Racial issues persist

Apr. 12—When O.J. went on trial, it seemed pretty straightforward to me. Looked like a case of a guy who killed his wife and another guy, then tried to run away.

White, black, whatever. Didn't make much difference. Looked simple enough to me.

That was a generation ago; in the generation since, for better or for worse, our society has become far more conscious of race, particularly when it comes to interactions with the police. Martin Luther King promoted the idea of a society in which skin color was irrelevant, but instead we've gone the other way. Seems to me O.J. was the beginning of that, at least in terms of mainstream America's recognition of it.

Yes, I'm speaking from my particular perspective, a white guy raised in a predominantly white town in northeast Kansas in the 1970s and 80s. I was in my 20s, a relatively inexperienced reporter, not far out of college.

O.J., too, was not so much black as he was a celebrity, at least in my eyes. He was the Juice, the guy who ran through airports, the guy in the movies.

The cops and courts — why would they want to persecute the Juice? If anything, they'd give him the benefit of the doubt, right? He was a celebrity in Celebrity City. In any event, the court system is fair, and they'll get to the bottom of it. That's what I figured.

I concluded, as the trial went on, that he was guilty. The jury deciding otherwise struck me as wrongheaded; just because a cop was pretty obviously a racist jerk didn't actually change the substance of the case. I mean, even if the cop planted the glove, that didn't mean OJ didn't kill those people. The blood evidence was awfully strong, and anyway why did he run away?

But I also was able to grasp that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is a high wall to climb, and so I accepted the verdict. (It also struck me as about right that he lost in civil court, where the standard is "the preponderance of the evidence.")

A generation later, after Rodney King and 41 shots and George Floyd, it's hard to see things the way they looked at that time. I'm not saying I've concluded cops are racists; I'm saying that the issues of race and the criminal justice system are far more complicated than they seemed to me in 1995. Yes, part of that is me: I'm now a grandpa, more skeptical, more nuanced, I hope.

But I think it's also generally true. The world before the O.J. trial was significantly different than the one O.J. just departed.

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