In case you missed the news, O.J. Simpson recently passed away to the public offering generally negative perceptions of his legacy on this Earth. While he was a noted athlete, the murder trial of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and subsequent acquittal led to him avoiding a lengthy fate in prison for the rest of his life in the 1990s, but the general feeling among the common populace was that justice was not served. There have even been several social media memes and jokes about the trial including the glove, the importance of having a high-powered lawyer, and the general inadequacies of the criminal justice system regarding poor offenders facing low-level crimes and famous defendants facing egregious crimes. This was during the period when the crime bill from the 1990s passed, for context. In general, not too many people were crying about him passing away with some people offering more harsh commentary than that. However, some people do miss him and even defended him against what they viewed as a racist justice system targeting yet another black man. One of the worst characterizations of Simpson and that series of events came regarding a CNN host talking about race.
On CNN, Ashley Allison said that Simpson being accused of the murder was notable for the black community because two white people had been killed and she mentioned the racial tensions that existed in the country at the time to contextualize the matter. While the crime bill from the 1990s made an already lucrative private prison system linger in perpetuity longer than it would’ve already done otherwise, the issue with Allison’s comment is that bringing up the deaths of the two-white people, tying in slavery, etc., made it appear that she was propping up the murders of Brown and Goldman because they were white. While no one was cheering on Simpson, even fewer people are cheering on the idea of black people being accused of killing white people as a form of relatability. Here’s why that matters in the context of modern-day American politics.
While fertility rates aren’t the first factors that people immediately go toward when thinking of the decline of the African-American population, their fertility rate nationally in the United States has fallen to about 1.62, roughly about the same as the white majority. This is despite making up just 15% of the population. This is while they also make up the disproportionate number of violent crime victim and offender statistics, abortions, incarcerations, low education attainment, and other metrics that paint a generally negative picture for that segment of the population. This is tragic because these are generally good people like most other Americans who deserve to have their quality of lives increasing, not decreasing. With Allison spreading messaging such as this where the greater societal context can get lost in racial division and grievance politics, the actual problems that are facing black America that deserve to be heard and financed aren’t getting addressed because people are fixated on blaming their neighbors for everything that’s allegedly wrong in their lives.
Then again, this is what happens when you attempt to make a non-story with controversial contextualization a story and then sell it instead of letting an unpopular figure drift into sands of time. Most people are ready to forget about O.J. Simpson. Even if he was innocent versus his acquittal (the two terms are not the same as acquittal means that the court could not prove he was guilty, just that the jury was unable to convict and declare innocent or guilty), there would still be the lingering anger over how a wealthy former NFL player could get a lucky break from a serious charge but another poor person of any color could be given a steep criminal sentence for what amounts to a non-violent drug possession or process crime. Allison could have simply avoided not mentioning trying to make the deaths of the two white people a key tenet to her memorialization of O.J. Simpson. But she didn’t, and the discourse surrounding her comments suffered as a result.
Race and crime in the United States – Wikipedia
Nicole Brown Simpson – Wikipedia
The Conservatarian Millennial 