Simpson’s case doesn’t resonate with black millennials

Justin Zimmerman was a 7-year-old black boy in Moreno Valley, Calif., when O.J. Simpson was on trial for murder.

He wasn’t old enough to understand the “trial of the century,” but his parents and the older black people in his community made their position clear: They were cheering for Simpson and were convinced the former NFL star was an innocent dupe in a racial conspiracy. For them, Simpson was a symbol of racial tension and uneven justice.

But Zimmerman, now 30 and living in Washington, D.C., grew up amid the hashtags that have come to symbolize the killings of unarmed black men by police. On his Facebook page on Thursday — after Simpson was granted parole from armed robbery and assault convictions — Zimmerman posted: “Let 1994 go guys.”

“The most relevant thing that came out of O.J. since the trial was the Kardashians for millennials,” said Zimmerman, referring to Simpson’s close friendship with the reality-TV clan that was highlighted in a recent television series about the case. Family patriarch Robert Kardashian, a lawyer, was on Simpson’s defense team during the murder trial.

“We don’t have an O.J.,” Zimmerman said. “For me, that was Trayvon Martin. He was me. That resonates more to me. … It wasn’t like [Simpson] was at the forefront of any movement.”

While millions watched Simpson’s parole hearing last week, audiences were hardly as emotionally invested as they were a generation ago watching his murder trial. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal in the deaths of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman bitterly polarized Americans around race.

But interest has waned, attitudes have changed and black Americans are wrestling with more familiar injustices. Today, Simpson’s racial symbolism is largely seen as a relic.

“We just have bigger concerns that are much more directly impacting our specific lives,” said University of Pennsylvania sociologist Camille Z. Charles. “We now have symbols that reflect what actually happens to most black people. Most black people don’t get fancy lawyers that get them off. They don’t have jurors that will be sympathetic because of celebrity. The tide has shifted.”

Simpson’s hearing on Thursday also didn’t resonate with Shane Walk, 23, of Albuquerque, a white man who was an infant when the verdict came down.

“I didn’t live through the trial, so he doesn’t represent to me, at least, to be a racial, polarizing figure as he did with previous generations,” said Walk, adding that he felt the hearing was just another passing fad for the media and that people his age should focus on the current divisions in our country.

On Oct. 3, 1995, an estimated 150 million people — more than half the country at the time — tuned in to hear the jury’s verdict in Simpson’s trial for the Brown-Goldman murders. The strategy for Simpson’s defense team — which included legendary black litigator Johnnie Cochran — was to frame the case around race. They argued that Simpson had been framed by a corrupt and racist Los Angeles Police Department.

Simpson spent much of his life distancing himself from the black community. He lived in the wealthy enclave of Brentwood in Los Angeles and traded his black college sweetheart for a white woman. And he once said, “I’m not black. I’m O.J.”

When Simpson was convicted in Nevada for a hotel-room heist in 2008 and sentenced to up to 33 years in prison, blacks and whites perceived the harsh sentence as a proxy justice for his earlier acquittal.