capitalist social reorganization--vicarious identification, to the point of artificial personal intimacy, with those on whom the public spotlight shines, especially in tragic circumstances. We've seen numerous examples over the past fifteen years: the throngs wailing and waving goodbye outside the funeral of Lisa Steinberg, the celebrated victim of fatal child abuse; the crowds who wanted to do the same for Susan Smith, only to turn instantly into a lynch mob on learning that she killed her children.

It struck me that many of Simpson's cheering supporters also were representatives of the batterers' lobby, men who identified with him as a guy who should get a break. Whatever else they were, however, they were multiracial.

After Fuhrman's racism came to light, though, the racial-difference angle began to dominate the spin. And public-opinion polling ratified that angle by telling people how they should see the case and what positions they should take as members of their market shares. Black patter...