Can Black America Ever Welcome O.J. Simpson Back Home?
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By DERON SNYDER (as published by The Grio)
“I’m a free man
I’m a free man and talking ‘bout it.”
In the 1975 disco hit titled “Free Man,” a guy makes a pass at a sister who wants to make sure he’s not married. She’s apparently had experience as the other woman and wants to avoid a repeat scenario.
O.J. Simpson wasn’t singing Tuesday as he parted with the Nevada penal system, discharged from parole 13 years after his conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping, a verdict delivered 13 years after his infamous acquittal. Simpson is free, a quarter-century after making Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman household names.
But I wonder how much of Black America is interested in hooking up with him on a cultural level.
Even if Simpson steps up disavowals of racists he openly embraced, even if it’s finally clear that, um, he’s black, too, can there be a warm homecoming within the greater community? The relationship was complicated in 1995, when both a gulf and a bridge emerged during the Trial of the Century. Determining Simpson’s place on the current landscape – where the ends fall apart and the middle vanishes – is especially challenging.
Let’s say Simpson flips sides like the Lincoln Project founders and starts to routinely call BS on old friend Donald Trump and other GOP scoundrels. That would put Simpson on the correct side of history, where truth matters and facts exist. It would set him apart from the likes of Herschel Walker, Ben Carson, and Candace Owens – celebrities whose melanin is only skin deep and definitely for hire.
There’s a clear threat to democracy today as Republican-led state legislatures weaponize policies to thwart elections, deny science, suppress education, and enact a host of other harmful measures. The more people willing to fight back, the better for all, particularly when such messages come from platforms with nearly 900,000 followers. Simpson will find loads of people who look like him in that echo chamber, decrying blatant attempts to turn back the calendar 75 years.
He seems to be making the proper choice. In May, he supported Liz Cheney as she was being stripped of her House leadership position role for telling the truth about Trump’s role in the Capitol Hill riot. He also correctly asserted that GOP lawmakers are gaslighting Americans regarding what happened on Jan. 6. The nation’s Fox Newsers are infuriated by such stances, which helps make Simpson more endearing. It’s the same dynamic that had many Black folks cheering in 1995, when he got off for murders that he seemingly committed.
The concept is easy to grasp. We’ve taken countless Ls as a people in the criminal justice system, including more than we can recall since Johnnie Cochran led the defense to victory. Centuries of innocent Blacks found guilty and guilty whites found innocent – if they ever faced trial – were at the forefront of our emotional response to the verdict.
Though they’re warped in the way they count wins and losses, a plurality of Trump supporters can relate. Barack Obama noted as much, reportedly saying “Trump is for a lot of white people what O.J.’s acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”
Simpson didn’t trigger that feeling any more than he made the LAPD a bastion of racism. But he symbolized the unthinkable, perhaps the unprecedented, that time “we” got away murder. If he can rekindle that emotional solidarity and pair it with political solidarity, perhaps he’ll be welcomed back to the fold. Perhaps we’ll excuse his forsaking us until it was convenient, his dumping a Marguerite for a Nicole, his buying the false narrative that Colin Kaepernick attacked the U.S. flag.
Then again, Simpson has nowhere else to turn, and we realize that too.
Even if he goes full-MAGA with Trump & Co. Even if he co-signs all of their half-truths and whole lies. Even if pledges fidelity and becomes an incarnation of Diamond & Silk. None of that would likely help. Too many of his would-be partymates believe he committed the black man’s unforgiveable sin.
Marrying a white woman is one thing, fine. But if that black man ever murdered her, that’s a a bridge too far.
So, if Simpson is ready to holler as a newly-free man, maybe Black America will holler back.
At the very least, he can get a smile and a wink while we keep it moving.
