In a lot ways, many of us remain locked in our bubbles, not entirely understanding the thought processes of people of other races and ethnicities.
I can’t say I’ve spent much time thinking about O.J. Simpson over most of the last three decades. But hearing Thursday that he died of cancer reminded me of two conversations that I’ve had about him in the last six months.
The first one was with a Black man who worked in Los Angeles city government in 1995 — the year the once-celebrated football star and actor was infamously acquitted in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
When the verdict was delivered, the Black man told me he and his co-workers were glued to the TV, just like everyone else in America. He recounted calmly and quietly walking outside, looking to make sure no one was around and then cheering.
“I didn’t want to scare all the white people,” he told me.
I understood. It’s not that he necessarily believed Simpson was innocent. In fact, that was beside the point. He was just happy that, at last, after the explosive fallout of a jury acquitting the white LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, a Black man had finally beaten the odds of a systemically racist criminal justice system.
“I mean, how many rich white people are guilty and go free in this country every day?” he asked, the answer obvious.
The second conversation I had was with a friend of my mother’s — a white woman who was living in Torrance in 1995. I told her about what the Black man had said, and she shook her head.
“All the Black people thought he was innocent,” she insisted.
No, I told her, that wasn’t entirely true. Sure, many Black people believed the Los Angeles Police Department had set Simpson up — and why wouldn’t they believe that? Particularly after one of the key witnesses for the prosecution, LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, was caught lying about using racial slurs and after Simpson couldn’t fit into a glove Fuhrman said he found, without a warrant, at the crime scene.
But there also were plenty of Black people privately joking that the LAPD had “just framed a guilty man.
