So much is being written, rehashed, recalled, misremembered and made up these days, it was refreshing to open the Milwaukee newspaper’s opinion section today and read a column about the Simpson case and miniseries drama based on characters in the case by someone who didn’t claim to have been there, knew someone who was there, remembered exactly where they were/what they were doing when…
James E. Causey’s “After 20 years, reassessing O.J.” led off with a quote from Simpson: “You wanna make this a black thing. Well I’m not black. I’m O.J.”
Simpson made that statement, Causey writes, “after he was arrested in 1994 in the brutal deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her companion Ronald Goldman, says a lot, not only about the case, but about black and white perceptions in America.”
Rather than dissect and regurgitate what he read and saw in the media about the case, the trial and the parties involved, Causey took the long view, examining black and white America’s reactions to the not-guilty verdicts and race relations in this country then and since, with stops at Zimmerman and in Milwaukee along the way.
Causey wrote the best thing in all that I’ve read yet about FX’s
“The People vs. O.J. Simpson” when he concluded with, “The wound of racism never heals with a Band-Aid. It takes dealing with some hard truths and honesty. This series may open up a much-needed dialogue that we need to have about race.”
Anatomy of a Trial blog 