"I'm Not Dead...I'm OJ!!!"

And yet...life has somehow evened the score.

“Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak....” — Othello [Photo Courtesy Esquire]

I never liked OJ Simpson. But back up: I’m not really a football fan. I’m even a lesser fan of uxoricide but this is not so much about that as it is the complicated legacy of a man who was not really ever liked by Black folks. Not at first at least.

Let me explain: Orenthal James Simpson was that certain category of Black celebrity that sought to allay whatever incipient concerns America might have had about Black folks in public spaces in the first place. Most famously when he was quoted as saying that he wasn’t Black, he was OJ. On the one hand what he said was fundamentally correct: celebrity in America sometimes changes everything.

However during an age that saw Black athlete activism from Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black power salute at the Olympics to Muhammad Ali refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam and going to prison for it, OJ was the house negro alternative, and gladly so.

Mostly “gladly” because it yielded great benefit for him. At least in the shape and form of endless commercial engagements from Hertz to Chevrolet and RC Cola. And subsequent movies where despite his generally wooden delivery he proved to be a welcome comedic foil. Toothless as he was.

And he most certainly wasn’t alone. Singer/actress Stephanie Mills tried to put to bed the never-ending media queries about race with a poorly timed blast regarding how depressing it was to be Black. A statement she’s tried to claw back over the years. Though she was right about the general media’s approach to being Black where the more it bleeds, the more it leads, she didn’t count for it being weaponized against her, or the community from whence she came.

OJ famously then went on a high speed chase where it was thought he might kill himself. In an excess of contrition? Maybe.

Of course there were also the rewards that “they” toss your way for playing nice. She got and OJ did, as well, all of those in spades. So it was always an enduring drag to see OJ whiteface it up for all and sundry. Even after he was rich. And ensconced in his Brentwood abode. No one would ever suggest he return to the San Francisco shit hole from whence he came. But to go as far as he did? Also unnecessary.

It worked for Simpson though. Right up to when it didn’t.

In his rocky marriage to Nicole Brown Simpson the police had been called several times for domestic disputes. Cops who were more than glad to be attending to the famous sports figure’s struggles with matrimony. Autographs were routinely exchanged. And OJ slipped subsequent notice because he wasn’t Black, after all. He was OJ.

When he wasn’t? On the night of June 12, 1994 when Nicole, his wife, was stabbed to death outside her home, along with her friend, waiter Ron Goldman. OJ famously then went on a high speed chase where it was thought he might kill himself. In an excess of contrition? Maybe. At least that was the narrative.

This right up to the so-called Trial of the Century where his high-priced mouthpieces overmatched the prosecutorial team who, had they spent as much time trying to convict him as they did fucking each other (in the worst kept professional secret ever), might have gotten him.

“I can’t say I blame him.” A former football playing friend of mine, but not of OJ, weighed in. He explained that I had no understanding of the hothouse world that went along with professional athletic celebrity. The drugs (Nicole Brown Simpson reportedly had struggled with cocaine), the infidelities, the inabilities to live any kind of life that anyone not there already would recognize. He also called himself a feminist. But in the case of Nicole v OJ, he was unmoved: “She knew what the game was and paid the price for playing it.”

She and Ron Goldman, the waiter on the move who stopped by to return some glasses she had left at the restaurant where he worked, and where she had supped that night.

[A]nd OJ, who been loved by white America because he wasn’t Black, he was OJ, suddenly served notice on that same white America that he, in fact, was Black.

Later that night they were both found stabbed to death on Simpson’s frontyard/walkway.

“Think of it,” a cop friend of mine had said. “They were killed very close to each other. Do you think it’s likely that the waiter waited while she was killed?”

Suspicions that it was Simpson were widely held but LA protects its celebrities. Robert Blake skated for shooting his wife. And it took decades for Robert Wagner to be raised as a person of interest in the death of Natalie Wood, his wife, despite the fact that when a spouse is killed the surviving spouse is usually the first and most immediate suspect.

So rumors, cop-fueled rumors, were that it was over cocaine/gambling debts. Cop support continued right up until trial, which the defense made it clear that they were playing to win by accusing them all of being racist rogue cops. “That sucked,” said my cop friend, himself a Black cop, and neither a racist, or rogue.

They planted incriminating evidence, they were racists, and right on the heels of the Rodney King trials where cops beat King half to death only to be exonerated, a woeful state of affairs that drew federal charges on the heels of worldwide riots kicked off on April 29th, the system beggared whatever you knew because you could not really effectively believe your eyes anymore.

And that was enough to get a guilty man set free, and OJ, who been loved by white America because he wasn’t Black, he was OJ, suddenly served notice on that same white America that he, in fact, was Black. But to Black America it was never really about race, it was about wealth and the celebrity that he claimed protected him from race working for him like it would for any other person in America who had the money to make it so.

A finer point on that and here we must say it directly: Black America knew he did it, as well. After the initial Rodney King verdicts though it was necessary to send a message that this is what it felt like when justice was not as blind as we like to claim. Especially when you’ve got money.

So Simpson was freed but with the mark of Cain on him, he never again reached the previously attained level of color blind glory. He was still famous enough to pursue the Black professional athlete’s bete noire, celebrity seeking white broads, but in general he lived the rest of his life a grinning pariah, golfing and after serving some prison time for kidnapping and robbing some autograph hunting sports memorabilia guys in an acting out that seemed like he wanted to get caught (and punished), just trying to stay somehow relevant. Like any other grade-Z celebrity.

Then he died.

And just as fast the chattering that ensued regarding his “complicated legacy” all managed to elide the truth: white America had been eager to take him at his word that he wasn’t Black but only because he said so, and not for the real reason: that he was wealthy enough to make it so.

America has always found it easier to say a lot of nothing about race but a lot of real nothing about class and cash. In fact, some might notice that Martin Luther King was not killed until he talked about poor people, Black and white poor people, finding common cause. The real third rail in America? The filthiest of lucres.

So the not-Black-but-OJ Simpson died. Along with that other race denier Michael Jackson. And even my ex-boss the alleged grifter of millions Carlos Watson who, while still alive, has joined the club of those Black folks who become Black for the first time when it becomes legally expedient to be so.

They lived lives that lied as liars and would expect tears at their passing. Tears that would not be forthcoming. Even in the face of them, at least in the first two cases, being exonerated.

They were Black, and now unforgivingly so. And neither community would forgive them for being the same.

So now he’s gone. And life goes on. Darkened, but on. And I still don’t like OJ Simpson. Or celebrity get-out-of-jail cards. But it will happen again. Let’s just try to not be so surprised when it does.

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