Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.
The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”
There’s a particular school of cultural critic — you know the kind — who are forever seeking signs that the world is going to hell in a bucket. One phenomenon that they decry with tiresome regularity is that of celebrity-in-itself — that is, the idea of someone who is “famous for being famous.” The assumption, when the phrase is used, is that such a state of fame is a new anomaly in the order of things, and so a symptom of our civilizational decline.
Reader, ‘tain’t so. Literary biographies and cultural encyclopedias are full of figures of questionable accomplishments whose names we still sort of remember: Mrs. Astor, Diamond Jim Brady, Lilly Langtry, Beau Brummel. They didn’t call them “celebutantes” then; instead, they come down to us with such non-professional titles as famed beauty, noted dandy, or celebrated wit. Some of them made a living as writers or performers in between stints as professional dinner guests, but then, just as now, many came from inherited wealth. They were famous in their day for their parties, their clothes, their lovers. Even figures of genuine ability aren’t immune to this sort of celebrity-in-itself. Lord Byron, for instance, was a hell of a poet — but not even grad students actually read him any more. He belongs to posterity as a lifestyle, as a mood, as an adjective.
You can’t control how history will remember you — only whether it will or not. The wealthy layabouts of centuries past might court fame by patronage of the arts, or by hosting literary salons; they shone by surrounding themselves with men of genius and reflecting their brilliance. The major innovation of today’s celebutantes lies in cutting out the middleman. Instead of surrounding themselves with talent, they’ve simply surrounded themselves with cameras and taken their case directly to the viewing public.
So it is with the kin of the late multimillionaire scumbag businessman and lawyer Robert Kardashian. How much of a scumbag was Robert Kardashian? Enough to sign on for O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys — even though his own then-wife Kris had been a close friend of Nicole Brown Simpson. Robert and Kris subsequently divorced, and Robert died a few years later, leaving his quasi-widow and their brood of kids (Kim, Khloe, Kourtney, and a couple of others with names slightly less ridiculous) to fend for themselves, shielded from the vicissitudes of the world only by their bottomless sense of entitlement, their trust funds, and the loving (if befuddled) presence of stepfather-figure Bruce Jenner. (Yeah, the guy from the Wheaties box, once the world’s greatest all-around athlete, playing straightman to a house full of drama queens. No wonder he looks so exhausted all the time.) In their E! Network reality series Keeping Up with the Kardashians(Sundays, 10 PM), we see them cope as anyone would, by endless parties and shopping among their moneyed peers, and by abusive drinking. The girls intermittently play at being members of the productive class, taking occasionally shifts at the till of a vanity boutique set up for just that purpose; I thought of Marie Antoinette’s little dairy at Rambouillet. Their real full-time job, though, is to read their own press and then complain about it. (more…)
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
