Miscarriages of Justice -- O.J. Simpson Thoughts
I am amazed and disturbed at how the O.J. Simpson verdict still deeply rankles certain people, such a long while later. The two murders have probably been encased in racism from the moment they were conceived, and it looks as if, as long as various mindsets persist, that case will never be closed. Instead it will remain a strong implement in making sure that racism will always be a strong, underlying force in American thought.
I didn't follow that case, and ever since I have tried to ignore it. One of my favorite mottoes goes, "Everything that happens in a courtroom is an exercise in ugliness," and that case was top-, middle- and bottom-heavy with ugliness. How happy I am that I didn't subscribe to Court-TV while it was going on. But one can't be around people for long without someone bringing up OJ, certain that others listening fully share their anger. By "people," in this instance I mean those of recent European descent, the ones who so solidly know that Simpson is guilty and who feel that the verdict was a direct slap at them and at all their ideals.
No one except Simpson himself really knows whether he is guilty, and the fact that he alone carries that knowledge securely shut up inside his skull probably enrages people almost as much as does the fact that, if he is the guilty party, it doesn't seem to be eating him up from within. And then there are the additional galling feelings on the part of his detractors that he had no need to kill such a beautiful woman, and instead, no matter how famous and well-paid he was, he should have been eternally grateful that he was allowed to marry and even to father children off such a glorious female specimen of the so-called "white race." That thought gets to the heart of what makes the continuous resentment over the verdict so hard to take: the certainty that not one of these endlessly furious people would care if Simpson had done in his first wife instead. After all, she was of a less favored configuration than was the second.
A lot of people who had been liberals were glad for the excuse that the O.J. verdict gave them to hop off that wagon. The TV shot that especially did it for them was the one of students at Howard University in D.C. jumping up and down with joy when the "not guilty" was announced.
Howard is my alma mater though I am generations removed from those students, and I would not have been so demonstrative. I suspect that they were the direct descendants of the raucous sorts that made viewing movies at that institution of higher learning so impossible. But I understood what was at the heart of their reaction, and it's too bad that few have ever taken that into consideration.
If the O.J. Simpson verdict was a miscarriage of justice, then it was just the latest in a long series of miscarriages of justice -- in the other direction, when people of recent African descent were involved. And those students knew that. They had been living and studying that history in ways and intensities unknown to those Liberals of little faith and to today's continuously irate, professed believers in justice. And to those who thought that the verdict was the right one, that mattered more than the simple matter of innocence or guilt, which so often had been twisted against them, a situation that hasn't weakened enough even to this day.
I didn't follow that case, and ever since I have tried to ignore it. One of my favorite mottoes goes, "Everything that happens in a courtroom is an exercise in ugliness," and that case was top-, middle- and bottom-heavy with ugliness. How happy I am that I didn't subscribe to Court-TV while it was going on. But one can't be around people for long without someone bringing up OJ, certain that others listening fully share their anger. By "people," in this instance I mean those of recent European descent, the ones who so solidly know that Simpson is guilty and who feel that the verdict was a direct slap at them and at all their ideals.
No one except Simpson himself really knows whether he is guilty, and the fact that he alone carries that knowledge securely shut up inside his skull probably enrages people almost as much as does the fact that, if he is the guilty party, it doesn't seem to be eating him up from within. And then there are the additional galling feelings on the part of his detractors that he had no need to kill such a beautiful woman, and instead, no matter how famous and well-paid he was, he should have been eternally grateful that he was allowed to marry and even to father children off such a glorious female specimen of the so-called "white race." That thought gets to the heart of what makes the continuous resentment over the verdict so hard to take: the certainty that not one of these endlessly furious people would care if Simpson had done in his first wife instead. After all, she was of a less favored configuration than was the second.
A lot of people who had been liberals were glad for the excuse that the O.J. verdict gave them to hop off that wagon. The TV shot that especially did it for them was the one of students at Howard University in D.C. jumping up and down with joy when the "not guilty" was announced.
Howard is my alma mater though I am generations removed from those students, and I would not have been so demonstrative. I suspect that they were the direct descendants of the raucous sorts that made viewing movies at that institution of higher learning so impossible. But I understood what was at the heart of their reaction, and it's too bad that few have ever taken that into consideration.
If the O.J. Simpson verdict was a miscarriage of justice, then it was just the latest in a long series of miscarriages of justice -- in the other direction, when people of recent African descent were involved. And those students knew that. They had been living and studying that history in ways and intensities unknown to those Liberals of little faith and to today's continuously irate, professed believers in justice. And to those who thought that the verdict was the right one, that mattered more than the simple matter of innocence or guilt, which so often had been twisted against them, a situation that hasn't weakened enough even to this day.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:52 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home