Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (51 page)

Relative to whites, blacks also made encouraging economic gains in the 1990s. Thanks to rapid economic progress late in the decade, the median household income for blacks increased considerably—from roughly $24,000 (in constant 2000 dollars) in 1990 to $30,400 in 2000, or by 27 percent. In the same period, median household income for whites rose more slowly, from $40,100 in 1990 to $44,200 in 2000, or by 10 percent.
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The median money income of black households in 2000 was nearly 69 percent of white households in 2000, compared to 60 percent ten years earlier. The income of African American married couples, which had been 67 percent of the income of white couples in 1967, had risen to 87 percent by 1995.
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College-educated black women fared very well in the workforce.

Black poverty declined during the decade from 9.8 million in 1990, affecting 31.9 percent of all blacks, to 7.9 million in 2000, or 22 percent. This was a stunning decrease, at last knocking down percentages of black poverty that had hovered between 30.7 and 35.7 between 1970 and 1990. All of this improvement occurred after 1993, following recovery from the recession of the early 1990s.
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The number of blacks who lived in crowded, poverty-stricken central cities declined during the decade, from an estimated 4.8 million people in 1990 to 3.1 million in 2000. This was 9 percent of overall black population in 2000.
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A considerable number of African Americans were residing in racially mixed areas: In the mid-1990s, one-half of all black people lived in neighborhoods that were 50 percent or more white. Greater racial integration was developing in workplaces.
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Optimists, finally, derived satisfaction from signs that the sharp and historically powerful dualism of black versus white was at last becoming a little more blurred. Virtually all scientists by then agreed that the concept of “race” was a “social construct” that had no significant meaning as a genetic matter, and that the old “one drop rule” that had hardened racial categories was inane.
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Perhaps more important in changing (though slowly) the ways that people identified “race” was the greatly increased number of other “people of color,” notably Latinos. Almost half of Americans who told census takers in 2000 that they were Latinos did not identify themselves as either “white” or “black.” They replied instead that they were of “some other race” or of “two or more races.” The
New York Times
, noting in 2003 the apparent weakening of once sharply defined racial categories, reported happily, “Simply put, most Latinos do not see themselves playing in the colored jerseys that are provided.”
⁴²

I
N 2004, HOWEVER
, the black scholar Henry Louis Gates was among the many worried Americans who looked back on recent trends and surveyed some roads not yet taken. The 1990s, Gates concluded, were “the best of times, the worst of times.”
⁴³
As he pointed out, black-white relations continued to be the nation’s number one socio-economic problem.

Central to this problem was the enduring power of social class—a power nearly as great, many observers maintained, as that of race.
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Though middle-class blacks gained economically in the late 1990s, the median money income of African American households in 2000 was still only 69 percent as high as that of white households. Statistics measuring personal resources that include not only income but also inheritance, possessions, and investments revealed that the average net worth of African Americans may actually have declined relative to that of whites, from one-eighth of white net work in the 1970s to one-fourteenth by 2004.
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Though poverty rates among blacks were declining, millions of African Americans remained in need. Their poverty rate in 2000 was still 2.5 times that of whites. The unemployment rate for blacks (7.6 percent in 2000) remained more than twice what it was for whites (3.5). A third or more of black people who were eligible for means-tested programs like food stamps or Medicaid were unaware of their eligibility.
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African Americans were far more likely than whites to lack health insurance. For these and other reasons, the life expectancy of blacks continued to lag behind that of whites: In 2000, it was 71.2, compared to 77.4 for whites.
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The “underclass” problem, while slightly less severe during the more prosperous late 1990s, had surely not gone away. The grim statistics on black crime and imprisonment were vivid, shaming reminders of that fact.
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Dramatizing these problems, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, organized a widely publicized Million Man March of black men in Washington in 1995. Black men, he said, were going to “clean up their lives and rebuild their neighborhoods.”
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Equally worrisome were numbers regarding poverty among black children. By 2000, these numbers looked better than they had between 1970 and 1995, when more than 40 percent of black children under the age of eighteen had been so classified. But in large part because of the still high percentages of female-headed black families, 30.4 percent of African Americans under the age of eighteen lived in poverty in 2000.
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Many of these children had serious health problems: Like millions of children in low-income white families, they suffered from high rates of asthma, mental retardation, lead poisoning, diabetes, and learning disabilities.

It was also obvious that residential segregation remained widespread in the 1990s. Though it was true that one-half of African Americans resided in neighborhoods that were at least 50 percent non-black, an additional 40 percent lived within almost wholly black enclaves. In a great many parts of the country, America remained a nation of vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities. Some suburbs, too—such as Prince George County, Maryland—had become heavily African American in composition. Many blacks, of course, preferred to reside in predominantly black areas; living close to whites had little appeal to them. It was also clear that significant cultural preferences continued to hinder relaxed interracial socialization: African Americans and whites had distinctly different tastes in music, film, and television shows. In any event, truly mixed-race neighborhoods and social groups remained very much the exception rather than the rule in the United States.

Studies of marriage further exposed continuing racial divisions. Concerning this ever sensitive issue, some statistics suggested that increasing numbers of black-white marriages might be launching a trend toward interracial amalgamation. In 2000, for instance, there were an estimated 363,000 black-white married couples in the United States, a 70 percent increase over the number (211,000) in 1990. This signified a rise in the percentage of married African Americans with non-black spouses from 6 to 10 within only ten years. The percentage in 2000, moreover, was higher than the percentage of Jewish-gentile marriages had been in 1940—a rate that escalated to 50 percent during the ensuing sixty years. In time, some people speculated, comparably rapid increases in black-white marriages might develop. Moreover, percentages of white-black cohabitation in the 1990s were thought to be higher than those of white-black marriage.
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Statistics such as these made it obvious that America had moved substantially beyond the situation in 1967, when the Supreme Court, in
Loving v. Virginia
, had finally ruled that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional.
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As of the early 2000s, however, the percentage of blacks and whites who were intermarrying was still small—far smaller than the percentages of American-born Latinos, American-born Asians, or Native Americans who were doing so.
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And neither TV nor Hollywood appeared eager in the early 2000s to depict romance across the color line. In the new century, it was premature to predict large increases in the number of black-white marriages in the future.

T
HEN THERE WAS THE EXTRAORDINARY CONTENTIOUSNESS
and publicity surrounding the O. J. Simpson case in 1994–95. Not even the Los Angeles riots, horrifying though they had been, seemed as discouraging to people who hoped for a closing of the racial divide in America.

The “Juice,” a black man, was a celebrity: a Hall of Fame football star, a movie actor, a TV sports announcer, and a dashing, bounding presence in television ads for Hertz rental cars. In June 1994, he was arrested on charges of having stabbed to death his divorced wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, a white woman, and a white friend of hers, Ron Goldman. The two bloody bodies were found outside the front door of her condominium in the upscale Brentwood section of Los Angeles. This was not far from Simpson’s own substantial residence.

Five days after the bodies were discovered, police issued warrants for Simpson’s arrest on charges of murder. When he failed to turn himself in as he had promised, they launched an all-out hunt for his car, a white Ford Bronco. By early evening they had located it, whereupon television reporters, learning of its whereabouts, entered the act. Following the Bronco from helicopters, TV cameras captured the car moving at moderate speed along the Artesia Freeway in Los Angeles. A friend, Al Cowlings, was driving it, with Simpson said to be armed and suicidal in the backseat. Police helicopters and a phalanx of cruisers, red lights flashing in the gathering darkness, accompanied the Bronco for more than fifty miles in a stately procession that lasted for nearly two hours.

By the time the procession ended, it had preempted programming on a vast number of stations. It was estimated that 100 million Americans saw parts of the pursuit. Only a few national events—Kennedy’s assassination, the moonwalk of 1969—had ever attracted such an audience. Rapt viewers wondered what would happen. Would the Bronco crash? Would Simpson kill himself? Would there be a shootout? None of the above, as it turned out. After the car reached Simpson’s home, the troubled celebrity eventually emerged from it. Though he was carrying a handgun, he did not shoot anybody. After more suspense, police made the arrest. It was nearly 9:00
P.M.
Pacific time, and midnight on the East Coast, when the televised drama finally ended.
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From then on, and throughout a nationally televised trial that lasted for nine months in 1995 (jurors were locked in hotel rooms for 265 nights), millions of Americans fixated on the many sordid details of the murders. In doing so they followed a drama that exposed many unflattering aspects of American society and culture: the powerful role of money in the criminal justice system, the extraordinary allure of celebrity culture, the seductive appeal to Americans of stories featuring sex and violence, and the saturation coverage by TV of sensational events. Television lavished greater attention on the trial than it did, combined, on the contemporaneous bloodletting in Bosnia, the forthcoming presidential election, and the terrorist bombing that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City. As much as any event of the 1990s, the Simpson trial spurred the development on television, especially on cable news stations, of “infotainment”—wherein “reality shows” featuring day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month updates of sensational crimes involving sex and violence dominated the screen.

Simpson, a wealthy man, hired a battery of prominent lawyers and DNA analysts to defend him against charges that most white Americans considered to be manifestly true. Within a month of his arrest, 77 percent of white Americans said that the case against him was either “very strong” or “fairly strong.” By contrast, only 45 percent of blacks saw the case that way. People who believed that Simpson was guilty emphasized that he had seemed to be avoiding arrest and that he had a history of battering his former wife, who had often called police. After one such complaint, Simpson had pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of abusing her and was fined, sentenced to 120 hours of community service, and placed on two years’ probation.

Without his attorneys, whom few Americans—black or white—could have afforded, Simpson might have had no chance in court. But he was a celebrity, and his lawyers were smart and determined. Leading them was Johnnie Cochran, a shrewd and experienced African American trial lawyer. Cochran and his assistants introduced carefully analyzed DNA evidence and picked damaging holes in the actions and testimony of a white policeman who had conducted the murder investigations. Cochran emphasized to the jury—made up of nine blacks, two whites, and one Latino—that racial prejudice in the criminal justice system had inspired the charges against his client. Prosecutors, including a leading African American attorney, angrily retorted that Cochran was brandishing the “race card.”

The case vividly exposed the commercialization that often accompanied sensational events involving sex, violence, and celebrities in America. It was later estimated that the total in commercial spin-offs from the case approximated $200 million. A slew of books on the case soon appeared. Even while the trial was taking place, some of the jurors sold their stories for later use by tabloids. Purchases of Broncos (and of other SUVs) boomed as never before. The
National Enquirer
paid Nicole Brown Simpson’s father $100,000 for her diary and featured the case on its cover in twenty-one of twenty-seven issues in late 1994. Her father also received $162,000 from a syndicated tabloid TV show for selling and narrating a home video of her wedding to Simpson. A girlfriend of Simpson’s pocketed an advance of $3 million for a book on the case, and posed for
Playboy
as the trial opened. It was reported that Cochran and Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor, between them received some $7 million in advances for their books on the case.
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