Steve Sailer writes: Seriously, the reason the conventional wisdom has such trouble making sense out of the Simpson story is because O.J. epitomizes how beloved blacks had become by American whites in the last third of the 20th century…and how often blacks then let whites down…
There is an interesting story of an adolescent O.J. endangering his athletic career in San Francisco due to his gangbanging tendencies, so the San Francisco Giants’ all-world center fielder Willie Mays called him up. Willie didn’t try to argue the young O.J. out of being a thug. He just had the kid hang out with him for a day. Mays’ implicit message to Simpson was: This kind of life can be yours, too…if you don’t screw it up.
Eventually, after being given countless second chances by white society, O.J. screwed it up.
* Steve has written about this at various times, but it’s really striking how different California’s racial consciousness was in the 50s and 60s from the rest of the country; that was part of Willie Mays’s story (my dad grew up in the Bay Area worshipping Mays). I was looking up something and ended up watching a 1957 montage of local San Francisco TV news and there’s one part where the Governor of the US Virgin Islands comes on as part of the Debate on Segregation and talks about how much he valued being in integrated schools in California growing up. Racial progressivity was something Californians were obviously expected to be proud of even in 1957.
My favorite book about education and race, The Way It Spozed To Be, about teaching school in a black school in Oakland in 1958, makes clear that while the school is a mess, it’s not because of material deprivation or obvious discrimination. It’s very short and might be of interest to iSteve readers- pdf here.
* Juiced athletes of the 1960s become enraged psychopaths 30 years later… It would make for a great plot, on the model of “Concussion.” In fact, maybe it will turn out that the two delayed-reaction syndromes are related?
* Norm MacDonald hosted the ESPY awards a long time ago, when the OJ trial was still fresher in people’s minds. At one point during the ceremony he congratulated the recent Heisman winner, saying, “You’ve won something that no one can ever take away from you… unless you kill your wife and some waiter.”
The camera panned to the audience and there were some looks of shock. It was glorious.
* Violent jealousy of a particularly black male kind. Which is partially why he went free—the prosecution couldn’t mention it, because political correctness kept them quiet.
Let me explain.
If you read black message boards on these here interwebs, black women are constantly trying to ward white women off from dating black men. One thing black women bring up a lot is the fact that black men get frighteningly possessive of white women once they date them, even after break ups.
Black women tell white women that a black man sees a white woman as a “prize” and as proof they are better than other blacks and better than whites; subsequently, if the white woman breaks up or leaves him, or is seen with another man, black women say the black man will get extremely violent, thinking they have lost the ultimate prize and are not worthy anymore.
The countless incidents involving black men and their estranged white girls attest to this stereotype being more than a little true.
Anyway, this kind of stereotype about black men who had white women used to be more prevalent in society. The Black Buck stereotype (google it) was part of this: the stereotype of black men who’ve tasted a white women becoming crazed in protecting it and utterly bloodthirsty if it’s taken away.
Had this been an earlier time, the motive would have been easily grasped and spoken of: OJ walked in in on his blond ex-white wife with another white man, and despite the fact that he wasn’t her husband, he snapped and flipped out on them due to his sexual embarrassment at losing possession of her and being cuckolded by another man (and a white man at that)—he had gone back to the ghetto and been degraded.
However, by the 1990s not only was this stereotype not prevalent in any non-black community, the prosecution couldn’t even mention it. Much like the stereotype of “rough trade” about gays was known, but as Steve pointed out, pcness has purged from our GoodThinking minds, so if we hear about a gay killed in seedy circumstances, we only think “hate crime.”
* Having OJ try on the gloves was Christopher Darden’s idea. No one, including fellow prosecutor Marcia Clark and at least one member of the jury, thought it was a good idea.
In the ESPN documentary (which is really good) they interview two jurors, both black. One is an ice-cold elderly woman who freely admits that her vote of “not guilty” was intended, at least in part, as revenge for the Rodney King beating (she claims “about 90%” of the jury was similarly motivated.) The other is a comparatively reasonable woman in her 40′s.
Here’s the younger juror recounting the day OJ tried on the gloves (brackets added to explain what the filmmakers communicated through courtroom footage):
It was later in the afternoon. The person who they had giving the testimony regarding the glove- you could see where it was leading up to. Obviously it was too big [when Johnnie Cochran put it on.]
At 24 years old, I could see: “This is a trick. Don’t fall for it. We could see that that glove is big on his [Cochran’s] hand. You don’t have to do anything.”
Defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey tells of baiting Christopher Darden into asking OJ to put on the gloves: “You’ve got the balls of a stud field mouse … If you don’t [ask him], I will!”
Marcia Clark begs Darden not to fall for it: “I told him in no uncertain terms why we should not be doing this. He said, ‘If we don’t, then they will,’ and I said, ‘Then let them.’” “It was the biggest fight I think Chris and I ever had.”
We then see the footage of OJ struggling to put the gloves on. As another member of the defense puts it, OJ goes into “Naked Gun mode.”
The juror’s reaction afterwards:
I looked at him [Darden] like, “I can’t believe you did it. You let him play you. You are the weaker one. And you didn’t have to be.”
… If OJ never put that glove on, I would have assumed it fit. I saw how big it was. And that’s when I just knew, you know- “Why is this guy here? He’s ruining this case.”
