“Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué’s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal. It’s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.

Illustration by Daniel Zender

An American historian I know registers a widespread sense of bathos when he says, “Who would have imagined that the Simpson trial would be like the Kennedy assassination—that you’d remember where you were when the verdict was announced?” But everyone does, of course. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson was in the red-carpet lounge of a United Airlines terminal, the only black in a crowd of white travellers, and found himself as stunned and disturbed as they were. Wynton Marsalis, on tour with his band in California, recalls that “everybody was acting like they were above watching it, but then when it got to be ten o’clock—zoom, we said, ‘Put the verdict on!’ ” Spike Lee was with Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, rummaging through a trunk filled with her husband’s belongings, in preparation for a bio-pic he’s making on the athlete. Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in her car in the parking lot of her local grocery store in Vermont, listening to the proceedings on National Public Radio, and she didn’t pull out until after they were over. I was teaching a literature seminar at Harvard from twelve to two, and watched the verdict with the class on a television set in the seminar room. That’s where I first saw the sort of racialized response that itself would fill television screens for the next few days: the white students looked aghast, and the black students cheered. “Maybe you should remind the students that this is a case about two people who were brutally slain, and not an occasion to celebrate,” my teaching assistant, a white woman, whispered to me.

The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they’d ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner’s disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove, who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it “appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not.” Of course, it’s possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, “You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we’re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides.”

The matter of side-taking cuts deep. An old cartoon depicts a woman who has taken her errant daughter to see a child psychiatrist. “And when we were watching ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” the distraught mother is explaining, “she was rooting for the wicked witch!” What many whites experienced was the bewildering sense that an entire population had been rooting for the wrong side. “This case is a classic example of what I call interstitial spaces,” says Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, who recently retired from the federal Court of Appeals, and who last month received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The jury system is predicated on the idea that different people can view the same evidence and reach diametrically opposed conclusions.” But the observation brings little solace. If we disagree about something so basic, how can we find agreement about far thornier matters? For white observers, what’s even scarier than the idea that black Americans were plumping for the villain, which is a misprision of value, is the idea that black Americans didn’t recognize him as the villain, which is a misprision of fact. How can conversation begin when we disagree about reality? To put it at its harshest, for many whites a sincere belief in Simpson’s innocence looks less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis.

Perhaps you didn’t know that Liz Claiborne appeared on “Oprah” not long ago and said that she didn’t design her clothes for black women—that their hips were too wide. Perhaps you didn’t know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program “20/20.”) Perhaps you didn’t know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church’s Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye’s?

Perhaps you didn’t know these things, but a good many black Americans think they do, and will discuss them with the same intentness they bring to speculations about the “shadowy figure” in a Brentwood driveway. Never mind that Liz Claiborne has never appeared on “Oprah,” that the beleaguered Brooklyn company that makes Tropical Fantasy has gone as far as to make available an F.D.A. assay of its ingredients, and that those fried-chicken franchises pose a threat mainly to black folks’ arteries. The folklorist Patricia A. Turner, who has collected dozens of such tales in an invaluable 1993 study of rumor in African-American culture, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” points out the patterns to be found here: that these stories encode regnant anxieties, that they take root under particular conditions and play particular social roles, that the currency of rumor flourishes where “official” news has proved untrustworthy.

Certainly the Fuhrman tapes might have been scripted to confirm the old saw that paranoids, too, have enemies. If you wonder why blacks seem particularly susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories, you might look at a history in which the official story was a poor guide to anything that mattered much, and in which rumor sometimes verged on the truth. Heard the one about the L.A. cop who hated interracial couples, fantasized about making a bonfire of black bodies, and boasted of planting evidence? How about the one about the federal government’s forty-year study of how untreated syphilis affects black men? For that matter, have you ever read through some of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO files? (“There is but one way out for you,” an F.B.I. scribe wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, thoughtfully urging on him the advantages of suicide. “You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”)

People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There’s a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The “shadowy figures” of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved. In any case, fealty to counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color: witness Representative Helen Chenoweth, of Idaho, and her devoted constituents. With all the appositeness of allegory, the copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” sold by black venders in New York—who are supplied with them by Lushena Books, a black-nationalist book wholesaler—were published by the white supremacist Angriff Press, in Hollywood. Paranoia knows no color or coast.

Finally though, it’s misleading to view counternarrative as another pathology of disenfranchisement. If the M.I.A. myth, say, is rooted among a largely working-class constituency, there are many myths—one of them known as Reaganism—that hold considerable appeal among the privileged classes. “So many white brothers and sisters are living in a state of denial in terms of how deep white supremacy is seated in their culture and society,” the scholar and social critic Cornel West says. “Now we recognize that in a fundamental sense we really do live in different worlds.” In that respect, the reaction to the Simpson verdict has been something of an education. The novelist Ishmael Reed talks of “wealthy white male commentators who live in a world where the police don’t lie, don’t plant evidence—and drug dealers give you unlimited credit.” He adds, “Nicole, you know, also dated Mafia hit men.”

“I think he’s innocent, I really do,” West says. “I do think it was linked to some drug subculture of violence. It looks as if both O.J. and Nicole had some connection to drug activity. And the killings themselves were classic examples of that drug culture of violence. It could have to do with money owed—it could have to do with a number of things. And I think that O.J. was quite aware of and fearful of this.” On this theory, Simpson may have appeared at the crime scene as a witness. “I think that he had a sense that it was coming down, both on him and on her, and Brother Ron Goldman just happened to be there,” West conjectures. “But there’s a possibility also that O.J. could have been there, gone over and tried to see what was going on, saw that he couldn’t help, split, and just ran away. He might have said, ‘I can’t stop this thing, and they are coming at me to do the same thing.’ He may have actually run for his life.”

To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe. Thus the soprano Jessye Norman is angry over what she sees as the decision of the media to prejudge Simpson rather than “educate the public as to how we could possibly look at things a bit differently.” She says she wishes that the real culprit “would stand up and say, ‘I did this and I am sorry I caused so much trouble.’ ” And while she is sensitive to the issue of spousal abuse, she is skeptical about the way it was enlisted by the prosecution: “You have to stop getting into how they were at home, because there are not a lot of relationships that could be put on television that we would think, O.K., that’s a good one. I mean, just stop pretending that this is the case.” Then, too, she asks, “Isn’t it interesting to you that this Faye Resnick person was staying with Nicole Brown Simpson and that she happened to have left on the eighth of June? Does that tell you that maybe there’s some awful coincidence here?” The widespread theory about murderous drug dealers Norman finds “perfectly plausible, knowing what drugs do,” and she adds, “People are punished for being bad.”

There’s a sense in which all such accounts can be considered counternarratives, or fragments of them—subaltern knowledge, if you like. They dispute the tenets of official culture; they do not receive the imprimatur of editorialists or of network broadcasters; they are not seriously entertained on “MacNeil/Lehrer.” And when they do surface they are given consideration primarily for their ethnographic value. An official culture treats their claims as it does those of millenarian cultists in Texas, or Marxist deconstructionists in the academy: as things to be diagnosed, deciphered, given meaning—that is, another meaning. Black folk say they believe Simpson is innocent, and then the white gatekeepers of a media culture cajolingly explain what black folk really mean when they say it, offering the explanation from the highest of motives: because the alternative is a population that, by their lights, is not merely counter-normative but crazy. Black folk may mean anything at all; just not what they say they mean.

Yet you need nothing so grand as an epistemic rupture to explain why different people weigh the evidence of authority differently. In the words of the cunning Republican campaign slogan, “Who do you trust?” It’s a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don’t. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they’re continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn’t be. Norman Podhoretz’s soul-searching 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem, and Ours”—one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race resentment—tells of a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author’s residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood. And yet, he notes in a crucial passage, “I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them.” That ordinary, unremarkable comfort—the feeling that “the police are working for me”—continues to elude blacks, even many successful blacks. Thelma Golden, the curator of the Whitney’s “Black Male” show, points out that on the very day the verdict was announced a black man in Harlem was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. As older blacks like to repeat, “When white folks say ‘justice,’ they mean ‘just us.’ ”

Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don’t have more than one story to tell. “These stories have a ring of cliché about them,” Erroll McDonald, Pantheon’s executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, “but, as we all know about clichés, they’re almost always true.” McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply “to show cause why I shouldn’t be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car.” Wynton Marsalis says, “Shit, the police slapped me upside the head when I was in high school. I wasn’t Wynton Marsalis then. I was just another nigger standing out somewhere on the street whose head could be slapped and did get slapped.” The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, “When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me that I was stealing things.” Nor does William Julius Wilson—who has a son-in-law on the Chicago police force (“You couldn’t find a nicer, more dedicated guy”)—wonder why he was stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts. There’s a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black.

So we all have our stories. In 1968, when I was eighteen, a man who knew me was elected mayor of my West Virginia county, in an upset victory. A few weeks into his term, he passed on something he thought I should know: the county police had made a list of people to be arrested in the event of a serious civil disturbance, and my name was on it. Years of conditioning will tell. Wynton Marsalis says, “My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal-justice system.” Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.

Another barrier to interracial comprehension is talk of the “race card”—a phrase that itself infuriates many blacks. Judge Higginbotham, who pronounces himself “not uncomfortable at all” with the verdict, is uncomfortable indeed with charges that Johnnie Cochran played the race card. “This whole point is one hundred per cent inaccurate,” Higginbotham says. “If you knew that the most important witness had a history of racism and hostility against black people, that should have been a relevant factor of inquiry even if the jury had been all white. If the defendant had been Jewish and the police officer had a long history of expressed anti-Semitism and having planted evidence against innocent persons who were Jewish, I can’t believe that anyone would have been saying that defense counsel was playing the anti-Semitism card.” Angela Davis finds the very metaphor to be a problem. “Race is not a card,” she says firmly. “The whole case was pervaded with issues of race.”

Those who share her view were especially outraged at Robert Shapiro’s famous post-trial rebuke to Cochran—for not only playing the race card but dealing it “from the bottom of the deck.” Ishmael Reed, who is writing a book about the case, regards Shapiro’s remarks as sheer opportunism: “He wants to keep his Beverly Hills clients—a perfectly commercial reason.” In Judge Higginbotham’s view, “Johnnie Cochran established that he was as effective as any lawyer in America, and though whites can tolerate black excellence in singing, dancing, and dunking, there’s always been a certain level of discomfort among many whites when you have a one-on-one challenge in terms of intellectual competition. If Edward Bennett Williams, who was one of the most able lawyers in the country, had raised the same issues, half of the complaints would not exist.”

By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers. Cornel West says, “I think part of the problem is that Shapiro—and this is true of certain white brothers—has a profound fear of black-male charisma. And this is true not only in the law but across the professional world. You see, you have so many talented white brothers who deserve to be in the limelight. But one of the reasons they are not in the limelight is that they are not charismatic. And here comes a black person who’s highly talented but also charismatic and therefore able to command center stage. So you get a very real visceral kind of jealousy that has to do with sexual competition as well as professional competition.”

Erroll McDonald touches upon another aspect of sexual tension when he says, “The so-called race card has always been the joker. And the joker is the history of sexual racial politics in this country. People forget the singularity of this issue—people forget that less than a century ago black men were routinely lynched for merely glancing at white women or for having been thought to have glanced at a white woman.” He adds, with mordant irony, “Now we’ve come to a point in our history where a black man could, potentially, have murdered a white woman and thrown in a white man to boot—and got off. So the country has become far more complex in its discussion of race.” This is, as he appreciates, a less than perfectly consoling thought.

“But he’s coming for me,” a woman muses in Toni Morrison’s 1994 novel, “Jazz,” shortly before she is murdered by a jealous ex-lover. “Maybe tomorrow he’ll find me. Maybe tonight.” Morrison, it happens, is less interested in the grand passions of love and requital than she is in the curious texture of communal amnesty. In the event, the woman’s death goes unavenged; the man who killed her is forgiven even by her friends and relatives. Neighbors feel that the man fell victim to her wiles, that he didn’t understand “how she liked to push people, men.” Or, as one of them says of her, “live the life; pay the price.” Even the woman—who refuses to name the culprit as she bleeds to death—seems to accede to the view that she brought it on herself.

It’s an odd and disturbing theme, and one with something of a history in black popular culture. An R. & B. hit from 1960, “There’s Something on Your Mind,” relates the anguish of a man who is driven to kill by his lover’s infidelity. The chorus alternates with spoken narrative, which informs us that his first victim is the friend with whom she was unfaithful. But then:

Just as you make it up in your mind to forgive her, here come another one of your best friends through the door. This really makes you blow your top, and you go right ahead and shoot her. And realizing what you’ve done, you say: “Baby, please, speak to me. Forgive me. I’m sorry.”

“We are a forgiving people,” Anita Hill tells me, and she laughs, a little uneasily. We’re talking about the support for O. J. Simpson in the black community; at least, I think we are.

A black woman told the Times last week, “He has been punished enough.” But forgiveness is not all. There is also an element in this of outlaw culture: the tendency—which unites our lumpenproles with our postmodern ironists—to celebrate transgression for its own sake. Spike Lee, who was surprised but “wasn’t happy” at the verdict (“I would have bet money that he was going to the slammer”), reached a similar conclusion: “A lot of black folks said, ‘Man, O.J. is bad, you know. This is the first brother in the history of the world who got away with the murder of white folks, and a blond, blue-eyed woman at that.’ ”

But then there is the folk wisdom on the question of why Nicole Brown Simpson had to die—the theodicy of the streets. For nothing could be further from the outlaw ethic than the simple and widely shared certainty that, as Jessye Norman says, people are punished for doing wrong. And compounding the sentiment is Morrison’s subject—the culturally vexed status of the so-called crime of passion, or what some took to be one, anyway. You play, you pay: it’s an attitude that exists on the streets, but not only on the streets, and one that somehow attaches to Nicole, rather than to her ex-husband. Many counternarratives revolve around her putative misbehavior. The black feminist Bell Hooks notes with dismay that what many people took to be a “narrative of a crime of passion” had as its victim “a woman that many people, white and black, felt was like a whore. Precisely by being a sexually promiscuous woman, by being a woman who used drugs, by being a white woman with a black man, she had already fallen from grace in many people’s eyes—there was no way to redeem her.” Ishmael Reed, for one, has no interest in redeeming her. “To paint O. J. Simpson as a beast, they had to depict her as a saint,” he complains. “Apparently, she had a violent temper. She slapped her Jamaican maid. I’m wondering, the feminists who are giving Simpson such a hard time—do they approve of white women slapping maids?”

Of course, the popular trial of Nicole Brown Simpson—one conducted off camera, in whispers—has further occluded anything recognizable as sexual politics. When Anita Hill heard that O. J. Simpson was going to be part of the Million Man March on Washington, she felt it was entirely in keeping with the occasion: a trial in which she believed that matters of gender had been “bracketed” was going to be succeeded by a march from which women were excluded. And, while Minister Louis Farrakhan had told black men that October 16th was to serve as a “day of atonement” for their sins, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was obviously not among the sins he had in mind. Bell Hooks argues, “Both O.J.’s case and the Million Man March confirm that, while white men are trying to be sensitive and pretending they’re the new man, black men are saying that patriarchy must be upheld at all costs, even if women must die.” She sees the march as a congenial arena for Simpson in symbolic terms: “I think he’d like to strut his stuff, as the patriarch. He is the dick that stayed hard longer.” (“The surprising thing is that you won’t see Clarence Thomas going on that march,” Anita Hill remarks of another icon of patriarchy.) Farrakhan himself prefers metaphors of military mobilization, but the exclusionary politics of the event has clearly distracted from its ostensible message of solidarity. “First of all, I wouldn’t go to no war and leave half the army home,” says Amiri Baraka, the radical poet and playwright who achieved international renown in the sixties as the leading spokesman for the Black Arts movement. “Logistically, that doesn’t make sense.” He notes that Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington was “much more inclusive,” and sees Farrakhan’s regression as “an absolute duplication of what’s happening in the country,” from Robert Bly on: the sacralization of masculinity.

Something like that dynamic is what many white feminists saw on display in the Simpson verdict; but it’s among women that the racial divide is especially salient. The black legal scholar and activist Patricia Williams says she was “stunned by the intensely personal resentment of some of my white women friends in particular.” Stunned but, on reflection, not mystified. “This is Greek drama,” she declares. “Two of the most hotly contended aspects of our lives are violence among human beings who happen to be police officers and violence among human beings who happen to be husbands, spouses, lovers.” Meanwhile, our attention has been fixated on the rhetorical violence between human beings who happen to disagree about the outcome of the O. J. Simpson trial.

It’s a cliché to speak of the Simpson trial as a soap opera—as entertainment, as theatre—but it’s also true, and in ways that are worth exploring further. For one thing, the trial provides a fitting rejoinder to those who claim that we live in an utterly fragmented culture, bereft of the common narratives that bind a people together. True, Parson Weems has given way to Dan Rather, but public narrative persists. Nor has it escaped notice that the biggest televised legal contests of the last half decade have involved race matters: Anita Hill and Rodney King. So there you have it: the Simpson trial—black entertainment television at its finest. Ralph Ellison’s hopeful insistence on the Negro’s centrality to American culture finds, at last, a certain tawdry confirmation.

“The media generated in people a feeling of being spectators at a show,” the novelist John Edgar Wideman says. “And at the end of a show you applaud. You are happy for the good guy. There is that sense of primal identification and closure.” Yet it’s a fallacy of “cultural literacy” to equate shared narratives with shared meanings. The fact that American TV shows are rebroadcast across the globe causes many people to wring their hands over the menace of cultural imperialism; seldom do they bother to inquire about the meanings that different people bring to and draw from these shows. When they do make inquiries, the results are often surprising. One researcher talked to Israeli Arabs who had just watched an episode of “Dallas”—an episode in which Sue Ellen takes her baby, leaves her husband, J.R., and moves in with her ex-lover and his father. The Arab viewers placed their own construction on the episode: they were all convinced that Sue Ellen had moved in with her own father—something that by their mores at least made sense.

A similar thing happened in America this year: the communal experience afforded by a public narrative (and what narrative more public?) was splintered by the politics of interpretation. As far as the writer Maya Angelou is concerned, the Simpson trial was an exercise in minstrelsy. “Minstrel shows caricatured every aspect of the black man’s life, beginning with his sexuality,” she says. “They portrayed the black man as devoid of all sensibilities and sensitivities. They minimized and diminished the possibility of familial love. And that is what the trial is about. Not just the prosecution but everybody seemed to want to show him as other than a normal human being. Nobody let us just see a man.” But there is, of course, little consensus about what genre would best accommodate the material. Walter Mosley says, “The story plays to large themes, so I’m sure somebody will write about it. But I don’t think it’s a mystery. I think it’s much more like a novel by Zola.” What a writer might make of the material is one thing; what the audience has made of it is another.

“Simpson is a B-movie star and people were watching this like a B movie,” Patricia Williams says. “And this is not the American B-movie ending.” Or was it? “From my perspective as an attorney, this trial was much more like a movie than a trial,” Kathleen Cleaver, who was once the Black Panthers’ Minister for Communication and is now a professor of law at Emory, says. “It had the budget of a movie, it had the casting of a movie, it had the tension of a movie, and the happy ending of a movie.” Spike Lee, speaking professionally, is dubious about the trial’s cinematic possibilities: “I don’t care who makes this movie, it is never going to equal what people have seen in their living rooms and houses for eight or nine months.” Or is it grand opera? Jessye Norman considers: “Well, it certainly has all the ingredients. I mean, somebody meets somebody and somebody gets angry with somebody and somebody dies.” She laughs. “It sounds like the ‘Ring’ cycle of Wagner—it really does.”

“This story has been told any number of times,” Angelou says. “The first thing I thought about was Eugene O’Neill’s ‘All God’s Chillun.’ ” Then she considers how the event might be retrieved by an African-American literary tradition. “I think a great writer would have to approach it,” she tells me pensively. “James Baldwin could have done it. And Toni Morrison could do it.”

“Maya Angelou could do it,” I say.