The Two Race Cards That Still Haunt Us
History repeats itself these days, first as tragedy then as a made-for-TV movie.
It may be only coincidental but this is a good time to revisit two racially charged dramas: The O.J. Simpson double-homicide case and the confirmation hearings for now-Justice Clarence Thomas' nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Watching HBO's two-hour docudrama "Confirmation," a retelling of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, after watching FX's 10-part "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" series, reminds me of an unexpected element that these two seemingly unrelated events shared in common: The race card.
In Simpson's case, as one of his high-priced lawyers lamented after the verdict, that card was played "from the bottom of the deck." But in my experience that's how the race card is usually played, whether out of desire or desperation, and no race has a monopoly on it.
As the FX series shows, Simpson's legal team essentially won by distraction -- they turned the jury's attention away from Simpson and proposed an alternative narrative: The far-fetched possibility that police had conspired to frame Simpson out of racial animus.
The jury, which in the end had 10 women and two men (nine were black, two were white and one was Hispanic), seemed to be primed by other outside events to listen to that narrative. Rodney King's videotaped beating by four Los Angeles police officers and the riots that followed their acquittal on charges of use of excessive force and assault with a deadly weapon by a Simi Valley jury were still fresh in local minds, including those of the jurors.
In similar fashion, then-federal Judge Clarence Thomas played a different sort of race card to save his Supreme Court nomination in 1991. He faced charges of sexual harassment made by law professor Anita Hill, who had worked for Thomas in two different government agencies years earlier.
Since both individuals were black, the charges did not concern race but rather sexual harassment, still a new concept in most public discussions.
Yet everyone also knew that Thomas was chosen by President George H.W. Bush to replace retired Justice Thurgood Marshall, the high court's first African American and a civil rights icon. Race mattered and, thanks to Hill, gender now mattered, too.
Thomas successfully reversed the hemorrhaging of his Senate support with his memorably passionate blast at the hearings as a "high-tech lynching."
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