The Key Detail Missing From the Narrative About O.J. and Race

When O.J. Simpson died this week at the age of 76, almost 30 years after being accused of killing his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, many reflections on his life made the same, familiar point about his legacy: His 1995 acquittal represented a “racial divide,” with many more Black than white Americans cheering the verdict.

That point, reliably trotted out in discussions of his sensational trial, while technically true, has always irked me. It leaves room to believe—and even suggests—that Black people really loved and adored Simpson. But not really. He certainly wasn’t a beloved athletic hero like Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, or Muhammad Ali. It’s not as if the spirits of Black Americans rose and fell with his efforts to turn the Buffalo Bills into title contenders.

In fact, a rarely discussed part of the story of the “racial divide” he represents is that it was white people, not Black people, who elevated Simpson at almost every turn.

That’s why on Thursday I couldn’t stop thinking about this quote from sportswriter Ralph Wiley: “White people had decided that O.J. Simpson was a ‘unifying symbol of all races.’ Black people didn’t decide that. Black people didn’t think that up. Black people didn’t even believe that. Who was he unifying, and to what end?”

Wiley said that in 2002 upon the release of HBO’s documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White. “The documentary starts with a flawed premise: that O.J. Simpson was a ‘unifying symbol for all races,’ ” Wiley wrote for ESPN.

Wiley and Simpson had become colleagues in the summer of 1989, when they were both hired as part of a major overhaul of NBC’s NFL live program. Wiley was brought in as an analyst; Simpson was chosen to be the sidekick to host Bob Costas.

It was supposed to be Simpson’s chance to recover from the embarrassment of his previous stint at ABC’s Monday Night Football, where he was criticized as “inarticulate and lost in the mix” while working alongside Howard Cosell and Joe Namath.

Wiley learned a lot about Simpson during that year together at NBC, giving him more context to things he’d heard whispers about from his stint working as an NFL writer at Sports Illustrated. “Juice was brought forward with great fanfare,” Wiley would later write of Simpson in his prescient book of essays, Dark Witness: When Black People Should Be Sacrificed (Again). “It was said his ‘Q’ rating was nearly as high as a religious prophet’s.”

Wiley did not share that view about his new co-worker.

After an awkward introduction during a network party in Oakland, California, where Simpson jokingly had an assistant ask Wiley to fetch him some water, the two mostly kept a healthy distance from each other. Wiley had already built a pioneering journalism career—with the help of his insightful observations on race and racism in a mostly white male industry—and he had no interest in becoming another of Simpson’s sycophants. And Simpson seemed to have little interest in making a friend of Wiley, often the only other Black man in the rooms they shared.

Wiley learned nearly as much about the people who enabled Simpson and his rise as he did about Simpson himself. In Dark Witness, Wiley wrote about how rich and powerful executives—who, it should go without saying, were almost all white and male—placated and even urged on Simpson and his crude behavior. That includes eagerly approving his loudly leering at women in public, to giggling at his many sexual exploits, to occasionally providing him with women themselves.

Wiley recalled a night in Denver with the TV crew: “I think Juice and I … were the only ‘black’ people in the joint. Although you can’t count Juice as ‘black’—nobody in the body bar did, at any rate,” Wiley wrote. “He was welcomed as the Second Coming.” The owner of the establishment eagerly introduced Simpson to his wife, described by Wiley as wearing “nothing but a bow tie.” Wiley said: “This was the surreal world O.J. gladly walked.”

Before June 12, 1994, I had rarely given much thought to Simpson or what he represented, if he represented anything at all. To me, he was just an old great football player talking about football on TV and, even back then, there were lots of those.

That all changed when Simpson was charged with the murders and attempted to flee his home in a white Ford Bronco, a slow-moving, 60-mile police chase across Southern California that interrupted the TV broadcast of the NBA Finals. After that day, it became necessary to develop a theory of—or some personal politics about—Simpson that encompassed what he stood accused of and the criminal case itself.

I was no fan of Simpson’s; he never even feigned an attempt as a role model or activist like Black athletes who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, strong race men whom I admired, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown.

Simpson had been famous my entire life. He was a celebrity dating back to his days as a Heisman winner at USC, someone who seemed more a product of glamorous Los Angeles than the gritty San Francisco projects where he was raised. I gawked at those iconic Hertz commercials of Simpson sprinting through airports, not even realizing those ads made him the first Black star of a national advertising campaign. I loved the Naked Gun film series.

But I didn’t know anyone who worshipped him or even talked about him much. By then, his career had already been matched or even surpassed by the likes of Walter Payton and Tony Dorsett. Simpson was merely a great athlete who seemed to have made a seamless transition into post-NFL life, retaining most of the fame and even his sturdy good looks after surviving the brutality of football.

Despite this, a new, unsettling media narrative emerged as the spectacle of the Simpson murder case dragged on: Simpson was now a treasured icon to millions of Black Americans. Which seemed especially absurd because, in fact, Simpson had long attempted to avoid being thought of that way—there are the possibly apocryphal stories of Simpson saying, “I’m not Black. I’m O.J.” early in his football career. After he retired in 1979, Simpson lived in Brentwood, hung out in Hollywood, and spent much of his free time playing golf and chasing young white women. It’s not like he was gracing the covers of Ebony or Jet magazine by the 1990s.

“O.J. was the first Black athlete to be put on,” said Lou Moore, a history professor at Grand Valley State University and author of We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality.

“Jesse Owens was a hero, Joe Louis was a hero, but marketers didn’t really think they could sell products to white folks. O.J.’s athleticism, his desire to want to rise above his race, and white America’s desire to move past what they saw as ungrateful Black athletes made O.J. possible,” Moore told me, following O.J.’s death.

But after Simpson’s surprising acquittal in 1995, there was lots of media coverage devoted to the differing racial responses to the verdict. One of the most widely cited polls found that 66 percent of Black Americans thought Simpson was innocent and that nearly as many white Americans thought he was guilty. The case was supposed to be a window into America’s “race relations”—more evidence that Black and white people were hopelessly divided on matters that seemed undeniable.

Thankfully, there’s since been lots of reassessments of the era, especially about how a legacy of racist policing might have influenced how Black folks saw the tragically flawed investigation and prosecution against Simpson. While doing some research for Slate’s Slow Burn podcast on the 1992 Los Angeles riots, I read a lot about how the failure to convict the four officers who’d been captured on videotape beating Rodney King might’ve influenced the Simpson verdict three years later.

I can vividly remember sitting in English class at my all-boys, mostly white Catholic high school in Houston and suffering through a predictable class discussion. When it came up that Simpson was giving his first post-trial interview to Ed Gordon of Black Entertainment Television, my English teacher smirked and said, “Come on. We all know why he’s going on there,” as if to say Black Americans were already in the bag for Simpson even after his decades of estrangement. As if Black journalists couldn’t be trusted to conduct a difficult interview. As if we all were so shallow and gullible.

I was only 17, so I didn’t quite have the words or wisdom to point out what I knew were the racist assumptions in my teacher’s snide commentary. He was telling our classroom, most of them wealthy white teenagers, that Black Americans were now complicit in protecting a known murderer. I could feel this growing contempt from people like my English teacher at what they saw as a closing of community ranks, a shameless rallying cry for a killer. It did little good to talk about the merits of the case or the verdict; the 10 Black members of the jury that freed Simpson made the rest of us guilty by association. They even had poll numbers to back up these assumptions!

Like many of us, Wiley chafed at the lack of reflection, the frustrating irony of the time. “Don’t be hauling him back over here with the unprivileged now, tacitly blaming black people in the country who didn’t know if Juice did it or not, only that their uncle or brother or son was once railroaded and looked like him,” Wiley wrote in 2002. “Don’t show a roomful of law students cheering a verdict and say they are not cheering Johnnie Cochran.”

And best as I can tell, Simpson’s own legal plight—there did seem to be credible evidence that one of the lead detectives working his case was an unabashed racist—never forced him into thoughtful reconsideration of his ways or of his own good fortune.

A decade after Cochran saved him from prison and took up the defense of a 14-year-old Black boy convicted of first-degree murder in Florida, Simpson winced at his former attorney’s legal tactics. “I wish Johnnie would just focus on the life sentence and not make it a racial thing,” he told a reporter. In 2018, Simpson said former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick “made a bad choice in attacking the flag” during his national anthem protests of police abuse.

In those post-trial years, Simpson even seemed to embrace the sleazier aspects of his newfound infamy. During an interview with the New Yorker in 2001, a writer described Simpson’s new routine in South Florida this way: “The basic structure of his life—golf, restaurants, women—hasn’t changed much.” Simpson regaled the writer with talk of his sexual exploits. “I got all the play. The tabloids were saying I was the reigning King of Porn,” the then-53-year-old Simpson bragged.

But Wiley had seen all this coming years earlier, even before 1994, warning that Simpson’s narcissism made him someone to avoid. He even got affirmation from Brown, who for all of his admirable activism was himself accused of battering several women. “You better watch him,” Wiley recalled Brown telling him. “That motherfucker’s dangerous.”

It was little surprise, then, that Simpson found himself in more legal trouble in 2008—13 years to the day of his acquittal in L.A.—when he was convicted in the armed robbery of two collectibles dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room.

His final years were a comedy of smut and brazenness, from openly speculating about murder allegations against other infamous figures to threatening at least one of his followers on social media with knife emojis. In many ways, I believe that his stubborn willingness to remain a public figure despite near-universal revulsion was a precursor to our current shame-free culture. These days, it’s hard to think of a scandal that could truly derail a person motivated solely by fame and unrestrained by morality or dignity. You can even remain a leading presidential contender a year after being found liable for sexual abuse.

Simpson never apologized, never seemed chastened by his notoriety. If anything, it freed him to truly be the charmless brute Wiley suspected he was all along.

“Of all the innocent black men who rotted in jails or swung from trees for ‘crimes’ they didn’t commit all over the landscape through this bloody century and the entire history of the country, out of all those doomed, forgotten people, this is the guy who gets off?” Wiley wrote in 2002, two years before he died of a heart attack at the age of 52. “The getting-off part is pretty much beyond the experience of black people in America. But still, somehow, it’s the black part that gets the blame.”

There’s that tricky racial divide again, but not in the way we often talk about. Wiley identified it in ways that still seem to elude the rest of us, and Simpson’s best move was staying away from him—and all the others who could see him clearly.