TRESSIE McMILLAN COTTOM: O.J. Simpson's legacy won't be the one he may have imagined
Friday, April 12, 2024 -- O.J. Simpson will be remembered not for his athletic ability, but as a spectacle.
Posted — UpdatedO.J. Simpson will be remembered not for his athletic ability, but as a spectacle.
Most people tend to think the O.J. story started when Los Angeles police chased a white Ford Bronco down a deserted highway.
The O.J. Simpson legend began when the nation decided that King must have done something to deserve his beating.
Rodney King was my generation’s; his beating showed me that a new day had not dawned in this country for Black opportunity and acceptance. Simpson’s legal team was able to paint a story in which he symbolized Black martyrdom to Black America because of such betrayals.
When the Simpson verdict was announced in 1995, I was standing in the student union of my historically Black college. My peers collectively sighed in relief when he was acquitted. But, if the King verdict was the moment when my generation fell out of love with our country,
Black America’s relief at the Simpson verdict was the moment that white America fell out of love with the promise of diversity.
He got away with it through a kind of carte blanche usually reserved for powerful white men, because his public mythology erased his private abuses. For Simpson, that must have felt like a certain type of moving on up.
He wanted to be above the rules not because of what he was but because of who he was. It’s the height of karmic irony, then, that what ultimately made Simpson special was the way his Blackness — that socially constructed distance from the white acceptance he so clearly craved — will forever define his legacy.
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