ABSTRACT
I was in Los Angeles only once during the whole O.J. circus, but the memory of a brief encounter in the cocktail lounge of a Santa Monica hotel in August 1994 has stayed with me. A bar bore was getting cranked up, and soon he was broadcasting loud and clear on the topic du jour. He was a white businessman whom the bartender seemed to know all too well and wished she didn’t. He was claiming a special knowledge about football players on the basis of having once served on the board of trustees of an East Coast university. Without much egging on from his audience of two, one bluster led to another until he unveiled his theory that, of all football players, the success of running backs on the field depended less on brainpower than on their killer instinct, and that this disposition was probably genetic. In fact, he was sure this was the key to the O. J. Simpson case. When pressed to elaborate, he ventured that the scientists could prove this kind of genetic theory in the courts but they would not be allowed to do so in the upcoming trial. At this point I had to leave to meet a friend. I discreetly expressed my sympathies to the bartender, who would now bear the brunt of these pronouncements alone. What I thought I had encountered in the bar was a new kind of concoction—of half-truths about the links between genetics, law, and crime—that may be more potent and widely consumed than anyone would like to believe.
