![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thoughts on 10 years ago today
Oct. 3rd, 2005 04:09 pmTen years ago today my school stopped teaching us anything at about 12:00. It was my senior year of high school, and I was in AP American History. They wheeled a TV into our room... you could have heard a pin drop as we tuned in CNN and watched in rapt horror at the Judge Ito carnival. OJ Simpson was acquitted... the explosion of noise that day, in our room - down the hall - across the campus, was loud. The reactions mixed.
Just as at the courthouse that day, the Black kids were excited, jubilant, high on a damn-the-man feeling. The white kids were subdued, outraged, shocked. I, the middle class white daughter of a public defense attorney, straddled the line so completely that I had no idea what to feel. There was the outrage you feel when something you know deep in yourself in denied. I knew and know to this day that we was guilty. There was the voice of my father in my ear - "reasonable doubt" - "I defend the accused because someone must stand for them and it may as well be me" - a voice of righteousness and intelligence that told me that in this war of lawyers, Johnnie Cochran had handily (no pun intended) defeated Marcia Cross.
Then again, there was my outspoken feminism, still developing and so easily quashed by that cruelest of all judges, self-doubt. Was it fair that Marcia Cross was lambasted not for her handling of the case, but for her perm? Was it fair that Nicole Brown Simpson was derided as the accomplice to her own murder because she had married "one a them black boys?" Was it so very vital to the verdict that OJ was indeed black and Nicole, white?
Ah race... I'm sorry Race(!) Are we forever caught by our forebears, guilty of all they did and worse, what they did not do? What was it about the OJ Simpson trial that so clearly divided the country along racial lines?
I have nothing but questions on what, if any, lasting impact the Simpson verdict had on our nation. But it disgusts me to no end to note that the man who this trial swirled around spent this weekend signing autographs (for $95 apiece) at a horror convention in Los Angeles.
Just as at the courthouse that day, the Black kids were excited, jubilant, high on a damn-the-man feeling. The white kids were subdued, outraged, shocked. I, the middle class white daughter of a public defense attorney, straddled the line so completely that I had no idea what to feel. There was the outrage you feel when something you know deep in yourself in denied. I knew and know to this day that we was guilty. There was the voice of my father in my ear - "reasonable doubt" - "I defend the accused because someone must stand for them and it may as well be me" - a voice of righteousness and intelligence that told me that in this war of lawyers, Johnnie Cochran had handily (no pun intended) defeated Marcia Cross.
Then again, there was my outspoken feminism, still developing and so easily quashed by that cruelest of all judges, self-doubt. Was it fair that Marcia Cross was lambasted not for her handling of the case, but for her perm? Was it fair that Nicole Brown Simpson was derided as the accomplice to her own murder because she had married "one a them black boys?" Was it so very vital to the verdict that OJ was indeed black and Nicole, white?
Ah race... I'm sorry Race(!) Are we forever caught by our forebears, guilty of all they did and worse, what they did not do? What was it about the OJ Simpson trial that so clearly divided the country along racial lines?
I have nothing but questions on what, if any, lasting impact the Simpson verdict had on our nation. But it disgusts me to no end to note that the man who this trial swirled around spent this weekend signing autographs (for $95 apiece) at a horror convention in Los Angeles.
