Spring is Angry / OJ Simpson: Made in America

Spring has been having a final temper tantrum before maturing into full summer of late. Back in May we had a string of 90-degree days that fooled a lot of people, including me, into thinking that summer had come early. Instead it began again to rain, and we all retreated inside, to gaze wistfully out windows at wet streets. It has been a weird, temperamental few weeks, and when the sun does manage to muscle its way through the clouds the air quickly grows hot, so that there’s no way to appropriately dress for the weather — either one swelters in a raincoat, and comes home damp with sweat; or one goes without, and comes home completely drenched. There is no solution.

Some days I walk along the backstreets of my neighborhood and think how fortunate I am to live in a place of such temperate salubrity, one that smells of trees and mud, where the sun shines all summer and then politely retreats to allow us all to receive the succor of rain again. Were it not for our long, glum winters, with their days so short and gray that they feel like the night has only been temporarily distracted and soon will turn its dark glare on us once more, none of this would be possible. Our green pleasant valleys would run dry and hard in summer, as they have begun to do in California. But then, when spring refuses to go, when it teases me with summer only to throw another thundery fit in June, I think, This might be too much for me.

But now, like a hungry child who has just been fed, spring’s mood seems to be lifting. They say the sun will come out tomorrow. May it stay for a good long time.

Early in my freshman year of high school, health class was interrupted one day when Mr Summerfeld wheeled a television into the classroom on a cart and tuned it to the local news. They were showing the inside of a wood-paneled courtroom, where a handsome, middle-aged man sat with a battery of lawyers. As we watched, the man and his lawyers stood and faced a jury — off-camera, represented only by a somewhat hesitant woman’s voice, reading into a microphone — who declared him not guilty of two murders. The man was OJ Simpson, of course. I wish I could tell you what the broader reaction in the room was like, but given that it was a group of white, Catholic teenagers, probably shock. I do remember my friend Nick saying, I think he was guilty, but I was hoping he would get off. Nick was a libertarian.

I had half-watched most of the trial with a vague feeling of disgust that would turn out to be the seed of a lot of how I continue to react to celebrity culture, more than two decades later. I’d never seen Simpson play football, I didn’t care about his commercials, I didn’t much like the Naked Gun movies. I found the way my parents were mesmerized by it — in memory, the bulk of every day that summer had been spent with one or the other of them fixed on the TV screen — completely baffling and kind of gross. I had no inkling of the way in which Simpson was a particularly bizarre nexus through which the drama of race and white supremacy in America might play out. Mostly I was annoyed by it.

That said, I do remember where I was during the famous White Bronco Chase. I had walked over to my friend Sean’s house one afternoon the previous spring, and when we got there, his dad — a balding, overweight man I’d always found a little bit hard to understand — was sitting on a couch in their front room, watching the thing unfold on television. Sean and I stood behind the couch with him, and though we kept meaning to leave, neither one of us quite could. Though I was already heartily sick of the Simpson drama by that point, there was something truly bizarre about a man driving at legal speeds, followed by an armada of police cars. And so it truly is a marker of my life, whether I like it or not.

Last weekend, without quite realizing I was doing it, I binged on all 8 hours of Ezra Edelman’s OJ Simpson: Made in America, which situates the trial snugly in the context of Simpson’s life and the experience of black Americans, especially in Los Angeles, where it came on the heels of decades of police brutality, militarized law enforcement, and unaccountability for cops — none of which had done much of anything to make the community safer. Only two years earlier, the city had erupted in violence and protest when a group of white officers, who had been videotaped delivering a beat-down to a black man named Rodney King, were acquitted of all charges associated with the attack. This was all stuff that I either (A) didn’t know about or (B) wasn’t quick enough on the uptake enough to draw the lines between, at least not when I was 14 years old. To see it laid out so starkly in Edelman’s film transformed something I’d always found distasteful and dull into something fascinating, a way of looking at race in America that I’d never quite tapped into before.

Simpson had gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with white people, both in public and in private — early in his athletic career, when black Olympians sought his solidarity in a move to boycott the 1968 Olympic games, he’d told them, “I’m not black, I’m OJ.” The line is repeated several times in the documentary, and for some of the people interviewed in the film, it clearly says something very poignant about his character — both the compromises he made to get the kind of success he wanted, and how blinkered he was about what that success meant. Simpson spent a lot of time shedding the outer markers of his blackness, including the black woman he’d married as a young man (though, interestingly, not necessarily his friends from that period), so that he could feel accepted in a world of wealth, glamour, and fame, which was largely the purview of white people. And once he made it in, he thought he was in forever. It’s clear that OJ became profoundly megalomaniacal and entitled, especially after he retired from sports and became mostly an actor and TV personality. It’s also clear that, by doing so, he was playing with fire in a way that a white counterpart might not have been.

When he murdered his wife — and let’s be clear here, he murdered his wife, verdicts and conspiracy theories aside — he suddenly became something other than every white person’s favorite black guy. And his defense team ran with that, and more or less convinced a majority-black jury that he was being railroaded by a racist conspiracy direct by a largely white power structure. There were clearly some black people who were uncomfortable with that: some of the people interviewed in the doc (I wish I could remember their names, but I watched it in a huge block six days ago, so a lot of those have faded from my memory now) clearly view Simpson, not only as an imperfect vessel for such a defense, but as the least perfect possible vessel for such a defense. Many, though, were fine with it. Simpson, though he’d made a career in part out of attempting to erase his blackness, was still black, and black people had still been routinely (not to say ritually) abused by Los Angeles police for decades. I have to say, if I try to put myself in the shoes of black folks who didn’t believe OJ was guilty, who believed that he was the victim of a conspiracy of corrupt cops aiming to string up the most famous black man in America the same way they’d been doing to non-famous black people for generations, I would probably have agreed. This is the way that systematic white supremacy gets etched on people’s souls. If you are born with it, and live with it, why should you ever expect it not to function how it always has?

When OJ was acquitted, he tried to return to Brentwood and live the glamorous he always had — but found that doors that had previously been open to him were slammed shut. On the one hand, one imagines that might have happened to anybody who had so publicly been the beneficiary of a bad verdict. But what happened to OJ was clearly tinged with the ugliest, most-secret racial instincts that people hold. There would never be the benefit of the doubt, and OJ was completely ostracized. The film makes the case that OJ, in some degree, rediscovered his blackness after his acquittal, because he received no quarter from white people.* At a certain point, OJ’s life became a bizarre form of self-parody, as he began to hang around with various leeches and lowlifes who seemed mostly interested in his fame, diminished though it may have been, and wealth, which appears to have survived a civil suit in which he was held liable for the deaths of his wife and her friend, Ronald Goldman, who Simpson also murdered. Then, eventually, it became a bizarre, Kafkaesque tale of a man who gets away with one crime, and so is destroyed for one he didn’t commit — when OJ and a group of flunkies tried to retrieve some memorabilia from a dealer who had more or less stolen the stuff from Simpson, a comedy of errors led to Simpson’s arrest and eventual conviction for kidnapping, among other things. If Simpson weren’t Simpson, it seems highly unlikely he would have been put in prison at all. Instead, he received 33 years, which — given that he’s in his 60s now — is tantamount to a life sentence. It is hard not to read this as white America getting revenge on Simpson for murdering two white people, at least to me.

*This is also an argument for the idea that OJ is a classic sociopath, though of course there’s no way of knowing that without actually knowing the man.

The most disturbing scenes in the film, at least to me, surround Simpson’s acquittal for murder. We see footage of Simpson and his lawyers embracing; we see black folks jubilant that he is free; we see white people and black people screaming at each other on the street. But really, the images that trouble me are the images of white people weeping at Simpson’s acquittal, as though what happened in the case had anything to do with them — as though this were some kind of team sport. Sure, Simpson’s acquittal was a miscarriage of justice. He murdered two people and got away with it. But miscarriages of justice happen every day, and this one — other than the notoriety of the defendant — was no greater, and was in fact much lesser, than many of them. A guilty man went free. I’m not going to argue that that’s a good thing. But is it worth our tears? Guilty men go free every day. And, worse — far worse — innocent people are put away every day. Do we weep for them? Or do we only cry for beautiful white people killed by famous black people? Yeah, I thought so.

I suppose some people would accuse me of having “white guilt” over this, but I actually think that I’ve come to feel much less guilt as I’ve come to think harder about a lot of this stuff; instead, what I feel is a clarifying empathy. OJ: Made in America is rife with scenes that filled me with rage, as they showed the ways in which systematic white supremacy is etched on all of us, daily: the overwhelming whiteness of the police force; the condescension of white lawyers for black jurors; the gross way in which Simpson is praised, essentially, for seeming white. I find it unsurprising, but simultaneously somehow astonishing, that so many white Americans are unable to perceive this, to even guess at how they would feel if the tables were turned.

But now we’re getting close to me just saying, I’m such a good person, why are other people such bad people? And that’s gross. I’m not going to do that. Anyway, you should watch OJ Simpson: Made in America. I saw it on ESPN’s mobile app, Watch ESPN, though I assume you can see it on the intertubes or even — weird — your television.