Political victories don't come cheap, and the fact that black Americans have now laid claim to equal standing in court rooms throughout America is generating a backlash among non-blacks. Cries of "reform the system" abound. And blacks, now viewed as winners, are being denied the moral cachet they had as victims. PNS associate editor Michael Datcher is a Los Angeles-based writer and reporter for the L.A. Sentinel.

LOS ANGELES -- The hysterical voice of a white woman crackled over the L.A. Sentinel's speaker phone. "If a white man kills black people he's a racist. But if a black man murders two white people, it's okay. Justice was not served!"

A week after the O.J. verdict, white people are still angry. The anger is a manifestation of fear. It's as if the Great American White Nightmare has finally come true. Not only has a black man seduced and very likely killed his blond-haired, blue-eyed wife and her white friend. Blacks have finally staked their claim to the most sacred arena in America -- the court room -- and gained his freedom. Power is in the hands of the oppressed.

Political victories like that don't come cheap. While white America has tried to keep it under the rug, many non-blacks are well aware of what it's meant for black defendants to face lynch mobs in the jury box let alone the racism and corruption of police. Now that black jurors are balancing out the scales, whites are no longer prepared to cede to blacks the moral cachet that comes with being victims. As history's losers, blacks have long been America's moral conscience. Now that blacks can stare at the world as winners, white America suspects we're no longer able to hold ourselves morally accountable.

And here's another irony. Just as blacks have begun to wield our collective clout in the last outpost where one-citizen one-vote matters, white America has decided the system is screwed up and needs to be reformed. Disenchantment doesn't just end with the courts. In post-Waco, post-Ruby Ridge America, whites feel the entire system of law enforcement is out of control -- from the cop on the beat to the FBI. Blacks who are celebrating the O.J. verdict as vindication for a 200 year history of justice denied may be oblivious to just how pervasive the white hostility is to the justice system in America.

We won't be oblivious for long. Even when the smart money was still on a hung jury verdict, politicians were mounting an aggressive campaign to lower the standard of conviction from a unanimous verdict to the so-called "10-2" verdict, in which only 10 guilty votes are needed for conviction in a criminal trial. In the wake of the verdict, "Fix the legal system!" cries abound. Where, one might ask, was the uproar for reform after the obvious miscarriage of justice in the Simi-Valley Rodney King case? Clearly the Simpson verdict was a slap in the face at white America. The campaign to change unanimous verdicts is a slap back.

Ironically, not all blacks are convinced that even with the Dream team defending him, O.J. got a "fair" trial. After all, jurors weren't allowed to hear those excerpts where Mark Fuhrman bragged about framing African Americans, especially those involved in inter-racial relationships. The same fear that once made a black slave's possession of books or guns a criminal offense made a black juror's possession of all the relevant information concerning a racist cop "too distracting and prejudicial." What really saved O.J., some people speculate, was "pillow talk" -- especially word-of-mouth excerpts from the Fuhrman tapes that went to the crux of the defense's "conspiracy to frame" argument.

In fact, the jurors didn't need pillow talk to intuit what black Americans everywhere have been hollering for years: we have a two-tier justice system. The trial of O.J. was a trial less about a specific murder case than about history. And the stakes were about equalizing power between the races in America in the one arena where the struggle for equal justice matters most -- the court of law.

That said, many blacks have our own post-O.J. fears. Now that one of ours has crept up on the upper tier of the two-tiered justice system, those of us down below better watch our back. But there's another possibility. Maybe freeing ourselves of the burden of being victims is the most important liberation of all.