When the Clarence Thomas, Mike Tyson, and O. J. Simpson cases emerged as high-profile media cases, a pattern was established in which Black men became symbolic representatives of three distinctively feminist issues. These issues were sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence, respectively. This article argues that a competitive and antagonistic relationship, or a playing of gender against race, developed through this disproportionate media emphasis. Three explanations for the pattern are explored: historical biases, the structure of legal trials, and media philosophy.

Unless one lived a hermetically sealed existence entirely devoid of popular cultural exposure, it would be virtually impossible to avoid learning in 1995 that O. J. Simpson was tried and then acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. But although the Simpson case was singled out for its alleged uniqueness and was popularly labeled "the trial of the century;" far less emphasized is a pattern within which this incident neatly fits along with other cases.

The Simpson case became the most famous example to date of the issue of domestic violence, symbolically crystallized through a high-profile crime trial; it drew attention to the ongoing and potentially deadly dangers posed by this all too frequent manifestation of violence against women. Only 4 years prior, Anita Hill testified against a Supreme Court nominee at a 1991 televised Senate hearing. In the aftermath of this hearing, Clarence Thomas became the party most likely to exemplify the problem of sexual harassment in history books to be written about our era. In 1992, several months after William Kennedy Smith was acquitted of rape charges, Mike Tyson was convicted of this crime and emerged as the most famous representative of date rape and its successful prosecution.

A pattern can be discerned that weaves a common thread through these three cases of the early to mid-1990s. Citing the cases in their sequential order, this pattern was that three African American males--Clarence Thomas, Mike Tyson, and O. J. Simpson--became major cultural symbols of precisely the kinds of coercive abuses against women that second-wave feminism struggled to define as personally and politically unacceptable. Three Black men came to embody the feminist issues of sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence, respectively.

As this Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern unfolded, highlighted here even if insufficiently attended to by the media, a larger problem also emerged: This problem can be called the playing of gender against race, enacted in and through high-profile crime cases. By this characterization, I refer to social situations that encourage the occurrence of an insidious process: In the course of objecting to one mode of discrimination, another form of discrimination is relatively belittled or overlooked. Yet, of course, discriminatory realities such as sexism and racism frequently overlap; experientially, they regularly cohabit in the same society. Thus, when two or more forms of discrimination are juxtaposed against each other, two valid social protests are often placed speciously in competition with one another. Like gender in relation to race, these discriminations are structured to appear, even though they are not necessarily antagonistic. The result is a divisiveness that makes it difficult for social movements to collectively address and uproot both problems. This outcome comprises a backlash against social movements in general, as the term was used by Susan Faludi (1991) to depict reactions against feminism in particular. Should this opposition become routinized, media and public attention can become preoccupied with the staging of confrontations between the two social movements against each other. Such confrontations are then highlighted more than the challenges potentially posed to traditional relations of power in society by the social movements themselves.

When these observations are applied to the cases at hand, it becomes dear that the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern facilitates the playing of gender against race when feminist issues become disproportionately represented by Black men. As we will see, all legal trials, and therefore highly profiled trials as well, are structured around the taking of antagonistic sides. Court cases are organized along the presumption that only one of these sides can "win," and the other must "lose" because verdicts of guilt or innocence are routinely expected. Thus, in each of these three cases, one side readily became symbolically representative of feminism as a social movement (and, therefore, of gender as a form of discrimination). The other side became symbolically representative of anti-racist protest movements (and, therefore, of race as a form of discrimination). That such a sense of competitiveness arose in these cases and actually began to play gender against race can be confirmed simply by recalling anecdotally the drama of the Simpson verdict and its divisive effects. Indeed, if one took the side of race in this and other cases, a cost was likely to be exacted in terms of decreased social sensitivity toward the issue of gender If one took the side of gender, however, a price was likely paid in terms of relatively less sensitivity shown toward racism because the latter is manifested in the differential scrutiny of Black men's behavior

Yet, in a society where racist and sexist subordination are regularly intertwined, this differential targeting of Black men often results in diminishing the potential power of both anti-racist and feminist social movement groups. For instance, for feminists, a pattern such as the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson problem reinforces equating all feminism with an ostensibly White-only feminism. In doing so, the pitting of gender against race re-creates an adversarial relationship that is misleading more than accurate, alienating many women from a movement that, in principle, affects--and therefore should belong to--all women across class, racial, ethnic, sexual preference, and other social divides wherein gendered violence occurs. Unfortunately; the fact remains that rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence do commonly occur across otherwise disparate divides such as ethnicity, race, and class.

Consequently; one would think it would not have been difficult for the media to focus its high-profile lens on instances in which well-known and/or wealthy White men were accused of rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence. Many upper-class White men have been accused and convicted of rape, domestic violence, and murder in brutal cases of violence against women. With regard to sexual harassment, cases involving other White politicians--from Bob Packwood to Bill Clinton--could have, although they did not, receive the same amount of coverage as was accorded the Clarence Thomas case. Why was it, then, that Black men came to disproportionately symbolize the crystallization of feminist issues? How did the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern emerge, and what were its consequences?

The two major purposes of this article are, first, to investigate how this Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern arose in the first place and, second, to analyze the problems bequeathed for social movements of a resultant playing of gender against race.

Background for this analysis comes from both quantitative and qualitative research I have undertaken for a larger project concerning high-profile crime cases in the 1980s and 1990s involving gender, race, and class. Based on research on the most publicized high-profile crime cases in 135 U.S. newspapers between 1985 and early 1997, I found that no other cases of rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence were accorded greater coverage in sheer numbers of articles than the Tyson, Thomas, and Simpson incidents, respectively. Indeed, these stories figured high among the top 10 of all crime cases that I found were given the most coverage in the United States during this period. I used Lexis/Nexis to conduct this piece of research, which involved checking results obtained independently from an index study of the The New York Times and Los Angeles Times and then using keywords to investigate the number of occasions when references to a given case were made in 135 newspapers all across the country (from the time an incident took place to the present). By this measure, I discovered that 103,589 articles and references to the O. J. Simpson case appeared during this period (making it the number one story during the selected time frame, a result that is not likely to surprise many readers); 20,311 articles and references appeared for the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas story (making it the third most publicized story in this 12-year period); and 9,864 articles and references appeared for the Mike Tyson case (making it the fourth most publicized story). Coming in second was the Rodney King case, to which 25,190 references appeared. Although the William Kennedy Smith case received an immense amount of national coverage, it was accorded relatively less than the Tyson case; similarly, the amount of coverage devoted to the Thomas case superseded that of White males accused of sexual harassment, including Bob Packwood and Bill Clinton.

In qualitative terms, this article is based on a series of interviews conducted in New York City and Los Angeles between 1991 and 1996. I interviewed many of the principal reporters who covered the Thomas, Tyson, and Simpson cases for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as a variety of parties involved in the legal aspects of these cases and in social movement protests that developed because of these cases.

Nonetheless, while drawing on this background, the bulk of the following observations are theoretically oriented given the dual purposes stated above. Each of the following sections is built on exploring three factors that might explain the diagnosed Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern: historical biases, the structure of legal trials, and media philosophy. Because books can and have been written on each of these subjects, this presentation offers only an abbreviated summary aimed at explaining the analytically highlighted pattern before returning, by way of conclusion, to this pattern's ramifications for the playing of gender against race.

In commencing with historical biases as an explanation of a contemporary problem, I am alluding to past and ongoing racial discrimination against Black men from slavery onward. This history encompasses fears of Black men having sexual relations with White women, which have been used to justify racial subordination long after slavery was officially ended. This projection of sexual fears about Black men already had the effect of playing gender against race through well-known crime cases of earlier decades: The Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s and the Emmett Till case of the 1950s entered many African Americans' and other Americans' collective memories as unfounded incidents that expressed racial biases through the issue of alleged violence against White women (Goodman, 1994; Whitfield, 1988).

Given this background of long-standing prejudice and of racist violence fueled by sexual fears, it is easy to explain differential targeting of Black men in terms of habitual ideological racism of the past. This is the focus of a recent book by Earl Hutchinson (1996) called The Assassination of the Black Male Image, which also notes the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern and argues that the media's focus on Black men need not be conspiratorial to produce a discriminatory outcome. Hutchinson writes that White editors do not necessarily plan to reinforce biased images of Black men. Rather, their decisions express the cumulative effects of past historical discrimination on a mainstream American press that is still White dominated at the related levels of its ownership and top editorial positions. These decisions may not be purposefully discriminatory at all and yet can reflect the recycling of subconscious fears and stereotypes about Black men and sexuality.

Consequently; long before the Tyson, Thomas, and Simpson cases arose in the 1990s, Black men were already being presented in the media as social embodiments of alleged violent criminality. Although one response to this criticism is that the differential representation itself reflects disproportionate commission rates of crime by minority males, this answer fails to take social context carefully into account. For historical racism has also bequeathed ongoing conditions of structural inequity--in housing, in education, in employment--that almost ensure the emergence of an underground economy and of crime related to it (Kozol, 1991; Massey & Denton, 1993; Wilson, 1987). To the extent the media continue to report on the effects of a long history of racism without critically probing the causes of apparently "objective" facts, biased presumptions are reproduced rather than exposed.

Thus, the philosophical underpinnings of the media themselves, including their belief in objective journalism, need also to be investigated as a possible explanatory factor Before turning to this question, though, the organization of legal trials themselves ought to be explored first because their structure may parallel the media's own ideological proclivities.

A second explanation that may help to explain the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson pattern in relation to the playing of gender against race involves the fact that high-profile crime cases eventually become centered on trials. One has only to conduct a cursory cultural study to sense that fascination with crime and with criminal trials is endemic--even obsessive--in the United States. From various film and television genres, spanning a gamut that ranges from horror and suspense movies to "reality" programming and detective programs such as NYPD Blue, crime provokes responses in the American public that cannot merely be characterized as repulsion but also involve attraction. How else is it possible to explain the coexistence in the 1980s and 1990s of a "get tough" environment and the fact that good violent crime stories in popular culture genres are immensely profitable?

However, the relevance of this point to this article's concerns is that cultural fascination with crime in the United States means that large numbers of people are likely to be drawn toward the cultural "spectacle" of trials. In an excellent early treatment of this subject, Kristin Bumiller (1988) depicted the United States, from the 1960s onward, as a "civil rights society" that is highly litigious indeed. But once public attentions are focused through highly profiled media cases not only on crime but on trials, perceptions are likely to be structured around "either/or" outcomes because trials themselves usually allow only for verdicts of guilt or innocence. Juries deliberate for hours, and not infrequently for days, knowing that the outcome they are expected to produce generally requires one side to win and the other to lose. Moreover, this expectation is itself analogous to the structure of sports, another hugely popular and resonant cultural medium by which collective sentiment in the U.S. context is habitually recycled and organized within either/or limitations. Obviously; in sports as we know them, an expectation of winners and losers also structures the experience of events.

Yet, whereas sports and trials can and do often require either/or outcomes for reasons that can at least be justified given "the rules of the game" by which these cultural institutions operate, this cannot be said for the playing of gender against race as social movement issues. To the extent that certain high-profile crime cases have become symbolically resonant, as occurred with the Tyson, Thomas, and Simpson examples, they are not simply cases but are likely to become causes. Take the Simpson case again, in which the imposed structure of a legal trial--one side against another--became virtually synonymous with one issue of social discrimination (in this case, race) becoming counterposed against another (in this case, gender). On the "pro-O. J." side were parties who passionately believed not only that Simpson's fate was at issue but that the case evidenced racist discrimination against Black men in general. On the "pro-Nicole" side, feminists have been passionately concerned not only with protesting the violence that haunted and may have ended Nicole Brown Simpson's life but also about the terrible consequences for all women of domestic violence.

Consequently; our subject at hand--the playing of gender against race--becomes reinforced by the structure of legal trials themselves. But whereas either/or decisions might be said to be required by legal trials or sports events, when it comes to social movement issues, a competitive antagonism between gender and race does not correspond to the actually overlapping character of these discriminations. As already suggested, the interaction of gender, class, and race discriminations in actual day-to-day life is far more complex: This complexity, as it affects both women and men, is veiled by the imposition of either/or structures that make it seem as if gender and race confront each other antagonistically as a matter of necessity.

Numerous writers have described the attraction of the media, not only the public, to "spectacles" (Edelman, 1971, 1988; Garber, Matlock, & Walkowitz, 1993). Thus, public fascination with crime and then with trials is likely to be recycled in a circular and tautological process through media attention. Reporters and editors believe that the public is eager for trials to be covered. Huge coverage ensues, public interest is regenerated, and further media coverage is justified by public interest.

Yet, the media may also be drawn to the public spectacle of trials because of an analogous, indeed a homologous, relationship that creates parallels between its own philosophical attitudes and that of the law. Common to both are beliefs in a particular definition of objectivity--namely; that truth is only to be established through the structuring of "sides" that can then be queried to determine whether the defendant's or the prosecution's position is factual. Little room is left for subtleties, for complex positions that may not fit so easily into this structure especially when, as in instances such as the Tyson/Thomas/Simpson pattern, cases have turned into politically symbolic causes. Let us turn, then, to two journalistic practices that relate to an overall media philosophy held by many editors and reporters. In combination with an overriding adherence to objectivity on the part of many journalists, these practices--first, the highlighting of two sides to every story and, second, a tendency to seek novelty but only in the mode of the routine may have facilitated the playing of gender against race, thereby affecting the genesis of the observed Thomas/Tyson/ Simpson pattern.

First, conventional journalistic philosophy regularly encompasses the belief that "two sides to every story" should be presented in news stories. Consequently, a common way to describe events is through the mechanism of their presentation vis-a-vis positions constructed in opposition to one another. Frequently; as Todd Gitlin (1980) showed in The Whole World Is Watching, two spokespersons become polarized representatives of opposite sides. In Policing the Crisis, Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts (1978) also described this media tendency to set up two sides as simultaneously constituting a device whereby liberal societies neutralize criticism. If two sides are represented, balanced vis-a-vis the media practice of according them equal weight, the society outside the news story may seem correspondingly fair as well. In this way; a false equalization tends to neutralize alternative ways of viewing the world. Moreover, a justification is then in place for not contextualizing events in their preexisting social and historical settings--settings that, if accurately depicted, encompass persistently imbalanced and inequitable social relations. More accurate depictions of social context beyond two-sided frameworks might also necessitate reporting the active participation of the media itself in constructing events; after all, journalists intervene as "mediating" third parties in allegedly only two-sided events. But given that the need for such self-reflexive contextualization does not regularly characterize media practices in the late 1990s, it is not surprising that legal trials will be attractive not just to wider publics but to journalists as well. That the trial is already organized into two sides corresponds with the media's own preexisting ideology. In this respect, the law and the media can be said to operate along parallel lines and with comparable assumptions.

The second media practice relevant to this article's concerns involves the journalistic habit of seeking novelty in the form of the routine. This suggests the subsistence of a pattern beneath the pattern. When this practice is applied to the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson incidents, a quite specific argument can be developed as to why these cases were not merely individually unique anomalies (as the label "the trial of the century" implies) but a series of gender-versus-race cases partly interconnected through preexisting media dispositions.

In two classic 1970s essays, sociologist Gaye Tuchman (1972, 1974) contended that American journalism is based on "routine" practices and, at the same time, on varying these processes to create a sense of "news" as new. Certain genres of crime stories are routinely employed in a formulaic manner while novelty is sought within these genres so that audiences will not become bored or cease to buy newspapers. In other words, new content is sought in old forms. Returning by way of exemplification to the more specific question of why Clarence Thomas might have interested the media more as a Black man than would a man who was White, Tuchman's analysis lends credence to the following analysis: Because of past and ongoing racial biases in the United States, it is certainly quite "routine" to find criminal defendants who are Black appearing in the news for violent crimes alleged or committed.

At the same time, unfortunately; past and ongoing interactions of race and class biases make it quite unusual for Black men or women to be either Supreme Court nominees or "heroes" (as O. J. Simpson was initially referred to in media accounts of his football career). If Tuchman is correct that newsworthiness is often perceived in terms of variations on a generic underlying theme, then it is not surprising that the Thomas, Tyson, and Simpson stories might glitter with an especially attractive news appeal. In a still racialized cultural context, it is fairly routine for journalists to write about violence committed by Black men in American society. But when class and race biases are considered simultaneously; the Thomas, Tyson, and Simpson stories become more journalistically attractive: As "news," they are at once routine and not routine. It is not usual to have a Black man nominated to the Supreme Court or for this person to be accused of misconduct by a successful Black woman. Nor is it routine for a Black man to be as economically successful as was Tyson and, in addition, for a well-to-do African American to be as accepted by the standards of White society as was Simpson. Moreover, as Joshua Gamson (1994) notes in an interesting study of celebrity, fame itself is highly attractive to publics and to the media, adding to the relative novelty of these men being well-to-do and successful; in the cases of Tyson and Simpson, they also possessed fame.

Thus, based on both Tuchman's (1972, 1974) and Gamson's (1994) cultural critiques, it should not be terribly surprising that many editors and reporters in the print as well as electronic media found the Thomas, Tyson, and Simpson stories extremely newsworthy. No conspiracy theory would have been required for such a pattern to emerge from one case to the next. More to the point is exactly the opposite predilection. Given the strength of ongoing beliefs in objectivity, many editors and reporters focus attention away from the relationship between the media and its social setting and are convinced that their day-to-day decisions are made on an individual case-by-case basis (Chancer, 1996). Many journalists are not likely to perceive patterns in situ that, if noticed, might encourage the examination of their own practices and presuppositions. To illustrate this point, I draw on an interesting interview done with the metropolitan editor of the Los Angeles Times, Leo Wilensky, in which he expressed his belief that had Simpson been White, the case would have received the same amount of coverage. In other words, Wilensky did not believe that the case did, or would come to, involve race despite the prior history of race cases such as Thomas and Tyson and the Rodney King Simi Valley verdict that erupted into the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Because the conversation showed a quite ordinary stress on the noteworthy characteristics of an individual case tending to take precedence over a single case's social context, a brief quote is included to close this section:

Lynn Chancer: But let's say the story had been Kevin Costner, some White star had been a suspect. Do you think it would have been as much of a story; or do you think there's additional interest because of O. J. Simpson being a Black man, because of the interracial marriage and other factors ...?

Leo Wilensky: Well, instead of saying Kevin Costner, I'd say Arnold Schwarzenegger.

LC: Fine.

LW: Because of the name recognition, yeah, I think it wouldn't ... this is just from my own perspective. I didn't know for a couple of days that Nicole was White. I really don't believe that there would be a difference. I know there are some people who believe that if O. J. were not Black, and she were not White, this wouldn't be a story at all, that it would be just an afterthought. I don't believe that. I think that in fact O. J. Simpson, while he is Black, he is not thought of as a Black superstar. I think he was a sort of crossover hero-Whites, Blacks, everyone loved him.

Where does this leave us with regard to the consequences of playing gender against race, as illustrated by the Tyson/Thomas/Simpson pattern? Why, in concluding, does any of this matter? One major consequence of this article's observations is that the media tend to neutralize and deny their own role in the social construction of events. Insofar as many reporters and editors believe that interest in the Tyson, Thomas, and Simpson cases emerged only because of these stories' individual newsworthiness, the media's own political role in the creation and re-creation of events is obscured.

But if the media did play some role in differentially focusing on Black men through the Tyson/Thomas/Simpson pattern, then the implications for social movement causes are significant indeed. This is because the highly profiled character of these cases allowed them to be transformed from individual cases into social causes. The feminist movement stands to lose because, through this pattern, objecting to violence against women--whether in the form of rape, sexual harassment, or domestic violence--becomes inseparable from participating in what has often been a decidedly racist history in the United States of discrimination against Black men. On the other hand, anti-racist movements are also affected by the playing of gender against race insofar as the opposite reaction to the one just cited arises. Many people are likely to be alienated by movement groups concerned about racial injustices that do not seem sufficiently sensitive to the widespread problem of sexist violence.

Common to these three consequences--the invisibly political attitudes by which the media construct repetitive patterns, the alienation of race from gender as mutually reinforcing forms of discrimination, and the related but converse alienation of gender from race--is that each potentially contributes to depoliticization. From the point of view of social movement groups and their goals, the most serious consequence of the playing of gender against race is that it dilutes these movements' collective power. Although the symbolic character of high-profile crime cases may temporarily change cases into causes, in the end, little is likely to alter once an individual trial has been concluded. But in the wake of the high-profile crime case pattern, it is possible that women will perceive sexist violence as a cause of division rather than as an occasion for unity. Just as troubling, the playing of gender against race increases the likelihood that the cause of Black men will be viewed cynically by many people who are sympathetic to feminist issues. For many; the cause of Black men may seem to be promoted as a post facto rationalization of violence against women. And as this subtle playing of gender against race takes place, the interlocking character of gender, race, and class subordination may itself become blocked from view rather than called into question. Once a pattern such as the Thomas/Tyson/Simpson series of 1990s high-profile crime cases is magnified into social visibility, it is easier to be seduced by these cases' divisive appeals than to alter the underlying conditions--not gender or race, but gender, racial, and class inequities--of which these cases were symbolic.

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By LYNN S. CHANCER

Lynn S. Chancer is an assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Sadomasochism in Everyday Life (Rutgers University Press, 1992) and a forthcoming book titled Reconcilable Differences: Confronting Beauty, Pornography, and the Future of Feminism (University of California Press, 1998).