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From: Jasper
T1:
Category 3: Category 1
Date: 09 Aug 1999
Time: 09:10:40
Remote Name: dyn1-tnt5-24.detroit.mi.ameritech.net
Kate,
You have shown amazing insights about the crucial issues in this case. But I think you missed the mark with Darden and Fuhrman on the issue of racism.
Darden is every bit as racist (as in white supremacist) as Fuhrman. It's not your color that makes you a racist, it's your attitude about color. To the extent that one acts on the belief that skin color or other superficial physical characteristics can be used as a practical guide to determining the worth of an entire group-with a few exceptions, of course-that person is a racist.
Racism is inherently irrational, which is why IT REQUIRES exceptions to THE RULE to maintain the look and feel of legitimacy.
Why were so many white people embarrassed by the idea that Fuhrman might have been a racist and so many black people embarrassed by the idea that O.J. might have been a killer? Why did so many Asians and Hispanics feel pressured to take sides before the facts in the case were in? Because race counts in this country; because it always has and because those who have enjoyed the privileges of it-which is to say the great majority of Americans-don't want to believe that it counts that much. Black people with some brains and no integrity can insure a bright spot for themselves in most of America's business and government institutions by "proving themselves" the exception-like Chris Darden.
The best proof a black person can give is to agree with the idea that black people, in general, do fit the negative stereotypes associated with them. That was what Darden sought to do with his argument that the n-word was so inflammatory to black people that they would be incapable of rendering a just verdict in the case if they heard a white police officer use it. At the same time, he was arguing any testimony he could get that painted a picture of O.J. as an n-word personified. He tried to browbeat all of the defense witnesses but the way he attacked Rosa Lopez and Robert Heidstra (after trying to ignore them) was the way Mark Fuhrman thought all "low class" people should be treated-like niggers.
When you get right down to it, that was the prosecution's entire argument for O.J.'s motive. The kicker is, it would have been a real motive for Ron Shipp.
As far a racist like Fuhrman not wanting to pollute himself with a woman who had sex with black men (I have often wondered if his mother had sex with black men) there is a more fundamental dividing line in picking sex partners than race. That's orientation. If Fuhrman was heterosexual it's hard for me to believe that he hadn't had sex with attractive women of different ethnic persuasions. A black actress he was reported to have had the hots for was Vanity, and I have good reason to believe he did. Some hard-core bigots get a big thrill out of having sex with an "inferior" race the way some rich people get a charge out of "slumming." A look at the shades of skin colors among African-American's before the Civil War ought to say something.
It's not interracial sex that bigots like Fuhrman object to; it's sex between black men and white women. In a system of determining which race one belongs to wherein "on drop black blood" makes you black, you get into trouble real quick. Normal heterosexual behavior in a mixed social environment means that there will be some mixing and before you know it there will theoretically be no more true white people left (I hit that one pretty hard in The Random Factor). It's the women who have the children and it's the "black children" of white women who threaten the "white race." --Jasper