ABSTRACT
O. J. Simpson was famous rather than black; that is, until the African-American community took its lead from the cover of Time and, well, blackened him. 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". 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 people could possibly look at things a bit differently". As blacks exulted at Simpson's acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that the race thing was knottier than they'd ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst.
