He was proud to be an honorary white man, and then he murdered a white woman.
Commentary by BlackKos editor JoanMar
I imagine that in the unlikely case that I’m still here 30 years from now, my blood will still boil at the mention of the names of George Zimmerman and Derek Chauvin. But what I will not be doing is trying to convince people that my hatred for those two has nothing to do with race. I will not be trying to convince people that I’m mad at them, not because they are white representatives of a system that dehumanizes, brutalizes, and marginalizes Black lives, but only because they were murderers.
Similarly, white people ought to stop trying to convince us that their searing, intense hatred of OJ is not all wrapped up in race and the primal need to avenge the death of a beautiful white woman. Stop lying to yourselves. Know that you aren’t lying to us, because we know the truth.
After OJ became an honorary white and reveled in his new “colorblind status,” Black people were not that in love with him. For the most part, he was all yours. I remember as a young woman seeing a clip of OJ in a restaurant surrounded by all white men and being served by a young blonde, and him turning to the camera and saying, “If she doesn’t look like this, like this [pointing to her as she stood over him], I don’t want her.” It was pathetic. So when news of his ex-wife’s murder broke and that he was the prime suspect, for most of us, it was just news — sensational yes, but just another murder like the thousands of murders that we hear about every year. And then the media remembered that he was Black and began treating him as such. That was when Black people started taking notice. They blackened his skin, thuggified him, called him the worst kind of animal, and all the while made no bones about the fact that their animus was directed at the Black community in Toto. OJ represented the Black community, and we were all on trial. Anyone remember that subplot in the whole saga?
For most of us in my community, Johnny Cochrane was the person we were rooting for. If it were a soap opera, Johnny Cochrane would be the star. OJ was just a sidekick who benefited from the pride and admiration people felt for the brilliant Johnny Cochrane. The Dream Team, under the leadership of Johnny, ably assisted by Barry Scheck and the rest of the crew, took on a system that, up until that point, had had their way with Black folks. The outpouring of emotion after the verdict came down was for Johnny, and Barry, and the fact that the racist media and all the pundits who could barely contain their racism, and who then went on to become media darlings, had all lost. The racist Los Angeles police department and all of its little bloodthirsty, petty tyrants running around had lost. It had very little to do with OJ himself.
Did I believe OJ was guilty? I wasn’t persuaded by the tainted blood evidence or by the motive. Was it a crime of passion or was it premeditated. In this case, it couldn’t be both. With premeditation, we’d have to believe that OJ, with his very distinctive body type, grabbed a butcher knife—not a gun, mind you, but a knife—got his ski mask, drove to the murder scene in his distinctive white bronco, brutally killed two people—one of whom was a very fit young man of whom it was said “he put up a spirited fight for his life”—jumped over a back fence after the act, and only managed to leave spots of blood and a minor scrape on one of his fingers. If it was a crime of passion, why was he armed with a knife, had a ski mask, and why was he parked in the back? The one bit of evidence that pointed to his guilt, in my mind, was the noise Kato heard in the back of the house around the time of the murder. That was Mark Furhman planting evidence, or OJ returning to the house after committing the murders and trying to avoid the chauffeur parked in front of his gate. Something happened that night that connected both locations. But what do I know? I’ve only ever studied Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and Columbo. What I do know about, however, is how racism works in this country.
And so, here we are 30 years later, and white folks are still trying to have their cake and eat it too. Still trying to set themselves up as the arbiters of what is righteous and moral, and cast Black folks as supporters of evil. Still trying to act as if we have or have always had a level legal playing field and that Lady Justice is and has always been blind. Still holding on to their soul-corrosive hatred even as they dare to chastise Black folks for having the audacity to remember history and the atrocities that have gone unpunished for centuries.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Two conservative operatives who launched a robocall campaign designed to prevent Black New Yorkers from voting by mail in the 2020 U.S. election will pay $1.25 million in a settlement, New York state Attorney General Letitia James said on Tuesday.
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were found liable by a federal judge in New York in March 2023 for targeting Black voters and sending false and threatening messages intended to discourage voting.
"Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate," James said in a statement.
During the summer of 2020, the automated calls claimed that mail-in voting would allow the voter to be tracked for outstanding warrants, credit card debt and mandatory vaccines, James said.
The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, was forced to redirect considerable resources to address the false claims made in the call, James said.
During the 2020 presidential campaign that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, Republican President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly made false claims that mail-in voting would lead to fraud. Trump, who is challenging Biden in the Nov. 5 presidential election, has continued to repeat the claims.
The 2020 robocall also was distributed in Cleveland, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Chicago, the Pennsylvania cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia; Detroit; and Arlington, Virginia, according to filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
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She no longer straightens her hair because she thought it was starting to thin. But over the years, Moraa used almost every relaxer on the market, with one goal: making her coily hair silky. The ingredients didn’t matter.
“I did not have the time or the expertise to discern the effects of listed ingredients,” Moraa says. “I’m a consumer, not a chemist.”
But questions are being raised about the safety of the ingredients in these products.
In October 2022, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a study that found women who used hair relaxers more than four times a year were at a higher risk of uterine cancer. The study marked a tipping point in the US, building on more than a decade of scientific research in which women’s exposure to chemicals known as endocrine disruptors appeared to correlate with the development of uterine and breast tumours.
Endocrine disruptors interfere with hormones that regulate functions such as mood, appetite, cognitive development and reproductive health.
While many black women in the US are now rejecting chemical straighteners – filing thousands of lawsuits against manufacturers in the wake of the study – sales of the products in some African countries continue to climb.
Tunisia, Kenya and Cameroon were among the countries worldwide leading sales growth for perms and relaxers from 2017 to 2022, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. Sales in Tunisia and Kenya jumped 10% over the five-year span. South Africa and Nigeria also saw growth.
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Wayne L. Smith, an engineer in the Washington, D.C., area, scoffed at an image he saw last week of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gleefully nestled among a group of smiling Black people. Seeing the image immediately alarmed him.
“Everything he does to try to get Black people to like him is fake,” Smith said. “Why wouldn’t that photo be fake, too? It just didn’t feel right.”
Smith’s instinct about the photo was correct; it was created by Trump supporter and conservative radio host Mark Kaye, who admitted he used artificial intelligence to create the image and posted it on social media for his 1 million Facebook followers to see. Kaye did not respond to an NBC News request for comment.
“I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller,” Kaye told BBC News, which tracked down the images’ origins. He added, “If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to an NBC News request for comment on this article, but last week one campaign official said: “The only ones using AI to meddle in an election are President Trump’s opponents. The Trump Campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these AI images. Nor can we control what other people create and post.”
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The core cause of Charles Blow’s inner conflict in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” stems from sexual abuse, a subject egregiously overlooked when it comes to African-Americans — and for Black males, in particular. Actor Laurence Fishburne explored his own adolescent molestation in last month’s one-man play, “Like They Do in the Movies,” shining another spotlight where precious little exists about the assault of Black boys. The first work staged at the Met by a Black composer (Terence Blanchard, with a libretto by Kasi Lemmons) in its 138-year history when it debuted in 2021, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” got there first. Returning now with all the majesty and pathos of its initial run, the opera makes a welcome return.
A Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity step show opening Act III elevates the production in all the right ways, with 12 dancers bringing pure Black culture to the highbrow halls of one of the world’s preeminent opera houses. The moment arrives as Charles first matriculates at Grambling State University, an HBCU a stone’s throw from his childhood home in rural Louisiana. His pledging of the frat mirrors the earlier loss of his virginity to a local girl, Evelyn, in Act II, a rite of passage to manhood that also fails to quell his inner demons. But the ritual brings into question the various ways Black males feel the need to “man up” in American society, and the turmoil that often lies underneath the bluster.
Opening with Charles (bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green) holding the audience at gunpoint in a narrative flash-forward, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” sets out its conflict from the start: our lead wants revenge. Eventually, as 20-year-old Charles trails his 7-year-old self (treble Ethan Joseph as Char’es-Baby) throughout his boyhood life in the Louisiana backwoods, we learn its particulars. Raised as the youngest, most sensitive of five boys by his mother Billie (soprano Latonia Moore), he’s continually called a baby, ostracized by his brothers and initially even kept out of school in order to stay under the watchful eye of his somewhat distant mom and Uncle Paul (played by bass-baritone Kevin Short).
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Alice Randall has been in the world of country music for decades. Her professional career started back in the early ’80s, when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to pursue a songwriting career and launch a publishing company with the hope of supporting Black artists. In 1994, Randall would become the first Black woman to co-write a No. 1 country hit with Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl).”
Yet she had never heard someone who looked like her sing one of her songs until 2023, during the production of the companion album to her new book, “My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future.” The album, in keeping with the themes of the book, is a collection of some of Randall’s songs performed by Black artists.
“Listeners thought all the heroes and she-roes in my songs were white because the singers were white,” Randall said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. “All of them I had imagined as Black, and I was willing and embrace people projecting their identities onto them, but I resisted the identities I originally imagined and created being erased.”
In her book, released as Beyoncé becomes the first Black woman to have a No. 1 country chart-topping album with “Cowboy Carter,” Randall explores the legacy of Black artists in the country music industry, including artists like DeFord Bailey, who helped shape the genre.
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