Farewell to The Juice

In 1995, when anyone mentioned OJ, no one thought they were talking about orange juice. Everyone knew they were referring to O.J. Simpson, the famous former football player who, because of his initials, liked being called The Juice. In 1995, though, Orenthal James Simpson was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her boyfriend, Ron Goldman.

The trial lasted eleven months. I remember following it, not daily, but closely enough that when the police found a blood-stained golf glove at the scene and a matching, similarly stained glove in Simpson’s house, I thought the case was pretty much closed. I read a lot of mystery novels, and knew that with evidence like that the only thing that could save Simpson would be for Perry Mason to be his lawyer and someone to jump up in court and confess to committing the crime and planting the glove.

I also knew that only happened in Erle Stanley Gardner novels. In real life, as in more literary novels – Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example – black men were convicted despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence. Simpson’s lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, told the jury that it didn’t matter whether Simpson murdered Nicole and Goldman or not, what mattered was that Simpson was black, and a black man could not get a fair trial in Los Angeles. The jury, ten of whom were black, agreed with him, and sent Simpson home.

Simpson’s acquittal, though celebrated by most African Americans, angered and confused some. “O.J. Simpson wasn’t black,” Ta-Nehisi Coates declared in an article in The Atlantic in 2016. At the height of his football fame (and in the U.S., football players are heroes – just ask Taylor Swift), Simpson refused to support the movement for black equality. “He came of age in the 1960s,” Coates wrote, “the era of Muhammed Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War and John Carlos’ and Tommy Smith’s black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics.” But according to Coates the only struggle Simpson embraced was “the struggle to advance O.J. Simpson.” Coates reminds us of Simpson’s claim that, “My biggest accomplishment is that people look at me like a man first, not as a black man.”

Coates considered that Simpson was acquitted for the wrong reasons, and that his trial actually hurt the black cause. “The support of Simpson,” he wrote, “was like a step backwards.” It may even have caused the LAPD to intensify its suppression of L.A.’s black community. “Two things, it seems to me, could be true at once. Simpson could be a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered?”

When Simpson’s trial turned from being about whether or not he was a murderer to whether or not a black man could receive a fair trial in the United States, my interest quickened. That year, 1995, was also the year I learned that my father was a black man who had passed for white, and that I was therefore one-quarter black. It was a road-to-Damascus year for me; I have since written three novels about how the discovery affected me, and I still haven’t quite figured it out. In 1995, I was less disturbed by Simpson’s acquittal than I was by the lengths to which the LAPD had gone to convict him. Mark Fuhrman, the detective in charge, didn’t investigate a single other suspect, bullied prospective witnesses, and may even have planted that second glove in Simpson’s residence. In other words, despite Simpson’s boasting that white society didn’t think of him as a black man, the LAPD treated him with the same ruthless contempt with which it treated every black citizen in L.A.

If Simpson’s skin had been lighter, he probably would have passed for white. Coates likened him to Harry Houdini: “Long before he led the police on a chase through L.A., Simpson had been an escape artist.” In football, he was famous as a running back, and running is a form of fleeing – which is how thousands of slaves, including members of my family, escaped from slavery in the American South. My father’s passing was another form of escaping – Coates wrote that passing is “less reputable” than fleeing. Passing is “disappearing into the overclass,” and both Simpson and my father thought they had disappeared.

They were wrong. Simpson’s acquittal didn’t mean he wasn’t seen as a black man; he was acquitted because he was black. And neither the black nor white communities welcomed him as one of their own. “Simpson’s lawyers,” writes Coates, “are not praised as adept defense attorneys, but disparaged as unscrupulous flouters of the rules who played the ‘race card’ in a case that should have been about science.” Science has little to do with such matters. My father once said, “I don’t know anything about genetics. All I know is that when I look in a mirror, I see a white man.” And so he was white.

It took me a long time to sympathize with my father’s passing. By leaving his family and community, he denied me the benefit of growing up with an extended family and the nurturing village it takes to raise a child. But Simpson’s trial showed me why my father seized his chance to disappear into the overclass. By the end of his Atlantic essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates comes to see Simpson in a more sympathetic light as well. Simpson’s acquittal mirrored that of the four LAPD officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King almost to death four years earlier. There have been fewer such acquittals since 1995, witness the furor over the death of George Floyd in 2020, which led, as the New York Times reported, to “a racial justice movement not seen since the civil rights protests of the 1960s,” a movement that included both blacks and whites. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.

The Juice, like my father, smudged the line between black and white. But in doing so they may have inadvertently brought the two communities closer together. I now think of both Simpson and my father as tragic figures, and tragedy, as we know, is a healing art.