[Header Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash]

Bella Baxter experiences several awakenings—some gradual, some abrupt—in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a pastiche of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as Shelley’s feminist ideals.

A resurrected, manufactured woman, Bella had committed suicide while pregnant. Godwin Baxter, the Dr. Frankenstein to Bella as the Monster, reanimates Bella by replacing her brain with the brain of the unborn child from her womb.

This woman-child must come to terms with this history, but as she matures and that child brain develops, Bella gradually embraces a social justice awareness solidified by an epiphany during her time of temporary escape from Godwin and the doctor to whom she is engaged, Archibald McCandless.

In her letter to Godwin, she details that epiphany in Alexandria:

I had just seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and the rulers—their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and the incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is. And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do. (pp. 175-176)

I am reading this after watching the celebrated film adaptation during the spring of 2024.

The reading coincides with my partner and me watching O.J.: Made in America, in the wake of Simpson’s death as well as the rise of student protests across college campuses in the US.

My eyes paused at “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”

OJ Simpson and Black America

For most people, nuance is a challenge, but two things that seem contradictory can be true at the same time. During O.J.: Made in America, these two things seem abundantly true: Simpson brutally murdered two people, and the LAPD was a disturbingly racist organization that embodied Bella’s realization above.

The Simpson trial became, as prosecution lawyers and family members of the murdered noted, a referendum on Mark Furhman, exposed racist policeman, as the sacrificial racist for all the sins of the LAPD (including, as the documentary includes, the Rodney King beating and the shooting of Eula Love, among others).

While lawyers on both sides either tossed out rhetoric such as the “race card” or refuted that charge as playing the “credibility card,” the trial of Simpson ironically did focus more on Furhman and the LAPD than Simpson and the murder victims, and also ironically, despite Simpson actively spending much of his life distancing himself from being Black, it was in the end being the claimed Black victim of police racism that seems to have led to his not being convicted.

The documentary in many ways is about race as well as about policing and the police. And that trial forces viewers to consider the tension that exists between policing and justice as often not the same thing.

Along with what now almost seems cartoonish—Simpson trying on unsuccessfully the gloves found at the murder scene—a key moment in the trial is Fuhrman denying his regular use of the racial slur, the N-word. A number of audio tapes from Fuhrman assisting in the development of a screenplay proved that Fuhrman almost gleefully used the racial term, forcing him to retake the stand, plead the fifth repeatedly, and likely shift the jury in favor of acquitting.

I grew up in the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing about Fuhrman’s use of a racial slur and the culture of racism surprised me. I lived that, and I recognize that for many white people over the second half of the twentieth century, racism wasn’t a belief; it was something they knew.

In 1971, my parents achieved their working class dream, building their own home on the golf course being built just north of my home town. They were early members of that country club—although the course was a country club mostly in that it was for whites only. The members were overwhelmingly rednecks like my parents.

When I was a teen, in the mid-/late 1970s, one member had a Native American wife and an Indian family joined. These people from a distance looked “Black,” as some members would say. Routinely, members directly and indirectly harassed these people and the use of racial slurs were common in those awful moments.

However, in the 1990s around the time of the Rodney King beating and the OJ Simpson murder trial, one day I had a confrontation with my then father-in-law. He was a highway patrolman who attended church every Sunday, tithing, as they say, religiously.

What led up to this I can’t entirely recall, but he had criticized me, I think, for not going to church or not taking my daughter, then around 6.

The house was filled with several of his grandchildren, and I said directly to him that at least I didn’t use a racial slur in front of children (he did so regularly and had that day).

He was a policeman, he was a god-fearing man, and this, I want to emphasize, was normal.

After decades of no justice, the Simpson trial seems to tell us that in that moment Simpson’s guilt and his being held accountable for brutal murders was less important in some way, especially in LA and especially to Black Americans, than finally holding the LAPD—in the person of Fuhrman—indirectly accountable.

This moment in history was about “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”

College Students and Red America

Watching the Simpson documentary series, and thinking again about Fuhrman, I was compelled to reconsider my own journey with racism and racial slurs. Yes, I spent many years of childhood into my teen years hearing, using, and thinking the worst of racial slurs and beliefs.

By high school, though, I spent much of my life with Black teammates and friends at school. I had close White male and female friends who lived partially closeted lives because they had romantic and sexual relationships with Black people.

I loved those people and absolutely knew by then that the racism and the words we used against Black people were wrong, inexcusable, dehumanizing.

I trust by college, I would have never uttered the N-word, even as it continued to pop into my thoughts. And I am certain that college is the place where I became a completely different person than I had been raised to be.

This spring, in fact, I did one of my common teaching skits where I overtly mention Marxism or Communism and then look up at the ceiling, alerting the students that I was likely being surveilled by Bill Gates and/or the university president.

This has always been intended as a joke, to ease the expected tension from me mentioning Marxism and communism.

Yes, somehow despite my roots, I grew up to be a teacher/professor who is an agnostic and legitimate Leftist (as Bella wants to be). I have spent much of my life and career actively resisting inequity, racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia—despite remaining in the South where that fight remains necessary even as it is a different culture than the one I grew up in.

But while I had the luxury of joking, a UNC professor, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, discovered he was, in fact, being recorded by his university without his knowledge.

And during this spring of 2024, while I have been reading Poor Things and watching O.J.: Made in America, college students across the US have formed protests about Israel’s military bombardment of Palestinians.

Once again my life and the lives of the mostly affluent and sheltered students at my university have stood far in the distance, in safety. The way I and many others across the US watched the video of Rodney King being beaten, the LA riots after the acquittal of those police officers, the slow-motion (it seemed) pursuit of Simpson and Cowlings in the white Bronco, and the so-called trial of the century, where Simpson was found innocent.

Daily, now, I think mostly ignored by many in the US, unlike us all being glued to TVs for the pursuits and trial of Simpson, college students and academics are being assaulted and arrested by police officers ushered in by college administration.

This is Red America: “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”

---