I saw what was billed as a thoughtful response to the piece in last week’s NYT piece on whether blacks can be friends with white people. The author of that piece speaks longingly of the midwestern college town where he grew up in the 1980s and 1990s as a place and time where race wasn’t important.

And the author of the ‘thoughtful response’ picks up on this, that in many ways it was a different time, more hopeful, etc.

The responses, of course, are telling. The most telling to me?

…and what destroyed the peace and progress of the late 80’s and early 90’s?
—> O. J.

Which I realized is probably how white conservatives see it. For white people, OJ’s guilt was obvious, because cops don’t plant evidence, and cops aren’t racist. Below that? OJ went from Magical Negro to Angry Black Man, with a side of sullying white purity - this subtext most won’t acknowledge, but it’s there. And black people were saying they thought he was innocent, that maybe the LAPD set him up.

And they had their reasons for thinking that way. It was just a couple years before that that Rodney King was beaten mercilessly by LAPD officers, on film. White America had a chance then to prove that “the peace and progress of the late 80’s” was real, but Rodney King was turned into a thug in the popular white imagination, and the cops got off scot free.

So, no. It wasn’t black people believing OJ was innocent that “destroyed the peace and progress of the late 80’s”. It was white people believing the LAPD’s innocence in direct contradiction of what you could see with your own eyes.