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A Remembrance
On the morning of Tuesday, May 19, 2026,
I was listening to NPR. Reporter Steve Futterman announced that Mark Fuhrman
had died. Fuhrman was a media anti-hero during the trial of O.J. Simpson. LAPD
Detective Fuhrman found a bloody glove at the crime scene. Simpson's defense
attorneys sought to render Fuhrman's testimony unreliable. They accused Fuhrman
of being a bad cop, a racist, who planted fake evidence because he hated black
people. To prove their point, they produced audiotape of Fuhrman using the N-word.
NPR's report of Fuhrman's death reduced Fuhrman's entire life to these bare
facts. Fuhrman was an alleged bad cop, a white supremacist, who allegedly
"planted" the bloody glove to frame an innocent black man of the
stabbing murder of his white ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald
Goldman.
On October 3, 1995, I was shopping in a
hippie store in Bloomington, Indiana. An announcement came over the intercom.
O.J. Simpson had been found not guilty. A thin, very pretty, very well dressed
white girl, maybe twenty or so years old, jumped up, clapped her hands, and
began hugging shoppers and dancing around the store. She was celebrating the
verdict. I was astounded. O. J. Simpson had a documented history of beating Nicole
Brown. There were photos of her bruised face. There was a chilling 911 call of Nicole
crying and begging for help and O.J. screaming and threatening her. Evidence
suggested that he stabbed her to death, possibly because she was in the company
of Goldman, a handsome young man. This college-town white girl was dancing
around a hippie store to celebrate Simpson's exoneration. What I understood as
feminism had utterly failed, at least in the mind of that white girl. A very
different ideology had parasitized her brain.
In 1997, Mark Fuhrman made the rounds of
talk shows. He appeared with Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. As a grad student, I
had to focus on my own work. I thought of myself as a committed leftist and I
had no inkling that that would ever change. But something really bugged me
about that dancing white girl. Something really bugged me about how we were
treating Mark Fuhrman. By "we" I mean Americans, my friends, my
fellow grad students, and popular culture figures and mass media. I felt like I
was in the middle of a cognitive traffic jam. Of course white supremacy was
bad. No argument. Of course the N-word was offensive. Of course, as a leftist
feminist, I found it easy to make ugly comments about police officers, about
macho masculinity, and about former Marines like Fuhrman. Fuhrman was a virtual
poster boy for the white male power figure we all assumed was our ultimate
enemy. So far, so clear.
And yet. And yet.
I remember the day I sat down at a
campus computer – computers were expensive in those grad school days and I
didn't own my own computer – and typed up the essay, below.
With every word, I was thinking of cherished
friends who were participating in the national show trial of Fuhrman. I was
thinking of how my words violated our unspoken social contract. We applauded
each other for being righteous, and we never questioned the approved narrative.
If we did, we would accuse ourselves of the crimes of racism or sexism or
merely wrong think, and we would be cast out.
And yet I was thinking things I
shouldn't be thinking, feeling discomfort, even outrage, I shouldn't be
feeling. I felt compelled to write the essay, below, partly to clarify to
myself why the treatment of Fuhrman bugged me so much. I had to struggle for
words, because none of my friends and no mainstream media were saying anything
like this. I had to struggle for words because I didn't want to lose friends or
paint a target on myself.
I finished the essay and sent it off to
potential publishers. I never found a publisher and the essay has been sitting
in my files ever since. I reread it today, the day that Fuhrman's death has
been announced.
Since I wrote this, the prediction I
made in the final sentences has come true. There have been many show trials,
many narratives that one dare not question, at the risk of losing friends and
accusing oneself. In 2013, Justine Sacco made an unfunny and harmless attempt
at humor on Twitter. She made a clumsy comment about AIDS and Africa. Within
hours, the tweet went viral, and Sacco was hated, and threatened, around the
world. People rushed to hate Sacco. Hating Sacco somehow was a righteous thing
to do.
These internet show trials have happened
to many others. There's nothing righteous about them. They don't help anyone.
Hating Mark Fuhrman or Justine Sacco did nothing to help black people.
Below is my 1997 essay about Mark
Fuhrman.
***
We knew everything we needed to know about Mark Fuhrman. Even those of us too pure, too intellectual, to follow the trial knew that Mark Fuhrman was not a man. Like a fairy tale ogre, he was our bête noir personified, without individuality or motivation. He was racist, if not racism itself. David Letterman joked about racism using the name as shorthand; a reporter equated him with Hitler. Forces usually in opposition, like the iconoclast Bill Maher and conservative pundits, were united in their vilification of Mark Fuhrman.
