The Atlantic

O. J. Simpson wasn’t black.

My view that Simpson existed beyond the borders of black America was based not merely on his narrow political consciousness, but on his own words. “My biggest accomplishment,” Simpson once told the journalist Robert Lipsyte, “is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man.” Simpson went on to tell the story of a wedding he’d attended with his first wife and a group of black friends. At some point he overheard a white guest remark, “Look, there’s O. J. Simpson and some niggers.” Simpson confessed that the remark hurt. But that wasn’t the point of the story. The point was not being seen as one of the “niggers.”

Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was 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, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.? I vented in the school newspaper. “Since Simpson’s practices show he clearly has no interest in the affairs of black people,” I wrote, “the question becomes why do blacks have any interest in him?” In those days, I conceived of African Americans as a kind of political party, which needed only, in unison, to select the correct strategy in order to make the scourge of racism disappear. Expending political capital on O. J. Simpson struck me as exactly the opposite of the correct strategy. Looking back, I realize what eluded me. I had lived among black people all my life, but somehow I had come to see them as abstractions, not as humans.

It offended me, too. Simpson should have been the last person in the world to reap a reward from the struggle waged against the LAPD. Months after he was acquitted, I watched him give a speech at a black church in D.C., where he was embraced by the local community. He was presented with traditional African garb. The black nationalist Malik Zulu Shabazz greeted Simpson as if he were the reincarnation of Malcolm X. I have not, in my life, ever felt much shame in being black. That was a moment when I felt it deeply.

The virtue of equality does not always feel like a virtue, because equality does not always run on the same axis as morality. Equality for African Americans means the right to be treated like anyone else—whether we’re doing good or doing evil. Simpson’s great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys. His acquittal, achieved as incarceration rates skyrocketed, represented something grand and inconceivable for blacks. He had defied the police who brutalized black people, the prosecutors who tried them, the prisons that held them. He had defied them all, and in the process, much like Houdini, he escaped.