Reflecting on the legacy of O.J. Simpson

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Visit your nearest Warby Parker store or head to warbyparker.com. You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. On Thursday, the family of O.J. Simpson announced that he had died. He was 76. OJ spent the first half of his life known as a record-breaking football superstar in college and then later in the NFL. But of course, in the back half of his life, he was the defendant in one of the most highly publicized murder trials in American history.

That trial, in which O.J. Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994, was covered with a kind of zeal and thoroughness that seems like impossible today.

There are some estimates that somewhere between 95 to 150 million people watched the verdict live when it was announced. And race became central to OJ's defense. And the trial in some ways became the rickety platform upon which the American public would... well, litigate their feelings about race, to the point where that discourse often eclipsed the two homicides at the center of the trial.

The irony is that OJ Simpson has spent much of his public life to that point actively trying to not touch race. He was famously quoted as saying, quote, I'm not black. I'm OJ, end quote. He wanted to be marketable and bankable and post-racial decades before that was even a coinage. But O.J. Simpson would become an avatar for so many of the anxieties and resentments around the way race and class and celebrity function in the United States.

Back in 2016, I spoke with Ezra Edelman. He directed the critically acclaimed five-part ESPN documentary, OJ Made in America. And we will get into that conversation in a moment. This message comes from BetterHelp. The holidays are a time of traditions, like making your grandmother's pudding recipe, or watching that movie you've seen a thousand times. And by caring for yourself, you can show up more for the important moments.

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it made sense to re-up that conversation with Ezra Edelman about why he thought it was so important that the already rabidly covered story of OJ Simpson was crying out for even more context. And we started with trying to just make sense of the man himself.

And just a heads up, this conversation contains use of a racial slug. Well, I'm going to resist the opportunity to play a psychiatrist, but I do think by the choices that he made, it seems very clear that there's this pattern of, for lack of a better... phrasing moving on up i mean i look at his life in some ways as like these rungs that he keeps progressing from one to the next to the next and so whether it's first yes transcending the poverty

Then it's transcending the blackness. And at a certain point, it's like, oh, transcending being an athlete. And then it's like, oh, maybe at a certain point, it's transcending being, you know, just a sort of celebrity because of his athletic. gifts and fame, which is now I want to be a serious actor. There's a sense of his continual desire to be legitimized or to further legitimize himself. And you wonder, you know, I wonder, it's impossible to know.

How someone who had everything come so easy to him and he was so gifted, preternaturally so, and the world was just laid at his feet in many ways because of those gifts, not just his athletic.

gifts but his looks and his charm his charisma yeah yeah i mean all that i think allowed him to sort of you know go through the world in a very easy way and i think that you wonder what happens after you are the best at this thing and you know everyone kisses your ass because of it and then even if you attain this fame you don't get to be that in this other arena oh i'm not a good actor

Or I'm not as smart as these other people in business. And what does that do to you when you still have the same ego and you still have the same ambition? Where do you go in your head to try to sort of still be that guy? These are the questions I'm trying to explore without having any answer for you. I think that that's something that we're really trying to just present his evolution as a character in the world and to have a viewer sort of absorb it.

to make their own, to draw their own conclusions. I'm going to ask you this question about the idea that OJ was trying to transcend race. It seemed to be like the template that Michael Jordan used later or tried to use later. Tiger Woods definitely tried to use it, tried to employ this thing.

And so he was like a deeply apolitical, at least in his public life. I don't think I appreciated the extent to which OJ was the first dude to do that. He was the pioneer. Yeah. He was the pioneer. He broke the mold. But here's the thing. Before the Hertz ad, again. The dude was in Chevrolet commercials and RC Cole commercials before he played a down the NFL. I mean like I'm fascinated by that. How does a guy end up in national TV ads?

before he's played professional football, as a black athlete, and there's no black athlete who's ever been a corporate sponsor in that way. Like, I'm amazed by that. And to your point, he really did create this paradigm that begat Michael Jordan, who begat Tiger Woods. I look at OJ's sort of trajectory as, you know, you look at sort of our culture. He created this idea of, I'm going to protect mine. I'm all about me. I'm all about sort of...

Furthering my image to make myself palatable to everyone in America, to be safe so I can be famous and I can be rich. And that's something that is a model that people use going forward. And we see that literally in the Hertz ad. When you're in a rush, take it from O.J. Simpson. There's only one superstar in Rent-A-Car, Hertz. We see O.J. darting through this airport. Before you get there, your forms fill out. Car is pre-assigned.

So there was this conscious decision in the production of that commercial that there could be no other black people in the ad besides O.J. Simpson because they needed to make O.J. safe for white people. What do you make of that? It seems bizarre in 2016 that someone would have to go out of their way to make sure that this wouldn't be interpreted a certain way in 1975 that we're talking about. So the question is, are you surprised that...

this was something that they even thought about? Is that surprising to you? I guess it isn't terribly surprising that you're like, okay, we need to have literally surround him, like put him in a universe full of white people. I guess it was surprising.

I guess I understand this in the context of the documentary now, but like that he would go along with it. There couldn't be just one other Negro like in the background somewhere, you know? Oh, but I think that I'm sure that made OJ feel good. I mean, look, you can interpret the statement.

that he makes when he's leaving his house on June 17, 1994, when he looks around and says, what are all these niggers doing in Brentwood? Well, what's that all about? OJ says that to the police after he finally surrenders himself to them when he's back in Brentwood.

After the conclusion of that long, slow-speed police chase. After he's already been arrested and all those people were around his house. He had asked me to stay with him throughout the process. I promised him I would stay with him. I say, it's time. I got to handcuff you now. You need to be handcuffed. I'm sorry. This is the way it works. As we take off, Simpson is amazed at the crowds.

Lots of black people. Black and white. You just couldn't believe there was this many people there. And Brentwood, which is basically an all-white. little area in a sleepy area and there was all these young especially black folks there cheering him on and so when he leaves you know in the car he

And one of the first things he says to Peter Wireater, who is the negotiator, and he says, what are all these niggers doing in Brentwood? I mean, was he oblivious to like the massive outpouring of like support by black people on the streets? I mean, look, he's calling people. He's on the phone with the police. He has a gun. I'm sure he's not in the most stable of mindsets. So that he might not have noticed all those people or who they were demographically would not shock me.

During the police chase, you see his celebrity sort of coming to bear on the way they treated him. Zoe Torr, I just want to lay out that scene. So Zoe Torr is the... helicopter pilot who was the first person to find O.J. Simpson in his white Bronco on the freeway, she says this is not the way police chase with anyone else would look. I've covered so many of these things.

This was not usual police behavior. If O.J. Simpson were black, that wouldn't have happened. He'd be on the ground getting clubbed. In fact, she had shot a whole video that she sold with police chases that ended in policemen, you know, cars ramming into suspects' cars and getting them on the ground and beating them. You know, and that really is about celebrity.

And you wonder, you know, obviously OJ's sort of way of going through the world and distancing himself publicly as far as, you know, talking about matters of race, that was distinct. But you wonder, if you're a black and a celebrity, how normal that treatment is. I'm sure there are plenty of incidents where black people who are celebrities might get profiled and pulled over before then they realize who they are. But in that way...

I think it was more O.J.'s celebrity. And by the way, not just his celebrity, but it's like his celebrity was predicated on this goodness. Everyone loved him. It wasn't just he was famous. He'd intended a bunch of goodwill, right? Yeah, and that spoke to the shock.

that we all felt was like this is impossible that this dude is capable of these things because he's never publicly shown anything to make us think that he has that side despite him playing the most violent game we have in our culture other than boxing

And so you wonder how much it's, you know, the pure celebrity of him. I think it was more that than any chumminess he had with the police, for instance, as far as the treatment he received on June 17th. But it's one of the reasons why this thing is so bizarre.

One of the scenes that, I mean, I can't stop talking about this scene, was this moment in which the defense takes the jury, the jury is mostly black, to OJ's house. And the defense team... has basically rearranged his house in a way to look like a black person's house. Like OJ didn't have many pictures of black folks in his house at all. And so the defense team comes into his house.

Puts up pictures of OJ with black folks. Puts up portraits, Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With, Ruby Bridges desegregating the school on his wall. And I guess it came from Johnny Cochran's office? That's correct. And so... Just that moment was so like they had to dig in the crates to find pictures of OJ with black people was so bananas. I mean, that was like he didn't even have pictures of black folks just like laying around. They had to search for them. When you would walk.

up the grand staircase. There was a large wall with pictures of the family, pictures of friends, pictures of OJ's career. Problem was, the overwhelming majority of pictures were of Caucasian friends and colleagues of his. We had an African-American jury, and we wanted to make sure that the home setting would reflect the themes that we wanted to reflect.

We took all of his white friends down, put all of his black people up, pictures he probably had never seen before. Because that's what we were told the jury would identify with. We made him blacker. I mean, look, in some ways, it's like it speaks to the savviness, if not deviousness of the defense. And so it's like you do what you need to do to, you know, win the case.

To me, like, the pictures are weirdly a lot less egregious than the painting because those were still pictures that OJ was in and they existed. Like, I don't know if they were buried underneath the basement. They were there somewhere, so they were there to be put up. So obviously it's devious to take down all those photos, which were the ones that O.J. wanted to display prominently on that stairwell in his house.

And so that obviously is a misrepresentation of OJ's world and his house and how he presents himself to the world. But it's almost like going back, it's the appropriation of the struggle. and of the movement, and of a girl like Ruby Bridges walking into her school in 1960 in New Orleans, and you're putting that up at the top of his staircase as if O.J. gives a s***, that's what's messed up about that.

You know, the fact that the fence even like would go there and would know to go there. It's brilliant. It's hilarious, but it's brilliant. Marsha saw the wall and she said, Carl. You know damn well he has never had this many black people on his wall in his entire life. Marsha, what are you talking about? How dare you accuse us of such things? I was miserable. I was angry. That is very dirty pool. I found that scene so fascinating and dark.

Just because, I mean, OJ had a black family, right? You would think that he would have. By the way, that's the whole thing about all this conversation. We can keep talking. It's like, you know, and a lot of people say OJ didn't want to be black or white. It's like OJ was black. I don't think you would ever hear him say, I mean, like he says it.

publicly in that I'm not black, I'm OJ, but it's more about how sort of weirdly narcissistic and egotistical and all about himself he is. But I don't think you would sit in there talking to OJ and he wouldn't say I'm not black. He's black. He knows he's black. And so like, but it's just like the choices that he made publicly, you know, belied that notion. I mean, do you think he, do you think he knows he's black? I mean, it seemed like he was engaged in this, you know.

decades-long project to minimize that as much as possible. Oh, look, this is where I wish I could be drawing upon, you know, all those hours of conversations I had with him. But... Yeah, I think he always knew he was black. I think he might have had this weird ambition and notion of himself as being, you know, transcending race and thinking that he just doesn't want to be defined by his blackness more so than someone of him being like, I'm not this.

Even with the sort of lengths that he went to publicly sort of distance himself and to not be defined by his blackness, I don't think that OJ, for instance, wanted to be white. I don't believe that. I think he just wanted to live and do whatever the hell he wanted to do. And if that was living in a white world, I don't think he was like trying to lighten his skin. I don't believe that he went to that extent.

I just think it was something you didn't want to be burdened by or talk about in any form, any time, in any way. So the title O.J. Made in America, how do you want the title of the documentary to be interpreted or understood? In a real simplistic fashion. This is a story that is much bigger than O.J., first and foremost. But that everything in terms of who O.J. was and his ambition, sort of, you know, he was created by us. And this story is as much us as it is him, and it can only be explained.

by his relationship to this country in which he grew up in. But, you know, I think even speaks to everything that sort of happened between his life. but everything that happened in terms of why people were so fascinated with the trial. There are so many of these things, everything that it touches on, that are so profoundly and uniquely American. Everything about this story, about race and celebrity, our culture and everything else, it's such a profound American tale.

So that's why it's called O.J. Made in America. Ezra Edelman is the director of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary O.J. Made in America. Thank you so much for doing this, Ezra. I appreciate you. Thank you, Gene. Appreciate it. All right, y'all. That is our show. Follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. We would love that. If email's more your thing, ours is codeswitch at npr.org. Subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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by walter ray watson it was edited by tisneem raja and alicia montgomery and i will be remiss if i did not shout out the rest of the coast which massive that's christina calla xavier lopez jess kong lea danela dahlia mortada virilyn williams b.a parker Lori Lizaraga, Skylar Swinton, and Cher Vincent. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all. This message comes from the Council for Interior Design Qualification.

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So an NCIDQ certified interior designer must complete a minimum of six years of specialized education and work experience and pass the three-part NCIDQ exam. All three exams emphasize and focus on health, safety, and welfare of the occupants. Being NCIDQ certified means that you've proven your knowledge and skills. through rigorous exams and are recognized as a qualified interior design professional. Learn more at CIDQ.org slash NPR.

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