The O J Simpson Funk - Part 1

What this author has decided to term as the “OJ Simpson Funk,” or “The Funk of the OJ Simpson’s [1994] Murder Case,” has different meanings different demographic communities of American society, besides what it plainly and deceptively was predictably and pedestrianly made out to be. On the face or the surface of things, the widely alleged brutal murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in June 1994, or thereabouts, was a typical case of what is legally termed as a “Uxoricide,” that is the murder of a wife by her legally married or wedded husband - in our particular instance, the author prefers to use the traditionally binary sense of the words or the pronouns of “wife” and “husband” as being unreservedly synonymous with “man” and “woman” and/or vice versa.

As already intimated in the preceding paragraph or the lead of this column, as we commonly call it in journalism, the Orenthal James Simpson Murder Case was about many things to many ethnically diverse people right here in the United States of America, the most fundamental of which in the proverbial playbook of African-descended Americans was almost ineluctably synonymous with the perennially sticky question or issue of the psychologically and culturally dicy relationship between Black and White Americans, as the same has prevailed, with what may be remarkably deemed to be slight modifications over the past Half Millennium, that is, ever since Indigenous Continental Africans were commodified and massively, if also brutally and savagely, exported across the Atlantic Ocean and into the then so-called New World, today’s Americas or North and South America, the Caribbean and anywhere in-between from the 1400s and well into the 1900s.

Some scholars and historians are of the firm belief that, in practical reality, the unspeakably horrific merchandising and the Chattel Enslavement of Indigenous Continental Africans never ended and has continued to the present day and age. At any rate, what is critically and discursively at issue here, right now, has to do with a “Long Read” news feature article that recently appeared in the New York Times which was needlessly sensationally captioned “O. J. Simpson, a Secret Informant and a Decades-Old Mystery (10/18/26).

In the aforereferenced article or mini-essay which, to be certain, was really what it was - bylined Mike Baker and Tim Arrango - one supposes the pair to be staff writers of the globally recognized and revered “Newspaper of Record,” whose coinage or a corollary of the same my City College of New York of the City The City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY) Journalism Professor Michael Keating, a former Director of News at CBS-TV, once informed my Introduction to Print Journalism Class had been globally made a household word by Johnny Apple Jr - aka Raymond Walter Apple, Jr - (1934-2006), a sometime correspondent and Associate Editor of the New York Times. Actually, as Professor Keating, an Irish-Canadian Citizen, told it, it was actually the New York Times’ mantra of “We Publish All the News That’s Fit To Print,” in retrospect, that may have been coined or commercially formulated by Johnny Apple Jr who, by the way, had once been invited to our class to enlighten us, students, on some of the nitty-gritty aspects of the Big-Time Media World.

For the overwhelming majority of White Americans, who constituted approximately some 74-percent of the total population of our Mega-Country or Contemporary Imperial Corporation of the 1980s, the O. J. Simpson Case may very well have been almost exclusively about a simple and a plain case of “Uxoricide.” But for the country’s Ethnic Minority Populace at the time and, of course, on the latter count, the allusion is squarely and fully to African Americans whose ethnic affiliation was routinely and officially hyphenated at the time, the Orenthal James Simpson Case of Uxoricide was decidedly about Racial Injustice and the Dual-Standard Application of the Law hereabouts in the United States of America since time immemorial. There was, therefore, absolutely no room for second-guessing or needlessly speculating about or over the fact of whether, indeed, short of any forensically airtight provability or any abject lack thereof, Mr. Simpson had “Slaughtered” or “Abbatoirized” his widely alleged estranged wife and the latter’s alleged male friend by the name of Ronald Goldman.

All that almost exclusively and fundamentally seemed to matter here was the fact of whether America’s Justice or Judicial System was apt to treat a Black Man accused of Killing or Murdering his White Wife with the same evenhanded prosecutorial, evidence-based justice as a White-American Man or Husband charged with the selfsame crime. And the resounding answer, even well before judicial proceedings were in full-blast or high-dudgeon, was a deafeningly emphatic “No!!!” And at least 400 years of indiscriminate festive bouts lynchings and other forms of race-based officially sanctioned acts of terror and unspeakable brutalities, as their main and almost exclusive judicial dietary fare, could anybody blame an overwhelming majority of African American Citizens for having absolutely no faith or confidence in the American Legal System?

For most African Americans, even some who strongly and firmly believed in the guilt or the criminal culpability of O. J. Simpson, it was just another déjà-vu moment and occasion of “Teaching This Uppity Nigger” an indelibly instructive lesson that a race-trangressing “Forbidden-Fruit Addicted” Mr. Simpson ought to have learned long before this abominable perp turned 46 years old; and on the night in which Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend Ronald Goldman, 25, were brutally slain.

In other words, vis-a-vis the so-called Trial-of-the-Century, Black Americans and White Americans were smack on diametrically opposite sides of the Race-Based Judicial Divide, as it were. They were both psychologically, culturally and morally at crosspurposes, with Whites obsessively fixated on what they hermetically believed to be the unvarnished details of the indelible truth surrounding the gruesome murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman; and Blacks, equally obsessively fixated on being dealt or meted the same kind and quality of judicial justice that White Americans have been taking for granted for generations and centuries ad-infinitum.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]