Orange Juice. A Sociologist Approaches a Concrete Case of Murder

March 28th, 2008 Posted in Concrete incident or process, Anti-Experiment, Family Forms, Murder

Like most cases of crime and deviance the OJ murder case appears on its face to be irrational. The shocking element: what seems to be a sane and ordinary person is acting against common sense. Why would a mature, successful, wealthy middle aged man under any circumstance slaughter his ex wife? She was giving proper care to their children and he had visitation rights. They were no longer married so her current sexual life was not his business and certainly did not redound against his reputation. True he was under court order to provide large support payments to her, but enough was left of his earnings to support an opulent life style. He had no problem finding another woman for affection and sex. He was busy with work and his leisure sports activity. Why would he even break a sweat over her much less plan a high risk commando type blood-thirsty raid that endangered his infant children asleep nearby and went diametrically against his public reputation of easy-going, nice guy?

He was a stellar professional football player turned Hollywood actor and advertising icon accused of murdering his ex-wife and her casual friend outside her house. Journalists blanketed the story’s unfolding. There was a long police car chase as breaking television news; the buying of witness stories by the news media, a melodramatic trial broadcast on television, followed by the less publicized trial of a suit by kin of the victims and court proceedings on the custody of the children. The crime was heinous. A slaughter.

The marriage was over. Both partners had been unfaithful. He had attacked her in anger and had been placed under court ordered restraint from repeating this behavior.

Their relationship was not new young love. Both were experienced adults. Neither came from families of established wealth and standing. Neither had shown any intellectual, entrepreneurial or .administrative talent. He was an athlete, she a model. Both simply working people, albeit very successful. From our perspective their marriage represented mutual validation of a recently gained social position. He offered fame and money, she beauty and charm and the illusion of social status. The rich man and his trophy wife. The beautiful woman and her trophy husband.

Regardless of possible extraneous motives they were initially a stable family and household which, within a short time, included infant children. But something went wrong (it might have been his proclivity toward infidelity) and their unity fell apart, their relationship became adversarial, infidelity endemic, filled with anger and humiliation and spiraling down to break-up.

The case is concrete: real people in real time so complete understanding would require investigation at all levels .and in all realms. Social life is only one part. And information available is mainly hearsay (my recollection of media stories) so anything I may say about this case might be air-born on variable winds and not conclusive. But for my purpose that is not a liability since I only want to find methods, concepts, attitudes that indicate possible ways toward insight into mysterious incidents of this kind. We will be using approaches that the police, the legals (judges and lawyers), and the journalists abjured. When we are done the central act of murder will be more sensible and not so alien to the common understanding though this knowing will not excuse the horrible act whose outcome was the violent and notorious deaths of two people.

We analyze after the fact so the models we impose are only part of a set of explanatory models. OJ could have actually been innocent, or he could have acted out of a homicidal mania, or he could have acted as an agent for someone else. And so on. Each model can be supported by careful selection of facts. And arguments over which model actually governed can continue on forever. The case of the assassination of President Kennedy comes to mind. We might even need a sociology of ex post facto theories. So we must face that we are using the OJ Case to introduce concepts and models that might be useful in other settings without claiming that we have found the truth of OJ and his actions. But for me intuitively the analysis is very satisfying—I think I have reached an understanding even though I know (in terms of method) that I haven’t.

The case became a significant question for me. It spoke to me directly about my values and attitudes and, even more, my cultural knowledge. What was mystery to me I suspect was obvious to others. But enough people were similarly taken up (each to his own mystery) to explain the massive media attention. So there was something to learn for me personally and, more generally, something to learn about using the methods of sociology.

There are four themes immediately open to our analysis. Whether guilty or not the decisions and behaviors of the people involved evoke certain sociological concepts that are relevant to our entire society and push us all to articulate and see a little more clearly the social organization and culture in which we exist. These are: 1) the power relationship between the genders or more generally the power relationships within the entire society. This is associated with a parallel status relationship among ethnic groupings, 2) the construction and projection of deceptive persona and their unmasking 3) the dilemmas of social institutions in which choosing one way over another always leaves a vulnerability—an outcome that surprises and is treated as a problem 4) the possibility of the construction of a social therapeutic as an alternative to the supposedly purely psychological one. (These are chosen by me out of a much larger list.)

Equality is the central tenant in American society. We all share certain basic civil rights in law and we all concede this equivalence. There are certain qualities distributed in different proportions among the people—intelligence, physical health and sprightliness, certain specific talents (in music or art and such), certain skills that some learn and practice, wealth, organizational position and command, appetites and so on. These can be edges used to advantage but even the most disadvantaged person is still considered equal to all others simply by being. Rights to vote, enter public spaces, to be free and not under special state imposed disabilities.

Even so, certain other categories of people have limited or below average rights. Felons are deprived of some of these rights but even they can be rehabilitated and rejoin all others. Children have a special status, are recognized as under the control of their parents or parent surrogates until they reach the age of officially recognized majority. They are considered immature and minor and unable to use their equal rights until they grow up.

More generally there are issues of competency. Certain actions, occupations, activities require state licenses—driving an auto, practicing a profession. And certain other activities require appointments—students, agents for a commercial firm or voluntary agency—before they can be entered. Fees and financial charges might be required for certain rights and activities—a ticket for a show, a purchase of an object or a service. All are imposed limits on the universally guaranteed. These hedge in the recognized basic right to participate.

Not too long back the basic civil right in the USA was limited for two defined status groups based on gender and ethnic (and/or racial) identity that are central to the case at hand. (There are others like style of life groups, immigrants, religious and cult groups, social classes that are not centrally relevant here.) Women and certain ethnic minorities were disadvantaged social categories, who shared with children heavy limits. The most egregiously disadvantaged ethnic groups were people of African and Indian descent. Basically these categories were under special legal limits that denied them access to certain basic rights that by definition within the constitution were supposed to be universal.

I do not need to enumerate these disadvantages but only suggest that the OJ case was governed by the liberal era values where most no longer officially existed. Still a residue remained as a cultural attitude and inclination and this remainder is what set the stage, at least in part, for the murders and the actions leading up to it.

OJ was identified as Afro-American male and his wife as Caucasian (Euro-American) female.

Have a care here since these cultural understandings are in transition. They exist as residues and are disappearing hopefully into less and less significance. We don’t want our analysis to affect this process, except to accelerate the demise of historical inequities.

There is a literature on the social organization of American racial groups, especially in the Old South but ramifying through the entire society. Summarizing, the black male was legally and practically most disadvantaged and suffered the great social indignity of having black women sexually accessible to while men while white women were specifically denied to black men. (This is categorical but in general access of men and women to each other is always problematic for us all. The issue was a limit in law against one set of men and another set of women.) An organized asymmetry. A psychology of humiliation paralleling the hierarchical social order. It set the white woman as an ideal prize, a symbol, an outward sign of grace that cures the disability. Love in this setting becomes twisted and difficult. The power relationships of the men enters the sexual realm of man-woman and mutual possession is not an expression of love but an achievement, a trophy. Similar distortions can occur along fronts of wealth, prestige, academic achievement and so on.

The cultural transform, the liberation from the old social order, means trophy wife (or husband) is no longer necessary, there is no legal or psychological wound to heal, and the relationships of men and women regardless of ethnic identities can finally be governed by love and respect. For us a station of utopia.

We can’t know the symbolic value of the OJ marriage. They were from an older generation so perhaps they were transitional, wavering between the old and new social orders. They swam in the current moment of a rolling out of an evolving social organization. The intermarriage of Afro and Euro which up through the middle of the 20th century was illegal in the Old South is now legal in all USA society and, in fact, is treated as simply another marriage with no special legal attention. The vast majority of Americans support this new order though everyone is aware, to some degree, of the historical background as are the people within these marriages or relationships. The idea of racial standing depends upon the varying cultural commitments, attitudes, and prejudices of participants and on-lookers. In law and overtly these relationships have no existence though in unofficial practice our society is segmented on this issue and these different orders come into play informally and, in reality, respond to changing situations. The demarcation of these segments is inexact and for some portion there can be a shift from one segment to another by the same person or group. The social order has a shimmering quality and what particular segment is operative depends upon emotions and negotiations in the actual situation.

So the marriage becomes troubled. Both fall into infidelity like Jack and Jill. Then he tumbled into jealously and anger and threatened and beat her. Th police and courts entered and next stop OJ was expelled from the marital unit though still its financial pillar.

Note his proclivity to physically assault her. Under the realm of modern civil rights this is a no-no. We all now share in this freedom from abuse by another, and none of us can claim a right to attack another unless in self-defense. So this particular nuclear family moved from regular love through a flex (change in social order) into the notorious order of wife beating. And OJ joined an unsavory group of men and his reputation dropped a notch—the affable, charming, kindly, nonthreatening athlete-actor-icon had a cloudy, heavy side.

This hitting out against the other can take a standardized form in itself, a periodic action and continuing threat. A form of terrorism. It fills a psychic hole in the abuser (and has many of the qualities of a despised habit) and establishes a limit on the actions of the other. A horrifying denial of the civil rights of one by another. The action of the bully. The abuse stops theoretically when the abuser is successfully and immediately abused back.

Ostensibly the OJ couple had transcended the order of the Old South and found love but it is possible that feelings of the old humiliation returned for him with this new conflict She became the failed white trophy instead of the unique loved and respected mate and the whole vast cultural apparatus fell back on him. All the years of discipline and work and achievement and success now negated. At first she cheated with a colleague.(another Afro athlete) and he beat her. Then she appears to have taken casual lovers from among Euro men as well. Insufferable. The affable athlete appears to have fallen into reverse racism. The Old South stood on its head.

But something else might have been at play, call it the macho man syndrome. We can see it clearly, with its best foot forward, in Shakespeare’s play “Othello.” A successful black man (a general in Venice’s military) falls in love with a local white woman from an established family (Desdemona) who loves him in return and they marry. Through the instigation of another man Othello begins to suspect his wife of infidelity (though in reality she is loyal to him) and under the influence of contrived circumstantial evidence Othello becomes convinced that she has been unfaithful and he kills her. When he discovers his mistake he kills himself. The Old South masculine wounding does not apply. Othello does not need to compensate for a prior social loss. He can love Desdemona directly. He is foreign though and vulnerable to induced doubt. He was mislead into doubting her innocence but even more he was mislead by the macho man’s need for direct violent action against a transgressing mate. Suppose Desdemona had actually betrayed her husband (and here the issue of ethnic difference falls away and we see a general outline of simply man and woman in an established love relationship) would not Othello’s action have still been a mistake? The immediate flaring passion of jealousy and the need to deal with the humiliation and shame might be seen as mitigating but the social sanction against murder (regardless of the sexual behavior of the other) would still govern. But this is legalistic. There is a certain logic and a certain notion of social order implicit in Othello’s action against Desdemona. And even though it radically differs from the official law and the governing social order in place in post-modern USA it requires serious social investigation. In the cultural world of the USA the relationship of man and woman is egalitarian. Infidelity is reason for divorce but not an excuse for murder. But not too long ago the man-woman relationship had the macho man asymmetrical form. The man had power of decision and could govern the actions of his wife and children while he remained master of his own fate—not answerable to them for the same behavior for which they were punished. This pattern of social order has continued longer in Latin societies. And it is very clearly described in a novel by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. “Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon.”

An older powerful Brazilian plantation owner marries a much younger woman, keeps her isolated and neglected at home with her children while he visits prostitutes, establishes fancy women as mistresses in expensive homes and supplied with expensive material goods. When his frustrated wife takes a lover and he discovers their relationship he kills them and claims the homicide justifiable with the expectation that he will be found not guilty by a sympathetic judge and jury. If he does not act as required by the social order he will be called a cuckold, and so shamed publicly that he will lose power and standing in the community. His very masculinity will be in doubt. And this is the crux of the syndrome, he will be presumed to lack the sexual power to satisfy, even rule and control his woman’s emotions and sexual gratification. He will be revealed a weak and vulnerable man.

Simplifying, the macho syndrome presumes two types of men: strong potent wealthy versus weak, poor and impoverished while women are either pure, cold mothers and daughters or hot immoral mistresses and prostitutes. In USA today this is a recessive social order, carried and enacted when opportunity presents by certain imprecise sectors of our society. This could have been the vision (or segmented convention) governing OJ’s understanding.

OJ veers off from the analogy. He and his wife had been officially divorced and were both free of the vow of sexual fidelity and could proceed with their ordinary private erotic lives like all other unencumbered adults. But even so, OJ persisted in his interest in radically limiting her to a life of abstention while he gallivanted as he chose. On the day of the murders he, it seems, saw ex-wife and restaurant worker together and threatened them. His ex wife had complained that he was stalking her. She expressed fear.

Complications: In the movies this kind of loving couple can work well even with greater initial economic and cultural disparity between the pair. In “Pretty Woman” the powerful, business executive and financier with great cultural achievement (education, appreciation of arts and music), living at a cultural high finds and loves and marries a pretty prostitute who has limited cultural achievement but is ambitious and honest and loves him sincerely. If pretty woman were to fall back into old habits would wealthy man fall back to vengeful, terrifying ogre?.

My suspicion: OJ’s wife transcended racial and ethnic distinctions. She was able to see the real persons behind the symbols but OJ could not follow. Skin color and ethnic identity blocked his understanding of the other, but at the same time he was, on occasion, able to transcend the country’s racial history. Like most of us he could go either way on this issue. The contention in the marriage threatened his sense of social honor gained from the public trophy status of the woman–the advantage to the man in having an extremely attractive wife. The threatened loss to her of the economic and social position of the husband was mitigated by the courts who generously insisted that he supply financial support to her and the children while at the same time denying him all parallel rights except limited visits with the kids. This disparity insisted on by the courts added to the felt injustice of OJ’s post-bust-up situation.

But more than that was involved, his view of power was premised on his athletic skill and recognized ability and the threat of being able to deploy an overpowering violence when required. He could (and this was important to his sense of self-identity) dominate his immediate situation by the use of his own physical force as required. This is a limited power. He wasn’t a chief executive (CEO) leading and coordinating large numbers of workers nor did he have similar power positions in the civil service, military, religious groups, public welfare. The one more general power position he possibly could do by himself was coach or manage an athletic team but he never went in that direction. His ability to use his money and the freedom it offered was also limited. An education that didn’t open him up for anything but his own limited, though wildly successful line of athletic talent and discipline. Even his leisure was athletic—playing golf. A narrow and limited space even with material wealth and the gimmicks it supplied. But in our society an envied position of success. So the importance of the trophy and his vulnerability to its loss. His ex-wife with the assistance of the courts of law had in a sense stripped him bare and threatened the whole edifice, a built-up defense for a wounded personality that he had worked so hard to construct against all odds. A lot of negatives but it seems to be normal for our society and that era. He was about the same as everyone else except for his fabulous but limited skill and for his ability to plan and carry out a murderous assault to retrieve his lost successful-though-limited self. It is another case of “What Makes Sammy Run?” (a Budd Schulberg novel). Surrounded by poverty and ordinariness, a big city youth, with a compulsive drive to succeed along a single line of opportunity, a total commitment and dedication and discipline and a disregard of others, reaches his goal, the top of the world in fantasy. But, then, where is he? In part it is like Dick Gregory sitting-in to integrate a lunch counter but when he wins he can’t find anything on the menu he wants to eat. But also the single purpose mania to win the trophy leaves one vulnerable. Is this all? Is this it? Is there a hole left in his psyche, an emptiness? Every other possible aspect of his life is undeveloped and when he is not doing his thing he vanishes into nothing. He is in the role (and he projects and needs the social ordering) of the dictator who can not afford to fall. Mr Macho. He kills to end the threat to his margin of identity and existence. He kills to save the social order that gives him his narrow advantage.

Am I wrong? Is he as pure and lively as Desdemona after all?

Another direction. The fact that the OJ public persona, if he did commit the murders, has been a fiction. The people (his fans) had been lead down the garden path. This guy was not what he seemed. We were all assured that he was debonair, easy going, affable, satisfied, at ease in the world, secure. He also projected the image of the Afro-American man who had assimilated to a Euro-centric upper middle class way. That he was like all the rest of us without any residue of anger and pain from a recent history of oppression and abuse. The persona gave him his iconic advertising value. So there is the issue of the building up of a false public personality as a socially shared image of a particular real person. We were all duped and had reached that moment where, as Lincoln noted, all of us, the people, were fooled.

In our face-to-face groups, at work, in associations with friends, in public service, we all tend to hide certain traits we, if we think for a second, just by being alive share but that we tend to keep secret and blocked from the view of others—basically our animal ways. Also certain traits of character negated by our shared cultural values like jealousy, hate, selfishness, and so on. At the same time we present qualities that are valued culturally like generosity, truthfulness, concern for and interest in others that we might privately not feel. We all construct a false picture of ourselves for those around us, we each build a persona as a front. But in direct association we all read each other, without conscious trying, and each member of the group is read by the others and the group as a whole tends to read each member in a near unitary way. You can camouflage but you can’t hide in face-to-face interaction. The interactive process tends to correct the projected and distorted persona. To escape this reading is possible but it requires an iron discipline and a very strong motive and an unusual talent for acting and for sustained deception. The mirror of the group’s shared perception will usually be received as a critique by actor central and as best he/she can adjust, a revision will be made (to the extent possible). The persona meeting the group’s perception generates a therapeutic. The injured personality finding compensation in the constructed persona strives to avoid the social test. Question: Missing in this story is the perceptions and observations of work mates and associates of the man behind the mask. Was there no mark of Cain?

In the trial racism, which the principles in themselves had under control (ostensibly wanted to surmount), enters the case via the Los Angeles Police Department when it was revealed in court testimony that a detective who had intruded himself into the investigation (it belonged to two other experienced and in behavior unbiased men) and who discovered a significant piece of evidence (a blood stained glove) at the scene of the crime was a racist in language at least and possibly a racist in motive and purpose. So the Los Angeles police became for awhile the subject of the trial and the stack of circumstantial evidence against OJ was tainted by bias. The jury, at the instigation of the defense team were mainly Afro-Americans, who leaned toward a black power ideological perspective, were ready to find the racist charge against the LAPD very plausible. So the inter-ethnic issue which had been mainly resolved by the murderer and the victims was introduced by the trial process and influenced the outcome.

The Othello theme. Theories of crime and especially the explanation of particular crimes are usually psychological in USA. Emphasis is on the responsibility of the individual and questions of social ordering are on the fringe. The main alternate sociological contributions to understanding are three: (1) Crime as a form of social mobility for the individual to resolve social class disadvantage. The attempt is to convert the criminal act into an ideological act of revolution. The felon is permitted to argue revolutionary legitimacy (an act of class or ethnic solidarity), but if he persists in his activity after the successful revolt, which he usually does, he is treated as the same outlaw he always had been. Some wildly successful criminals use their ill gotten wealth to buy individual social mobility. (2) Secondly the criminal and the crime are located in a sub-culture—a special sector of shared understanding that makes criminal acts and attitudes conservative and reasonable because established as normal for a select grouping. The criminal is supported by buddies, kin, specialists in legal defense, fences, ideological excuses .and rationales. He does what he does because it is right. The law and the ordinary citizens frame the space within which he and his grouping act. The potential imprisonment and possible violent death the dominant segment impose is accepted as a known risk that with luck and care can be avoided. (3) Third the criminal cultural segment is more like a continuation of a very old and primitive culture that is not simply a reaction to the established majority culture but rather a vision of the world that is an alternative that has always been there and now resides hidden and parallel to the majority theme of the moment. The criminal way continues on under any and all majority ideological systems—democratic capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, anarchism, hippie or hip hop. The OJ case and the Othello case, separated by around four centuries, would suggest that this third way of social interpretation might have some validity. The alternative culture here dooms the unfaithful wife. It is an act required by a masculine dominated world where a man’s position of honor and power is based upon his ability to control the behavior of others whether his wife’s sexual and reproductive behavior or the economic and power behavior of his employees, associates, and competitors. I am not happy with this formulation but it is a temporary way of marking the astonishing persistence of this masculine energetic form.

I am more and more convinced that large parts of the governing culture we enact are not articulated, do not take a literary (or even a clear verbal) form in ordinary life. That the person making the choices and acting is working off emotion and unanchored assertion. Even where the crime is not the immediate result of passion, where the act is cool, planned and logical, where act and goal are linked, the perpetrator might be severely limited by lack of verbal skill and verbal habit to describe the ordered pattern within which he acts. He is like the planet following its trajectory without knowing the gravitational law that describes it. They, and we, need Robert Graves and William Shakespeare to sketch the governing field. The motive and the understanding are not known until articulated by the class of verbalizers. They don’t know what they do until our literary heroes tell them.

The dictator at the center of both sexism and racism and political and economic domination, is the roaring lion. In the dock, reduced to toothless bite, empty and almost random talk, yet unable or not permitted to scurry back to the ordinary life, he is pathetic and ridiculous, laughable. This is his nightmare.

The threatening specter of the macho man is matched by an equally destructive feminine image. I’ll call it out in the next post.

But what if Jody’s six feet tall? (Line from an Army marching song.)

Notes.

*If the details remind you of the O.J. Simpson case I won’t argue. My facts are not definitive so I avoid the use of actual names.