Pratt Case May Help Bridge Gap Between Blacks, Whites

Orange County Judge Everett Dickey’s freeing last week of former Black Panther Geronimo Pratt offers great possibilities for narrowing the racial gap in America. This assumes, of course, that the country genuinely wants the racial gap narrowed, as opposed to just yakking about it or fearing where honest dialogue may lead.

But if we’re not afraid to listen and learn, then Dickey’s action--coming as it did in the same week that President Clinton began a national dialogue on race relations--has the power to reverberate and to educate.

After earlier reversing Pratt’s 1972 murder conviction, Dickey let him post bail last week. The judge indicated that Pratt’s conviction for killing a white schoolteacher in 1968 was tainted by false testimony. Afterward, a former FBI agent said he knows Pratt is innocent and that the agency also knew it.

While attention focused on Pratt, my thoughts drifted to the jury’s not-guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial and the despair it generated. Perhaps even more fundamentally dispiriting than the dispute over Simpson’s innocence was the post-trial belief that black and white Americans were on hopelessly different wavelengths.

The despair, it seems to me, grew out of white America’s belief that the Simpson jury and much of black America simply closed their eyes to the obvious. To white America, Simpson’s guilt was proved overwhelmingly. To white America, black America’s references to “different life experiences” and to police and prosecutorial conspiracies sounded like a string of cop-outs. What black America really wanted to do, according to much of white America, was to rationalize letting Simpson get away with murder.

In the post-trial anguishing that dominated talk radio for months, people wondered what hope there was for a unified society if blacks and whites applied such different thought processes to everyday life. Where was the common ground?

The Pratt case intercedes in a potentially helpful and healing way.

I should say that I early on believed in Simpson’s guilt and still do. I’m not in the camp that trashed the jury verdict, but I’ve done a fair share of grousing about people who insist on Simpson’s innocence. “Blind to reality” is about as strong as I want to put it.

However, the Pratt case is eye-opening. Or it should be to people who want to explore whether white and black Americans really are as far apart as we think.

Many African Americans in Los Angeles have cited their run-ins with police over the years on things ranging from traffic stops to police treatment of them in custody. I’m guessing white America probably believes some complaints are true, some aren’t.

But when it comes to big-ticket items like police or prosecutorial misconduct in capital cases, it’s a different ballgame. Black America asked why it was so preposterous to believe the LAPD planted a glove or sprinkled blood. White America said, “Come on, get serious.”

Then along comes Judge Dickey and Geronimo Pratt, a name long-forgotten to white America but no doubt part of a martyred legacy passed down among blacks in Los Angeles. White Americans may never have heard of Geronimo Pratt, but many of the Simpson jurors probably had. Or if not him, someone like him. As I said, handed down one generation to the next. And to people who have believed in Pratt’s innocence over the years, notions of police conspiracies aren’t ridiculous.

Viewed against the Pratt backdrop, what white America branded in the O.J. trial as rationalization looks more like honest skepticism, born not of wishful thinking but from, literally, “different life experiences.” All of a sudden, armed with details of the Pratt case, white America might well ask itself whether blacks’ reaction to the Simpson case was so outlandish after all.

None of this is meant to imply I think Simpson should have been acquitted. In fact, I’m arguing from the opposite direction: If there were no put-up jobs like the Pratt case to infect the history of many blacks in Los Angeles, would Simpson have been acquitted?

Isn’t there a common ground here? If we all started from the same base of knowledge--namely, that the “system” may have in the past framed innocent people--would white America still contend that black Americans view the world so differently?

To the contrary, whites would react exactly the same as blacks.

As President Clinton begins his race-relations initiative, I hope he uses the Pratt case as a chapter in his text.

It would be up to him to apply perspective, but if it were me, I’d tell white America that blacks’ concerns about police conspiracies aren’t made from whole cloth. There is a history that white America needs to catch up on. I’d tell black Americans that many years had passed between the days of the FBI spying on Black Panthers and the Los Angeles Police Department investigating O.J. Simpson. I’d say something to both groups about the perils of injustice breeding injustice.

It’s not that a diverse country must have unanimity of thought. It is important, though, that everyone at least understands what the other guy believes and why. That can’t happen when we’re reading from different textbooks, or never exchange textbooks. Or when we act like we’re in the same country but in reality have different histories.

When everyone gets the same textbook and reads the same history, we’ll find out we’re not nearly as different as we think we are.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.