Mark Fuhrman: A Remembrance

 

Mark Fuhrman Dies at Age 74
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.

 

All you had to say was "Mark Fuhrman," and you were using the trendiest, most economical vocabulary available to convey the evil of racism. Lange and Vannatter made the LAPD look squeaky clean, Clinton displayed sensitivity to the needs of African Americans, columnists took on the authority of clergy, all by isolating and ritualistically denouncing Mark Fuhrman.

 

Did we interrogate the private lives, the public actions, the secret thoughts of these politicians, columnists, comics? Did we dig up their unfinished novels, dream diaries, office e-mails, and expose them publicly in a search for sin? Did we ask if they have ever gone the extra mile for a member of another race? Did we ask that of ourselves?

 

No. America drew a border around racism; it was embodied in Mark Fuhrman. No matter how bad we were, we were at least not him. As long as we were not him, we could enjoy a temporary respite from our racial agony. Isolating, trying, and condemning Mark Fuhrman provided catharsis. That's the whole point of having a scapegoat.

 

After two years of silence, Mark Fuhrman, the man, has recently been making the talk show circuit. We had reason to expect a shallow racist who would continue to entertain us and provide us with the opportunity to feel relatively righteous. After all, as the press has been reminding us, where has he been hiding out but Idaho, that white supremacist enclave? Why else would anyone leave the coasts? Either for the siren song of supremacy, or potatoes.

 

Our favorite fairy tale ogre has not materialized. This Mark Fuhrman was able to complete whole sentences and use words appropriately. As he spoke, traces of humor, pain, and hope quivered over his face. Fuhrman wasn't only simply human, although that was enough to be rattling. He apologized for his actions while disavowing racist action or sentiment. He talked of his complex relationships with African Americans throughout his professional and personal life. He revealed: he is not the Beast we so wanted him to be. Now we ask ourselves, what made this man so easy to demonize?

 

Fuhrman is obviously male in a traditional sense. He has short hair; he wore a suit and tie; he sat erect. He appeared physically fit. He spoke courteously but with decision; he spoke standard English; he apologized but did not plead for mercy. He revealed accomplishment and intelligence, perhaps the source of what looked like arrogance but what might be simple self confidence. His former occupation -- police detective -- is a traditionally male one involving weapons, crime, and power. And he's white.

 

However Fuhrman may classify himself, as a good cop, a once poor kid without a father who took on adult duties at a very young age, an artist, a felon, we classify him as a white male. In a woman or a person of color, the kind of dignity and sang-froid that Fuhrman displayed would be admirable. In him, it is read not as self-mastery but as a tool for the oppression of others. No less than for Willie Horton, Fuhrman's public assessment suffers for the genre our fears and current politics place him in.

 

Fuhrman may be the only major figure in the Simpson Drama who has not had a crying scene. Were Fuhrman to produce one, to reveal a temporary lack of mastery, we could embrace him. Public weeping would violate the taboos of his exotic tribe of martial white males, and demonstrate surrender to our more civilized mores.

 

Race is not the only divide in America. Class is another. Fuhrman did the kind of work it takes a body to get done. And we know those guys need the thinkers to keep them in line. The problem is, action risks; actions can be seen; actions can be judged. As Fuhrman himself has pointed out, he spent his career working with and, he says, protecting African Americans. The assassination of his character was the gambit of wordsmiths, whose actions may or may not mirror their avowed and popular politics. Not risking action and material consequence makes it easier to appear superior.

 

Like Robert Bork, Lanie Guinier, and Clarence Thomas, we gave Fuhrman his fifteen minutes of fame to provide ourselves with target practice. Unlike those figures, he was not judged on alleged actions. An extensive review of his professional record, The L.A. Times has reported, revealed no indication that he ever planted evidence or engaged in racist activities. The contents of his notorious tapes were the basis of a fiction project; not even his thoughts, rather, his imaginings. Mark Fuhrman was pilloried in the court of public political correctness, not for anything he did, but for what he imagined. Even the too lo-tech Puritans never pulled off such a coup in their witch trials.

 

Having gone through hell, Fuhrman has not gone crazy the way we want martial white males to go crazy. He is not Bruce Dern in the veteran-goes-nuts movie Coming Home, not Michael Douglas in the unemployed-white-defense-worker-goes-nuts movie Falling Down. Fuhrman seemed to receive Larry King's and Oprah Winfrey's outrage and sermonettes in a centered place, and not lose balance. He revealed awareness of his demon status, yet he doesn't look damaged to the core. He expressed awareness of the pain and wrong that resulted from his action, yet, at certain moments, his face revealed what looked like an almost Buddhist resignation to the complexities of life.

 

The main character of a story is sometimes defined as the one who changes. Change may be beyond O.J. Simpson. Mark Fuhrman has revealed the capacity to change, not just in public perception, but in himself. He has learned and grown from his trauma, rather than let it destroy him. The question now is whether or not we change. Yes, Jay Leno apologized for his Richard Jewell jokes, but only after Jewell sued and cried. America shouldn't wait for Fuhrman to cry before we change the virtual courtroom that chewed him up. Any one of us could be next. Do we really want to be judged simply on how media savvy we are, how well we can pose?

 

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery