I taught at a non-traditional four-year college where most students were black. I taught a course in Logic and Argumentation that had for its textbook a rigorous approach to logic, heavily weighted towards the courtroom.
By lucky coincidence, the course coincided with a huge court case in the media. It was every teacher's dream. It was like teaching a class with a Lab component. We could watch the arguments unfold as we study proper argumentation and logic. And the court case was-- OJ Simpson.
OJ Simpson as you remember was once a football hero, the model of perfection of strong, fine black manhood. He showed black people that it is possible to excel. He was shiny clean and competed fairly, successful on his own merits. I actually saw his name in the American Heritage dictionary, with his picture. Of course he never made it to the next edition.
Nobody wanted Simpson found guilty. It was not just a mark on him but on all black people, particularly black males, who already had it hard enough. Everyone felt this way, black and white alike. My students, as blacks, felt it as something personal, and hoped dearly that he was innocent.
The Logic and Argumentation textbook for this class taught the kind of logic that lawyers use, such as ad hominem and other fallacies, bias, unconscious assumptions, the vagaries of witness testimony, guilty until proven innocent, and so on. There were snippets of court cases in the book as examples of some of the concepts. Heavy emphasis was placed on the topic of bias, with many examples to show how our prejudices and assumptions lead us to inaccurate conclusions, and how advertisements, the government etc. mislead us by using language in sneaky ways.
Well by now you see where this is going, I'm sure. The course was very demanding and induced a completely new way of looking at the world. By the end, nearly every student said the same thing: "When I started this class I was for OJ, but I hate to say this, now I think he's guilty."
I learned about the verdict even before I got home. I passed a subway token booth whose message board read, in large triumphant letters:
Not Guilty!!
They didn't even have to put his name.
1 comment:
Thank you for posting this. It brought back memories of a trial from nearly two decades ago. I have a couple of observations. First, OJ's athleticism wasn't the only thing that made him a celebrity. Through his countless leaps in rent-a-car commercials, his appearances on variety shows (including a great comic turn on Saturday Night Live) and his recurring role in the popular "Naked Gun" movies, OJ was a familiar face for Americans. This made it equally hard to want to find him guilty of anything
Second, while it was convenient that you were teaching a course on Logic and Argumentation, I am reminded of something a lawyer friend once told me, "Logic has no place in a trial. It is to be shunned." Eyewitnesses are unreliable. Experts can be challenged by opposing experts. The evidence should support a conclusion but cold logic very, very, very rarely PROVES it. Argumentation, however, is the major component. And Team OJ argued the hell out of everything. Everyone is guaranteed a fair trial, after all, but not a perfect one.
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