Here’s how I first heard of O.J. Simpson: I was eight years old, and I’d never watched a football game before.
My parents were white middle-class left-wing intellectuals, and disdained spectator sports. I was at my friend Kenny’s house. I knew Kenny from fourth grade. Kenny was Black, as were all my schoolmates, because my parents had decided their three children would be the first white kids to attend the segregated Black elementary school in that miserable little racist southern town.
So I was at Kenny’s house, and there was a framed portrait of JFK in the living room, and Kenny and his family were watching football, and I was watching with them. It happened to be the Dallas Cowboys against the Green Bay Packers 1967 Championship Game, known as the “Game in the Snow.” Kenny’s family were Cowboys fans, but I decided to root for the Packers, because I was from Wisconsin, originally, before my family moved to North Carolina.
Bart Starr pulled off the legendary quarterback sneak, and the Packers were ahead with only, I don’t know, like 15 seconds to go—this is the way I remember it—and at Kenny’s house there was some speculation about whether by some miracle the Cowboys could return the Packers’ kickoff all the way downfield for a score and win. And I said nobody could even run that fast.
“O.J. could,” Kenny’s uncle said.
O.J. was at USC, a track star turned football player, with a sub-10-second time in the 100 yard dash. Obviously, he was going to shake things up in professional football. And that’s how much he was on the mind of Black sports fans--more than Charlie Scott, who was, that same year, the first Black player on the basketball team of the university that happened to be in that miserable little racist southern town.
But that’s about all the attention I paid to O.J., the years during his NFL career and after. I liked the ad with him running through the airport.
Then there was the murder and his arrest, and the trial, and Johnny Cochran and Lance Ito with the mug that made Peets coffee a thing.
By that time I’d survived my childhood and teenage years, been a laborer and an activist, belonged to a Marxist-Leninist collective, organized tenants, been to a hundred protest marches, gone to school for an engineering degree, gone back to school for another engineering degree. I was working for a small consulting firm in downtown Oakland.
That consulting firm had about 20 engineers and scientists and one clerical worker. And guess what, all the engineers and scientists were white and the one clerical worker, Sharon, was Black.
And the verdict came down, and in the office everyone was talking about it, and I asked Sharon what she thought.
And Sharon thought different than anyone else, she was glad to see O.J. acquitted, and I asked her why, and she told me. Sharon was like that. I admired her. Sharon said that white people get away with murder all the time, and if O.J. was white and had a lawyer that good, and a prosecution that bad, he’d be sure to be acquitted, but he might have been convicted anyway, because he was Black and the victim was white.
Can I say I completely understood her feelings? No, I didn’t. I don’t now. But I damn well understood that Sharon saw things differently because she was Black, and that meant—this is the important thing here—that everyone else in the office saw things they way they saw them because they were white. By that time in life, I’d learned that when things come down that way, with all or most of the Black people seeing things one way and all or most of the white people seeing things differently, you need to look deeper at what’s really going on.
So then O.J. dies, and DK posts an AP story about it—an AP story because this is news that needs to be noted, but doesn’t warrant a staff story. It’s not really that important politically. Fine.
And then I read the comments, including the hidden comments. All of them.
And I’m saddened, and appalled.
mohistory2 is absolutely right in his first comment: This is where progressives risk accidentally betraying their true hearts. And many did, in that thread. Many more betrayed their true hearts by flagging mohistory2’s other comments. For their part, mohistory2 was very restrained.
Thirty years. I hope some of my white colleagues at that consulting firm know better by now.
We should all know better by now. But we don’t.
I don’t know what else to say.