Yuri Orlov, one of the world's leading arms traders, flies to Liberia, inflamed by a horrific civil war, to secure a monopoly on the supply of weapons to the government forces of the bloodthirsty dictator Andre Baptiste. He will spend the night in what is formally a two-star hotel, in reality a hovel in one of the world’s poorest slums, in stark contrast to both the sumptuous presidential palace where he has just signed a contract and his luxurious New York residence. In the lobby, with the hum of fans in the background, two men are sitting on stools watching a rickety television set and commenting on what they see: a clip of OJ Simpson's deposition at his trial.  This scene, from the 2005 blockbuster Lord of War, well demonstrates how the echoes of OJ's trial continue to reverberate thunderously in space - from a Los Angeles courthouse to the back alleys of West Africa - and in time - as the director deems it unnecessary to specify anything beyond the images glimpsed for a moment on the screen in the screen, despite the film's didactic and explicit tone and the fact that more than a decade has passed since the court case.

In fact, almost like the assassination of Kennedy or the 9/11, the trial that saw OJ Simpson charged with the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman was a proper Event, the kind that marks a historical and narrative discontinuity: even if only in broad strokes, everyone knows what was about, what the premises were, how it ended. Above all, it was an Event in the most media-oriented sense of the term, a television show of mammoth scope and duration.

Suffice it to say that, between June 17th 1994 and May 23th 1995, the segments dedicated to the case on the ABC news programmes far exceeded, both in absolute and percentage terms, any other news story, including the 1994 presidential election and the Oklahoma City bombing, to the date the second bloodiest act of terrorism in US history. The live transmission of the acquittal verdict registered an audience of more than 150 millions viewers, more than half the population of the United States. This isn’t just a quantitative question: mediatisation also produced radical qualitative transformations in the way racism, gender violence and criminal trials were discussed in the mainstream, ratified new narrative and commercial paradigms, even spawned entrepreneurial and lifestyle sagas, such as that of the Kardashians [1].

Derek Alderman has gone so far as to speak of the “Simpsonization of domestic news” [2]; i.e., a mechanism whereby, in the course of the trial, the latter became the lens through which all national and international news was interpreted and represented the parameter of contextualisation and signification of events in the US debate in the mid-Nineties. To better clarify the concept, Alderman used the hyper-coverage notion: in presence of a relevant piece of news, television journalism tends to generate an almost endless flow of data, information, updates, which seamlessly add up without ever producing a recapitulation or a contextualisation. A continuous movement, therefore, that gives the illusion of feverish activity, of constant reversal and change; a form of journalistic coverage that tends to fade into entertainment and sensationalism; a phenomenon that is self-perpetuating in a vicious circle, as the various media players constantly attempt to raise in order not to be left behind by their competitors, leading to a saturation of both the market and the narratives. Hyper-coverage is almost a given in the Internet age, but as far as the medium of television is concerned, the OJ affair was a watershed event. It’s no coincidence that this media over-exposure had occurred in the field of a criminal trial: journalistic coverage of trials in the United States can be traced back to the Sixth Amendment, which attributed particular importance to it as a means to guarantee the right to a public trial and thus disarticulate the possibility of being oppressed by a secret court.

Like all Events, the OJ case comes from far away, and goes far away: it has deep echoes and stellar digressions, it represents both the apex of past trajectories and the germ of the new to come, it is deeply rooted in its context for the same reasons that it inexorably mutates it and, in an endless movement, in talking about itself, it always reveals something else.

In addition to the obvious relevance of a scandalous affair involving a celebrity, Christo Lassiter [3] underlined how the narrative around OJ is fully inscribed in the groove of the American dream: the self-made man who rose from the misery of a black suburb in San Francisco to the radiant heights of a sporting career first, and then the entertainment and film industries. His human qualities are those extolled, from Fitzgerald’s novels to television serials, as inherently and superbly American: determination, perseverance, self-confidence, adaptability. In all mythologies, however, the hero’s rise is counterbalanced by his fall, a phenomenon to be observed and dissected in order to learn from it. Moreover, OJ was a black self-made man, who had married a white and blonde woman: not only did the story work well as a famous case of domestic violence, which was ostensibly useful in raising public awareness of the issue, but it also lent itself perfectly to a racist and, so to speak, vengeful narrative about black men.

Moreover, this media success is inscribed in and, to some extent, anticipates a television trend of the 1990s and, especially, the 2000s, namely a certain form of media representation of gender-based violence that mixes a splatter aesthetic with an obsessive attention to detail and the psychologisation of murderous behaviour: this aesthetic first used as a medium slasher movies, the horror subgenre in which a madman wielding bladed weapons hunts down a group of teenagers, and then to the so-called true crime genre. Cutting ties with the fantastic, the latter represents a further exaltation of the morbid: the butchered dead blonde, punished for her sexual promiscuity and autonomy, is no longer an imaginary projection, but a concrete body. What remains unchanged, in both genres and in the OJ trial, is the invisibilization of the woman, reduced to a victim, defrauded of a story, exclusively linked to her murderer. It is not surprising, then, that market surveys suggest that the audience for slasher movies and true crime podcasts is predominantly female: Sady Doyle interprets this as an attempt at catharsis, a compulsion derived from everyday life and a quest «for safety tips» [4].

Perhaps the most relevant and central dimension of the OJ case, however, consists in the translation of the trial from a debate over a double homicide to a race dispute: from police racism to blackness as such, from OJ as a mere black corporeality to the biases of the US legal system. The trial changed meaning, deviating from its original trajectory, and, at the same time, crystallised a particular key to reading, which progressively overwhelmed or eliminated all others: it simultaneously caused an extension and a restriction of the debate as it became a stage, a representation, a version. In its explicit exploration of one aspect of the story, it reduced the complexity of both: the show devoured the debate, producing a discourse on racism that, on closer inspection, said nothing about racism.

Just like the Super Bowl halftime show, OJ’s race trial englobed and eclipsed all other aspects of an overall and general phenomenon, becoming the only point worth dwelling on. While Super Bowl, and, more generally, American football, is an event of interest primarily to the American market, the halftime show is a phenomenon of global scope, whose significance goes far beyond a brief concert between the two halves of a match: it could even be said that the sporting dimension is the least relevant aspect of the event, both in terms of television audience and narrative extent. Similarly, the double murder trial, or, better, a particular key to reading it, took on such centrality and relevance as to overshadow all other aspects: the reflections about OJ’s human and sporting story, the debate on gender-based violence and racism, the power and interest struggles that were raging in the Los Angeles courtroom, even the homicides themselves.

The origins of the halftime show can be traced back to a commercial strategy from the 1920s [5]: in an effort to promote his purebred dogs breeding, Walter Lingo, an entrepreneur from Ohio, conceived a new form of sports entertainment, which included shows inspired by those of the Buffalo Bill circus, at the sidelines of football matches played by a team made up entirely by Native Americans, the Oorang Indians. Although the most uncouthly racist veneer of the event was gradually removed, it is difficult not to take into account this initial defect; not because it constitutes some kind of an original sin to be paid, but rather because it is in mass phenomena that the implications and the trajectories of domination are more clearly revealed, especially when they, and their genealogy, are nearly invisible. Also in this sense, the OJ Simpson case seems to follow the main event of the sport that made the Juice [6] a global celebrity. 

[1] The media phenomenon of the Kardashian sisters, born of the 2007 series Keeping Up With the Kardashians, wouldn’t have been possible without the financial resources and the visibility of Robert, the father of the Kardashians and a lawyer who was indeed part of the legal defence team in the OJ trial. 

[2] Alderman, D. H. (1997), TV News Hyper-Coverage and the Representation of Place: Observations on the O. J. Simpson Case, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 79, n. 2.

[3] Lassiter, C. (1996), The OJ Simpson Verdict: A Lesson in Black and White, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, n. 69.

[4] Sady Doyle, J. E. (2019), Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, New York, Penguin Random House, p. 47.

[5] Meler, B. (2017), The Start of Something Big, Big Reads, sportsnet.ca. 

[6] OJ Simpson’s nickname derives from the fact that the acronym “OJ” is commonly used as a contraction for Orange Juice.

A relatively young country such as the United States lacks its own historical background in which to find, more or less fictitiously, an epic narrative that serves equally as a mythological origin and justification of the present and as a programmatic manifesto for the future. While in Europe the nation-building processes could be rooted in an often ideological and distorted reading of the past (e.g. the Roman Empire in Italy or a certain narrative about Middle Age in Germany), in the United States what Hobsbawm defined the invention of tradition had to replace historical epics with community building around abstract and universal principles and with the mythologisation of the present. Hence, on the one hand, “the land of the free” and the centrality of certain Calvinist themes skillfully stripped of their more confessional aspect -think of the In God We Trust inscribed on banknotes- and, on the other, the Wild West epic and the interpretation of the Civil War as an ethical conflict related to the slave question, rather than a political-economic one.

In this sense, sport, or rather the individual figure of the athlete, plays a key role in US imagery: a contemporary epic that sublimates the national mantras of individual initiative, merit and perseverance, and that is able to produce the beneficial effects of armed conflicts- association, identity, will to power- at a much lower price and significantly faster. But just as the universal freedom so extolled by the Founding Fathers restricted its benefits exclusively to white males, so sport and sporting narratives have excluded racialised people from their ranks, both in discursive and purely material terms. With its simple binary logic- us and them, win or lose, home and away-, sport is a perfect field to formulate metaphors of a broader sense: for example, to express and strengthen racist concepts that position black bodies as less than human, and therefore as less rational and more connected to nature, praising here the physical and athletic prowess intrinsic to blackness, blaming there their lack of lucidity and tactical intelligence. 

African-American athletes simultaneously embody, as athletes, one of the key ideological constructs of American society and, as African-Americans, the defiance to the racial domination dynamics equally fundamental in its development. As a faithful representation of the society in which it is inscribed, sport as well has experienced segregation, reconciliation and colour-blindness; sport as well has experienced conflict, invisibilisation of marginality and valorisation. In this sense, sport is characterised by a strong ambivalence, simultaneously constituting an effective tool for reinforcing and legitimising domination and a platform for liberation.

In the era of the civil rights movement, there were many African-American athletes who utilised their visibility to express acts and messages of rupture against systemic racism in the US, only to face ostracism and exclusion. Mohammed Alì was sentenced to five years in prison and banned from sporting activities for evading the compulsory draft and opposing to the war in Vietnam; at the awards ceremony for the 200 metres dash  at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed an iconic protest, stepping onto the podium barefoot and raising their fists during the playing of the national anthem, subsequently being ejected from the Olympic Village and effectively ending their careers in athletics.

However, it must be underlined that the symbolic level of the fight against racism can also be a narrative that exceeds the will of individual athletes or is even imposed; sometimes, an apparently progressive message can conceal deeply racist trajectories. For example, Jesse Owens’s victory in the long jump at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was portrayed as a great blow for Nazi racism and a triumph of egalitarian US democracy; that is, of the same democracy that, in portraying itself, overshadowed segregationism, lynchings and the KKK [7]. Rather than Hitler’s outrage, in his interviews[8] Jesse Owens recounted the fact that, among the participants at the Olympic Games, President Roosvelt had received only the white athletes at the White House. Similarly, Mohammed Alì would reply  to the narratives of the war in Vietnam as a crusade for justice and freedom that “I got nothing against the Vietcong; they never called me nigger”. 

In antithesis to the paradigm of the politically engaged African-American athlete, we can find a typology of athlete that could be defined as post-racial: in its eliding and supposedly going beyond the racial question, this narrative category qualifies blackness itself as an obstacle and disadvantage, giving way to a fantasy of racial transcendence[9] that relies on stereotypes and archetypes capable of confirming racist trajectories precisely by inverting ‘normal’ racist expectations. An example of this formula is the archetype of the exceptional negro, with superhuman (or beastly?) athletic and physical prowess, which was often used to portray OJ the athlete, as fast as the wind, as powerful as a hurricane: the same speed that allowed him to run the iconic 64-yard dash against UCLA made him the perfect profile for the famous 1978 Hertz commercial. The image projected by OJ in this short video delineates him as a model of harmless, friendly blackness: smartly dressed, he advertises the same cars that, when associated with African-Americans, are most likely to be juxtaposed with stories like that of George Floyd[10]. He is a black man, but he alienates himself from his blackness: he might as well be a white man.

The Juice chose to be exclusively an athlete, for instance by refusing in 1968 to join an athletes’ campaign for civil rights. OJ’s acting career, for example in the awkwardly comic role he played in The Naked Gun, would reinforce this reassuring and naive aesthetic, which eliminates the racial question by simply ignoring it; in the same vein, Michael Jordan would refuse to endorse Democratic candidate Harvey Gantt, because “Republicans buy sneakers too”[11], and, more generally, would embody and embrace a self-narrative totally stripped of blackness. Jordan’s story is also emblematic because of the dissonance between his colour-blind rhetoric and the geography of his life: his career was, in fact, tied to places such as North Carolina, a bastion of the KKK, where he played in the college leagues, and Chicago, the city that simultaneously had as its idols African-American athletes in all sports and was considered one of the most residentially segregated cities in the North- the city where the wind blows over Ernie Banks’s homeruns[12] and Fred Hampton’s blood[13]. The same discursive and spatial co-presence of successful African-American athletes and conflict along racial lines was also one of the reasons for the conspicuous television investment in the OJ trial coverage.

In fact, in the years immediately preceding the crime, the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers and the following uprising, alongside the emergence of gangs in the media, had conveyed the portrayal of a Los Angeles shattered by violence, an urban jungle of drugs and misery. The OJ Simspon affair, starting with his- not particularly- daring police chase, was perfect for deflecting and channelling this narrative: white audience had a heinous crime to enjoy and comment on, without the (induced) fear of being a possible victim, a debate over racism in the US which provided more certainties and opinions than radical self-criticism, and, as a defendant, a familiar face with a beaming smile, rather than an anonymous thug. It was now impossible to erase the veneer of violence which had coated the narratives of Los Angeles; rather, it could be brought back into the realm of Hollywood and VIPs in limousines, simultaneously valorising and redimensioning it. 

If, therefore, OJ blazed a trail, the African-American athlete who has most closely linked his story to a winning and innocuously apolitical idea of blackness was the aforementioned Michael Jordan. Joshua Wright[14] analysed the impact of the Jordan figure, highlighting both the elements of continuity with the athletes who preceded him- OJ above all- and the discontinuities in terms of features and impact: the author sees Jordan as the paradigm of the black athlete dilemma, namely the painful choice between political exposure and individual career. If the basketball player represented the pinnacle of the so-called Me-Generation, Wright emphasised how the post-Jordan generation of athletes somehow managed to conjugate personal success with social activism. It is equally true that even today speaking on political issues remains, if not a taboo, an act liable of reprisal, depending on the depth of criticism and the involved subjectivities: in addition to the systemic difficulties that a black woman can face in a traditionally white, bourgeois sport such as tennis, Serena Williams has often been the centre of intense controversy for her departure from a conforming model of femininity -composed and polite-, and has on several occasions spoken out strongly against racism and sexism in the tennis world.

While Lebron James received acclaim and esteem for his words in support of BLM, Colin Kaepernick was ousted from the football world after kneeling in protest during the playing of the American anthem in the summer of 2016.  In return for the obstructionism of the sports world and the Republican Party[15], Kaepernick instead experienced important opennesses from the corporate world: the Nike commercial in which he starred demonstrates the complexity of positioning around racial issues and the capitalist ability to integrate and encompass elements of rupture, valorising and, effectively, undermining them. 

[7] Ku Klux Klan.

[8] Fling, S. (2021), “Running Against the World”. Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, The White House Historical Association.

[9] Chau, J. e Walton, P. (2018), “I’m Not Black, I’m O.J.”: Constructions, Productions, and Refractions of Blackness, Canadian Review of American Studies, A48 n.1.

[10] According to all the most recent studies, a black driver is much more likely to be stopped by the police and searched: rather than the work of a few “bad seeds” or an example of excessive zeal, the scale of the phenomenon configures it as the usual end of a criminal profiling on the basis of race. Even leaving aside the United States- where traffic violations are criminal, not administrative- one may recall in Italy the case of Tiémoué Bakayoko, the AC Milan footballer who was stopped while driving his car in June 2022: police officers, suspicious of a black person driving a luxury car, pointed a gun at him before realising their mistake.

[11] In the 2020 documentary The Last Dance, Jordan admitted that he had indeed uttered the sentence, but claimed it was just a joke.

[12] Considered one of the best baseball players of all time, Banks played for the Chicago Cubs between 1953 and 1971: in a 1969 Chicago Sun Times poll, he was crowned the club's best ever athlete.

[13] Chairman of the Black Panther Party for the state of Illinois, he was murdered in his bed in 1969 by FBI agents: his murder was part of COINTELPRO, a secret federal law enforcement programme to dismantle and eliminate, even physically, ‘subversive’ political organisations, especially Marxist and anti-racist ones.

[14] Wright, J. (2016), Be Like Mike?: The Black Athlete’s Dilemma, Spectrum: A journal on Black Men, Vol. 4, n. 2

[15] Even at its highest ranks: a year after Kaepernick’s gesture, whose contract had already been non-renewed by San Francisco 49ers, hundreds of athletes joined the protest against systemic racism, often kneeling during the playing of The Star Spangled Banner. In a speech in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 22th 2017, then-President Trump stated: «Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. HE’S FIRED!”».

Kobe Bryant, Cristiano Ronaldo, Mike Tyson, Tiger Woods: what do these figures have in common, beyond having been the greatest in their sport, certainly for a given period, maybe of all time? They have all been at the center of prosecutions for sexual and gender-based violence. 

It could be argued, and rightly so, that gender-based violence is a discourse about masculinity as a whole, and not a more or less narrow category within it; and, above all, that dwelling the gaze on a specific group risks not only disarticulating a comprehensive and effective discussion on toxic masculinity, obstructing potential transformations and deconstructions, but also risks shifting the focus from a social and cultural dimension to some precise traits (in this case, physicality and the tendency to low schooling) which perpetuate equally toxic and dominant narratives, such as classism or racism. However, it is also true that overall societal trends manifest with different intensity and vigor in specific contexts, and that, while the essence and the trajectories of domination remain the same, other characteristics may instead take on deeply different nuances and developments. Moreover, certain realms are particularly relevant because of their mass diffusion, their assumed social importance and their consequent pedagogical impact: sport - and its narrative - is a full-fledged field of education, replicating, passing on and instilling in subtle and implicit ways some of the fundamental rules of our society.

Masculine camaraderie, the cult of physical strength and determination, the competition that turns into a desire to annihilate, the belief that “if you want something and fight hard against all expectations and doors slammed in your face, sooner or later you will get it,” the existence of space-time sections in which everything is allowed, given the stakes and the blessed rush of adrenaline: these are all values at the foundation of competitive sports practice and constantly renewed and celebrated in it, but they could easily appear in a descriptive analysis of patriarchal masculinity. Holding together both of these blocks of reasoning - that of sporting masculinity as a specific configuration of masculinity and that of sporting masculinity as naked masculinity - may provide a valuable starting point to reflect on the often-unspoken relationship between gender violence and the construction of a model of masculinity through sport.

Behind the divorce between OJ and Nicole Brown was also the former player's recurrent mistreatment and abuse: during the trial, the prosecutor presented a series of recordings of 911 calls made by Brown, the most serious of which dated back to New Year's Eve 1989, in which the woman reported a brutal beating and expressed fear for her life. The defender's response was emblematic: they discredited the prosecutor's evidence by arguing that, out of the 4 million women who annually reported abuse from their partner in the United States, only 1,500 were later killed by him; thus, past abuse could not be considered a valid argument.

On the one hand, it is a perfect example of how one can, by manipulating data and formulating a seemingly valid syllogism (rather, one would have to wonder how many of these victims of femicide were murdered by their abusive partner - in 90 percent of cases), express a terrible and erroneous conclusion by giving it a veneer of common sense; on the other, how little a woman's testimony can matter and how violence against women can be belittled and turned against them. Therefore, it is essential not to think exclusively in terms of numbers and statistics, but rather to consider trajectories and trends in order to be able to produce discourses capable of driving transformations and advances on this issue.

However, it is not simply a matter of talking about it: the point, rather, is how we talk about it. The media portrayal of gender-based violence is sensationalistic, often resorting to well-known clichés and archetypes that place their focus on the individual monstrosity of the killer and the proclaimed or merely alluded guilt of the victim. In order to deny and invisibilize its systemic responsibilities, patriarchal civilization sees rape in the terms of a feral (the beast, the wolf) or non-human (the monster, the ogre) deviation from rational behavior; the same operation, moreover, carried out to legitimize its domination along the lines of race and gender. When these two supposed irrational othernesses - rape and a non-white subjectivity - share a discourse space, patriarchal and racist narratives take on, if possible, an even more disruptive intensity and force. It was not a man who raped, who abused: it was a sick person, a beast, a black person. And what to do, for example, with a black man who “wear[s] the livery that the white man has sewed for him”[16]? Easy, you bring him back to his Blackness, to the “phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety”[17] that Blackness represents in racist and colonial societies: for instance, by artificially darkening his skin in pictures, as happened to OJ on the June 1994 cover of Time Magazine, or by enhancing, through rhetorical devices or photo editing, the features most commonly associated with Blackness. In emphasizing OJ's dark-skinned complexion, the deep weld between racist and patriarchal domination is highlighted; a weld that is reinforced precisely in the production of a discourse capable of selecting which points to illuminate and which to elide, and, therefore, of asserting itself mostly through subtraction.

In American football, the blind side refers to an area on either side of the quarterback, precluded from his view since he is focused on the field in front of him, and therefore particularly exposed to opposing attacks: therefore, an interdicted, invisible portion of space, of phenomena within which it is impossible to be aware. The close relationship between gender violence and sports culture is produced precisely in a blind side, the space in which sporting events, so to speak, break the narrative that wants them to be exclusively inherent in the well-demarcated realm of sport; in the space that opens, or, rather, highlights the connections between the particular and the general, the correlations between patterns of domination and behaviors that, apparently, have nothing to do with it, the gap between ideological narratives and the materiality of a trend. The Blind Side is also the title of a successful 2009 film starring Sandra Bullock, which tells the story of Michael Oher, a black football player who has the role of offensive tackle, the player precisely in charge of controlling the blind side: the film mainly explores his rise from a socio-economic hardship to success in the football world, enabled and supported by his white adoptive mother Leigh Anne Tuhoy, who could be seen as the real protagonist of the film. Fourteen years after the film's release, however, Oher filed a lawsuit against Leigh Anne and her husband Sean, accusing them of never legally adopting him but, rather, of obtaining conservatorship solely to exploit him financially.

After all, a space in which one cannot see is also a space in which one cannot fully understand, in which it is easy to get confused and misrepresent phenomena: the quarterback's peripheral vision doesn’t read figures, rather it glimpses movements, lacking thereby mathematical certainty of a distance or strategy. In the blind side, it is easy to perceive an opponent closer or farther away than he actually is, to be certain of a forward snap that is only hinted at or imagined, or to confuse friends and foes: to read a story of economic exploitation in the groove of white supremacism as an affair of individual redemption, solidarity and love that breaks down racial barriers.

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the blind side, however, is that it is a space to be protected, to be defended at all costs: domination is reproduced not only due to the absence of analysis, but more importantly through a complex interplay of forces and powers that safeguard its existence. One of the lessons addressed to NBA rookies in the courses taught by the federation focuses on how to protect themselves against alleged gold-diggers: women who, in pursuit of money and visibility, buzz around athletes, seducing them and potentially accusing them of rape - exploiters, witches, sirens. One does not have to cross the Atlantic to find similar examples: in 2015, four players at Brighton youth team were charged with rape, prompting the club to put the entire team through a course on consent entitled PIP (Protect Inform Prevent). The provider company described the course as “an exclusive training package designed to help safeguard the reputations and careers of professional athletes and their clubs from sexual assault allegations”[18].

[16] Fanon, F. (1986; or. ed. 1952), Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles L. Markmann, London, Pluto Press.

[17]  Ivi, p. 143.

[18] The Liberton Investigations and Life Center association pages are no longer available: however, the text can be accessed at https://web.archive.org/web/20150408095550/https://libertoninvestigations.com/pip_training.php

The choice of John Cochram - who had previously represented some victims of police brutality during the Rodney King uprising and Black Panther Party political detainee Geronimo Pratt - as the lead attorney in OJ's legal pool, made clear how the defense's line was to make the double-murder charge against OJ a prime example of police racism. On the one hand, this approach rested on the specific accusation of racism and manipulation of evidence against investigator Mark Fuhrman, who had found the infamous bloody gloves at the crime scene: the defense played a series of recordings in court, where the officer used heavily racist language and suggested that, in the face of manifest guilt, evidence somehow pops up. On the other hand, there was also no need for evidence to support that argument: the materiality of the lived experience of black people in the United States was enough. It is in this sense that the widespread support for OJ by the African American community should be framed, as taking a stance on a specific issue on the basis of an overall and deeply biographical social trend: besides, «what is reasonable to a black person may not be reasonable to a white person, especially in matters involving the police»[19]. This support, of course, should not be overstated and should always be understood through the lens of gender and class inequalities: for example, Ellie Bulkin and Becky Thompson pointed[20] out how, during the Simpson trial, the opinion of Black women was sought as women or as Blacks, never as a whole; as if they had to choose which side to support, crushed by the blackmail of complexity flattening.

In short, both the legal defense team and the prosecutor shared an interest - not strictly in the legal sense, but in the broader sense of a society lashing out at a defendant to defend and affirm itself - in condensing and circumscribing the totality of the trial in reducing OJ to naked blackness. As Ralph Wiley well pointed out in a particularly caustic article toward OJ Simpson and the 2002 HBO documentary focusing on his court case[21], the Juice has often been presented as a unifying symbol for all races; but one has to wonder, rather, what reconciliation means and who wanted to be reunited, and in what terms. If the documentary begins with a scene in which the Juice declares that “I'm a black guy, always been a black guy, always been nothing but a black guy,” Wiley defines Simpson as a man who “tried and almost succeeded at being everything but a black guy”[22].

Even after the double murder, the author argued, OJ was treated not just as a black person but, rather, as a wealthy person: he was allowed to get out on bail, to be chased in a car at very low speed with LAPD officers pleading in the background - stop, OJ, please, we love you! - and the chants of his supporters perched on overpasses, to stand trial in Los Angeles rather than in a predominantly white town, and to have a multi-racial jury. On the one hand, the latter factor is, theoretically, a form of protection and safeguard of due process; on the other, it provides a perfect target. In the debate contemporary to the trial, the accusation often emerged that black jurors had opted for acquittal exclusively to defend OJ as black; and not because the object of inquiry of the criminal trial is not so much the truth of the facts as a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. Reflection on the importance of the racial composition of juries thus reverses direction and trajectory: from being a tool for leveling racist bias, providing the fullest and most democratic representation possible of various communities, and reaffirming the profoundly human and social nature of the criminal trial, it returns to perpetrating, in a different guise and with identical force, the very racism it targets. 

Such kind of anticipation of the me-too movement based on color rather than gender, along with the observation of the racism exhibited by white commentators and analysts in their granitic certainty that black jurors had rendered a verdict of non-guilt on the basis of common racial identity are perfectly consistent phenomena; far from being mutually exclusive, they are rather different configurations of the same trajectory. The same trajectory that unites the phenomenon of color-blindness, the flattening of complexity to a single - though broad and pervasive - key, and the most retrograde and shameless forms of racism; the same trajectory typical, moreover, of a socio-economic system that, over a few generations, has declined racial domination in very different forms (from slavery to segregation to the election of a black president) without, however, changing, at the systemic level, either white domination or the economic apparatus simultaneously producing and produced by the racial system.

On one hand, the narrative of the OJ trial as one over/to race overshadowed the fact that, at the core of the trial, there was gendered violence; on the other hand, it interpreted the latter exclusively through the lens of the former, in a mechanism that we might call the interchangeability of axes of domination. This narrative was facilitated by the fact that the double murder simultaneously represented a variation and an adherence to stereotypes about gender violence: it was evidence that domestic violence transcended the class dimension and “happened even in the best families,” but it coincided perfectly with racist narratives of Black people as predators, especially if in the -exclusive- role of victim was a rich, white woman.

Bulkin and Thompson highlighted the central point of the dominant media narrative surrounding the OJ case: every day, viewers were bombed with images, reconstructions and reflections that recalled how a black man killed a woman who embodied the ideal of white womanhood. Lives reduced to victims, stripped of their humanity and exploited as weapons; a femicide deprived of its complexity and turned into a grueling racist campaign; a grand spectacle reinforcing the idea that no matter how rich or famous, a black man is still and only a black man, barbaric, inhuman, ready to hurt our women. The scholars also pointed out how this operation was not explicit, but subtle and insidious, gaining strength and authority precisely from the absence of an overt dimension: it is harder to detect and counter something that is never plainly said, something obvious but always concealable and deniable, and therefore “what white people have been taught is impolite to say in words is instead communicated through pictures” [23].

OJ's celebrity and skin color led to a massive increase in news coverage on the subject: not only is it noteworthy that, following the verdict, almost all publications returned to their pre-OJ levels, but also that the vast majority of articles published fell squarely within the canonical form of male violence reporting - i.e., articles focused on the monstrous action of the individual, which spectacularized the crime or abuse by removing any social or contextual analysis except for providing relevant legal regulations or advice for victims (toll-free numbers, hotline and the like), which ultimately put the onus on the abused woman to put an end to it[24]. Even reflections on legal sanctions for the abuser reveal underlying racist and patriarchal trajectories: in fact, cases involving black and famous men as perpetrators are given special and high visibility, and even the content of the specific debates can conceal the depths of domination. For example, in the OJ case, it was generally agreed that, if the possibility of capital punishment had arisen, jurors would have preferred to render a verdict of not guilty rather than sentence the Juice to death: always Bulkin and Thompson pointed out, on the one hand, how capital punishment in the United States takes the form of a true legal evolution of lynching, being imposed in abundantly higher percentages on racialized people; on the other, how it is very rarely considered in cases of femicides and gender crimes, except, precisely, when a black man kills a white woman. Turn the card over, and under allegations of gender violence the hammer blow of racism surprisingly comes out; turn the card over, and on trial is not a violent man, but a woman as such.

The prosecution's last misstep, bogged down in a trial that was highly complex in terms of its themes and media exposure, was sealed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Darden: while, up to that point, the prosecution had attempted a linear and reasoned argument, clashing as much with both the public and jury’ lack of understanding of “technical” issues (for instance, the evidentiary value of DNA was still little recognized at the mass level) as with its own inability to argue and explain, on June 15th it attempted a knockout blow. The prosecutor brought the gloves found at the murder scene into the courtroom and asked OJ to put them on, and was left speechless as the former player struggled to slip on the now skimpy gloves: a perfect assist for Cochran, who was able to utter the phrase that later became symbolic of the trial - if it doesn't fit, you must acquit. It had not been considered that many months in a storage and the encrustation of blood might have shrunk the gloves; nor could it have been known that, perhaps, OJ had stopped taking his arthritis medication to guard against such an eventuality; above all, that a criminal trial, like the unraveling of a racist and patriarchal society, is a complex, multifaceted affair of a thousand rivulets which diverge in various directions and then somehow come to the same sea. That, if spectacular linearity is preferred to tangled branches of race and gender, any reflection is bound to remain an unfitting glove.

[19] Butler, P. Black Jurors: Right to Acquit?, citato in Chau, J. e Walton, P. (2018).

[20] Bulkin, E. e Thompson, B. (1994), The Spectacle of Race and Gender in the O.J. Simpson Case, Off Our Backs, Vol. 24, n. 9.

[21] Wiley, R. (2002), White Lies: HBO Gets it Half Right, ESPN Page 2

[22] Ibidem

[23] Bulkin, E. e Thompson, B. (1994).

[24] Borum, C., Hornik, R., Huxford, J. e Maxwell, K.A. (2000), Covering Domestic Violence: How the O.J. Simpson Case Shaped Reporting of Domestic Violence in the News Media, J & MC Quarterly, Vol. 77, n. 2.

Alderman, D. H. (1997), TV News Hyper-Coverage and the Representation of Place: Observations on the O. J. Simpson Case, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 79, n. 2.

Borum, C., Hornik, R., Huxford, J. e Maxwell, K.A. (2000), Covering Domestic Violence: How the O.J. Simpson Case Shaped Reporting of Domestic Violence in the News Media, J & MC Quarterly, Vol. 77, n. 2.

Bottini, L. (2017), Breve storia dello sport americano contro Trump, L’Ultimo Uomo.

Bulkin, E. e Thompson, B. (1994), The Spectacle of Race and Gender in the O.J. Simpson Case, Off Our Backs, Vol. 24, n. 9.

Chau, J. e Walton, P. (2018), “I’m Not Black, I’m O.J.”: Constructions, Productions, and Refractions of Blackness, Canadian Review of American Studies, A48 n.1.

Doyle, J. E. S. (2021; ed. or. 2019), Il mostruoso femminile. Il patriarcato e la paura delle donne, traduzione di Laura Fantoni, Roma, Edizioni Tlon.

Fanon, F. (2015; ed. or. 1952), Pelle nera, maschere bianche, traduzione di Silvia Chiletti, Pisa, Edizioni ETS.

Fling, S. (2021), “Running Against the World”. Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, The White House Historical Association.

Lassiter, C. (1996), The OJ Simpson Verdict: A Lesson in Black and White, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, n. 69.

Meler, B. (2017), The Start of Something Big, Big Reads, sportsnet.ca. 

Tracia, M. (2016), I due O. J. Simpson, L’Ultimo Uomo.

Wiley, R. (2002), White Lies: HBO Gets it Half Right, ESPN Page 2.

Wright, J. (2016), Be Like Mike?: The Black Athlete’s Dilemma, Spectrum: A journal on Black Men, Vol. 4, n. 2

Zorthian, J. (2015), How the O.J. Simpson Verdict Changed the Way We All Watch TV, Time.