The People vs. O.J. Simpson: The race card

The People vs. O.J. has never danced around the subject of race; this is, after all, a series that opened not with the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, but two years earlier, with the Rodney King riots. But "The Race Card" is the first episode to make race its central focus, and it doesn't shrink away from the full complexity of the dynamics at play, making this the show's most pointed and insightful episode yet.

"The Race Card" opens with a key bit of framing set in 1982, a full 13 years before the start of the O.J. Simpson trial. Johnnie Cochran is driving down the street, young daughters in tow, when a motorcycle cop pulls him over. As the cop manufactures a nonsense explanation for the traffic stop, Cochran cuts him off. "Look, I know the drill," he says. "I'm black. I'm driving in a fancy white neighborhood, nice car. You pull me over." As frustrated outbursts go, it's relatively contained — but it's just the excuse the cop needs to haul Cochran out of the car, bend him over the dashboard, and handcuff him.

When the cop realizes Cochran is an assistant district attorney, he lets him go — but the experience still requires a painful conversation with his children about the realities of the situation. "Daddy, did he call you a n-----r?" asks one daughter. "No, he didn't. He didn't have to," says Cochran. "And don't you girls, ever use that word, ever. Ever. It's a terrible word. You hear me?"

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Cut to 1995 as the O.J. Simpson trial begins. As Johnnie Cochran exits a church service, he takes an interview, criticizing the prosecution for adding Chris Darden — as O.J. Simpson put it last week, their own "black guy" — in a cynical effort to balance out the lopsided racial dynamics between the prosecution and the defense. "It's obvious to me Mr. Darden is being used as a tool by the DA's office because he's black," says Cochran.

So begins a fascinating and complicated battle between Cochran and Darden, former colleagues whose sparring match is based, in large part, on their conflicting efforts to define race as it relates to both their personal identities and the O.J. Simpson trial. Let's start with Cochran's bombastic accusation, which — despite Marcia Clark's fervent protestations — is actually kind of true. Marcia's boss, Gil Garcetti, explicitly told her he was concerned about "perception" if the prosecution didn't add a third black chair, and she put Darden's name forward. It's a professional variation on the affirmative action Darden felt handcuffed by in college, as his peers deemed him less worthy despite his top-tier credentials for the program. This time, for reasons entirely outside of his hands, Darden's race was definitively a factor.

Does that make Chris Darden a lesser member of the team? Of course not. But in this case, pretending his race was a total non-factor is disingenuous, and Marcia's refusal to acknowledge that to his face is condescending — particularly as Darden faces widespread condemnation from the black community, with a Los Angeles poll finding that 76 percent of African-Americans deem him an "Uncle Tom." When Marcia says that key witness Mark Fuhrman — an L.A.P.D. cop with a history of racially charged statements — will "present best" if Darden questions him, he challenges her to say what she really means. "Say it. Go on. It's because I'm black. Go on." She doesn't. Rather than acknowledge that Darden's race is a part of the prosecution's strategy, she says she'll handle Fuhrman personally.

The (almost entirely white) team of prosecutors' staunch refusal to acknowledge the racial dynamics of the case may be well-intentioned, or may just be the product of discomfort. Either way, they allow Cochran to take complete control of one of the most pivotal subtexts of the case — and in The People vs. O.J.'s telling, it's the key to the defense's eventual victory.

Cochran had to fight for it. Robert Shapiro insisted that race "will never be an issue in this case." O.J. Simpson himself told Cochran, "I'm not black. I'm O.J." Even Darden attempts to convince him to walk back his invocation of the case's racial dynamics. "It's my sincere hope that we can agree, from this point forward, to treat each other with respect," Darden tells Cochran, attempting to be the calm adult in the room. "Brother, I ain't trying to be respectful," retorts Cochran, letting his own polished, heavily enunciated patter drop away. "I'm trying to win."

It's this philosophy that leads to one of Cochran's earliest and cleverest gambits, when he has Simpson's Brentwood house redecorated with African-style art and pictures of African-Americans — only some of whom are people Simpson has actually met — before the jury takes a tour. And it leads to the showcase scene of "The Race Card," as Darden and Cochran publicly argue over whether Fuhrman's history of racial slurs should be admissible in court. Fuhrman's statements are "completely irrelevant," argues Darden. "We're talking about a word that blinds people. When you mention that word to the jury, it will blind them to the truth."

Darden's tactical error is his hectoring, condescending tone, which implies that African-Americans lack the maturity to hear Fuhrman's racial slurs without being biased against his testimony. Cochran seizes on it. "It is prosperous to say that African Americans are so emotionally unstable that they cannot hear offensive words without losing their moral sense of right and wrong," Cochran thunders. "They live with offensive words, offensive looks, offensive treatment every day."

And then comes the kicker. As Cochran walks away from the microphone, he mumbles, in a voice perceptible only to Darden, the word he once solemnly ordered his children never to speak: "N-----r, please." It's a moment of focused aggression, and it stings; the subsequent close-up of Darden's shocked face, staring directly into the camera, says as much as any of the episode's dialogue.

You can argue whether Fuhrman's remarks are relevant to the Simpson trial or not — but you can't argue against Cochran's strategy, which is remarkably savvy in its manipulation of "optics" — the euphemism the show's white characters use to describe the tactics that rely on race.

But real as they might be, let's ignore the question of optics for a second and look that the true value of diversity. As an African-American, Darden really does bring a unique and a valuable perspective to the prosecutor's table. Marcia Clark, his partner, has a clear blind spot. "We cannot be so hung up on color," she said, allowing the defense to stack the jury with people who the research clearly showed would be likely to sympathize with O.J. Simpson. She underestimates how much Mark Fuhrman's credibility will be damaged by his well-documented history of racist remarks. "Marcia. I don't expect you to understand," warns Darden. "But there is a way that certain white people talk to black people." ("Ask around, I work with black cops every day," defends Fuhrman, in an echo of the "I have black friends!" defense that persists today.)

But no matter how hard he pushes, Marcia Clark refuses to believe that Fuhrman's racial slurs, which are so disconnected from the stark reality of the murders, could have a true impact on the O.J. Simpson verdict. She should have been smart enough to listen to Darden, who carried an entire lifetime's worth of experience as he urged her not to put Fuhrman on the stand. As Marcia Clark explains in her opening statement, the evidence against Simpson is overwhelming: Simpson's blood was found at the murder scene, on the infamous glove, and in Simpson's Ford Bronco, which also contained the blood of the victims. There's a reason cases like this are often described as "open and shut"; if the criminal justice system works as intended, where emotion is trumped by the hard facts, cases like this should be decided that quickly.

Of course, nothing about the O.J. Simpson trial was ordinary. Between the fame of the accused murderer, the intense scrutiny of both the media and the public, and the racial dynamics at play, it was impossible for anyone to go into the case without some kind of bias.

Few people have truly taken the time to immerse themselves in both sides of the debate. So let's end this review on the words of Sterling K. Brown, who originally celebrated the Simpson verdict, and has now spent six months of his life playing Chris Darden — a man unequivocally convinced that Simpson was guilty. "Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective," he told Variety. "Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms. If that conversation can begin, if mainstream America can understand why black America was happy with that verdict, if black America can understand why mainstream America was offended by that verdict, then at least people can see things from each other’s perspective and we can find some sort of middle ground."