The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story

The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, is first season of the new hit anthology crime series has revived new attention to the infamous case. I'm only up to episode 4 but I've gotten pretty into it. I knew the basics about the case before watching the show, the iconic Ford Bronco, the dropped glove, the Kardashian aspect. I also knew that this case was more than just a murder trial, it was a national phenomena. I was barely crawling at the time yet I still grew up hearing about it, knowing about it. American Crime Story, though cheesy as hell, manages to help communicate the outlandish effect it had on American culture at the time. It truly enraptured the nation.

Trying to navigate your way through this event is so difficult. I found that whenever I tried to form an opinion it was quickly followed by a sense of collusion with some kind of oppressive power. This is why when talking about race it is so important to also discuss other intersecting discourses such as gender. I was able to identify however that the reduction of this case to a binary destroyed productive analysis, the media took some complex shit and tried to tell us it was actually super simple. So with all of this complexity I sought people who are much smarter and wiser than I to form opinions for me. One of these people is my longtime fav Bell Hooks. In her series 'Cultural Criticism and Transformation' she discusses the Simpson trial. 

 She emphasizes the problematic role media had in allowing any form of reasonable discussion to actuate around the case, it was from the get-go a spectacle. In the mass media's portrayal, everything was reduced to a form of binary opposition, namely between blacks and whites. The media told us that blacks thought he did it, whites thought he didn't do it. If your race contradicted your opinion within these ridiculous guidelines you were then seen as either betraying 'justice' or your 'people'. Hooks states how this media spectacle disallowed productive dialogue on the case;

“One could actually not participate in that without in fact colluding with very the forces, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy that had led to the violent death of Nicole Simpson in the first place.”¹

She goes on to also discuss how the central issue of domestic violence was lost. Male violence became a non-issue. Nicole Brown Simpson's murder to the media happened in a vacuum, the systematic nature of violence against women disappeared and instead it was simply a singular incident of madness. Wait, mmm maybe not actually. I think it is here that you could argue the media did attempt to take a broader structural approach to the case, but only via essentialism and racism. OJ's violence was viewed as societal problem, but not one which everyone could be counted within, it was instead one which was distinctly limited to black men. 

In 'Birth of a Nation'hood', Toni Morrison discusses the deep-seeded stereotyping of black men, something which prevails today and we can see playing out in the police violence, and in the media representation of OJ Simpson during his trial. Stemming back to and before the slavery complex, you can see the white racist ideology which placed black folk as animalistic children. Morrison quotes the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica;

“the mental condition of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion... capable of performing acts of singular atrocity... but often exhibiting in the capacity if servant a dog-like fidelity.”²

The portrayal of OJ Simpson in the media, and their insistence in turning the case into a binary racial divide, helped perpetuate this harmful imagery of black men which is often used to justify things like police brutality. Simpson was not seen as an abuser who's actions related to the broader societal issue of patriarchy and violence against women, instead he was racially reduced to a singular representation of blackness, confirming the suspicions whites had all along that black men are to be feared. Morrison says;

“He is not an individual who underwent and was acquitted from a murder trial. He has become the whole race needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing”

The The People v. OJ Simpson is so prickly and difficult to discuss. It is something I would mostly like to avoid delving into because anytime I try to it feels like I'm drowning. But if at all possible, maybe we can now, with the distance of time, attempt to bit by bit decipher the complex system of forces that were at play here. I haven't really decided if the TV show 'The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story' is a positive thing yet. In someways it feels as if this tragedy is being further extorted, but then in another way it has inspired me and hopefully others to give the relation between race, gender and mass media further thought. So who knows! All I do know however is that the importance and complexity of this cultural event transcends 'did he or didn't he' and is instead evidence to how much further we have to come in regards to the politics of race and gender.

1Bell Hooks, Cultural Criticism and Transformation (USA, Media Education Foundation, 1997), DVD.

2Toni Morrison, “The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing.” in Birth of a Nation'hood, (Toronto: Random House, 1997), VII.