O.J. innocent or guilty and what's your race & gender?

In My Humble Opinion
41

FTR, I think you backed down way too quickly on that one. Just because your view is not the mainstream one doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to it. I can name a hundred other well educated, informed people who would back you up.

The problem is, at least in my (very white) experience, the idea of white privilege is really hard to for a white person to grasp, particularly if you feel you’ve had to work for what you have or if you’ve ever fallen on hard times. There is an inherent need in all of us to believe we deserve what we have and that we are good people. The concept of white privilege on its surface appears to imply, ‘‘If you are white, you do not deserve what you have and you are not a good person. You are a racist who built success off the backs of the downtrodden.’’

But I don’t think that’s really what white privilege is about. It’s more about just recognizing that everything we do and think is informed by a history and culture that discounts the minority experience. This was obviously at its most vicious during slavery and the violent lynchings in the early 20th century, but we still live in a society that just sort of ignores and belittles and excuses minority reality. It happens even in places you think would be most open to it – domestic violence movements, LGBT support groups, etc. It even happens within the black civil rights movement itself, for we have managed to perpetuate some illusion that every black person in the 50s thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was the shit and believed desegregation was the only path to true equality. The reality is more that Martin Luther King, Jr. got to be the cuddly mainstream face of black civil unrest because white people liked him.

And while I’m always up for gathering evidence to support beliefs, your quick retraction of your lived experience to me just points to the way minority voices are so systematically marginalized that you had no problem marginalizing and invalidating your own experience.

We all want justice. I don’t think any reasonable person would say, ‘‘in an ideal world we would celebrate black people getting away with murder.’’ But when we fail to ask how we became a society where that can actually happen and treat the symptom as the root of the problem itself, that’s white privilege right there.

Yeah, but you totally increase our coolness factor by like 500%, so it evens out.

[QUOTE=panache]
The choices should be:

I am sane, and I think he’s guilty.
I am insane, and I think he’s innocent.
[/QUOTE]

This. Dude’s totally guilty.

42

If the jury found him to not guilty, he is not guilty.
:slight_smile:

43

Prosecution: This is the glove Mr. Simpson wore during the murders. We will now have him put the gloves on to show how well they fit and support the contention that they are his.

Simpson tries and fails to puts on gloves

Prosecution: :smack: Um, did we mention that the gloves may have shrunk? We said that up front, right?

Jury: Actually you didn’t. You’re something less than credible if you bring it up now.

44

Dammit. I only fessed up because I thought the statute of limitations was up.

45

Like I said dumb ass jury thats obviously never seen or tried to use leather gloves before. And gosh, as a juror it would never occur to me the accused might actually ham it up pretending the gloves didnt fit.

The prosecution being shown to be wrong is one thing. Flubbing something that should have gone smoothly is another.

Is there something else you got? Not being snarky here. I am seriously interested.

46

The totally bizarre thing: OJ was found not guilty in a criminal trial, but “responsible” in a civil trial.
Ron Goldman and Nicolle Simpson are still dead.
And Alan Dershowitz thinks that makes perfect sense.

47

deleted.

48

Well, if there’s one thing this poll demonstrates conclusively, it’s this: almost everyone is white.

49

Or the non-white non-black people just aren’t responding. Seeing how welcome we feel and all.

This is mostly a joke.

50

I know one. She and I used to work together. She took a fair amount of vacation time to drive down to L.A. to protest for Mr. Simpson. She was an exception though. The few other black people who expressed an opinion to me thought he was guilty.

So yeah, he is guilty of the crime but the prosecution fucked the dog and arguably didn’t prove their case. They were plain out-lawyered, naive and incompetent.

Your multi-year obsession with this shit is, frankly, bizarre, AnnieX. The rest of the Universe has moved on.

51

I said that I believed Simpson is guilty of the murders. I was giving an example of why others might reasonably think otherwise.’

And, as I said, I remember at the time thinking that the prosecution had not met its burden of proof. I’m not going to go into why, as it was sixteen years ago and I have had other things on the mind since then.

52

He was guilty as hell, but the cops tampered with evidence, probably in an attempt to turn a strong case into an open-and-shut case.

Black people already distrust the police- Fuhrmann gave them even MORE reason to do so.

I’m a conservative white male, but if I’d been on the jury, I probably would have HAD to vote “not guilty,” because you can’t convict based on utterly tainted evidence.

53

Oh, hajario, I know. I don’t mean to imply that a single black person doesn’t believe he is innocent. I’m sure there are others like the dingbat woman you know.

54

It seems like every time there is a “What celebrity do you most revile” thread Simpson is named and the factoid about OJ being used as "good " name in that episode of Seinfeld is brought up, seemingly, every time that show is brought up here. It’s odd. It is like this board is stuck on him. Outside of the SDMB I barely ever hear his name mentioned; that moment would be very very low on my and my friend’s list of memorable Seinfeld moments. I might just especially notice it when it happens, because it is so odd to me. Maybe there are one or two OJ obsessed people who make me notice it. Alternatively, OJ might be a common topic of conversation all of the time everywhere,and I just happen to walk in when that part of the talk is winding down. To me it really is weird. Kind of like stepping into a single issue time machine.

55

True story: So one time I was at this bar, and I was listening to some white guy rave about how much he loved OJ. I said something to the effect of, “In spite of all that murder?” He then went into some story about how he thinks OJ was framed by the coke mob, or whatever else theory he had. His wild theories aren’t important. The point is I was taken aback to hear someone –anyone– say out loud that he thought OJ was innocent, let alone a white male.

Most people I know, and I know veritable shitloads of black people, think he’s guilty. While the reaction to the verdict was very clearly racially divided, in my experiences, many black people seem to view it as a strange “victory” (of sorts, for reasons mentioned here earlier), even though they think he did it. Also, I found during the time of the trial, black people were more receptive to the possibility of his innocence, rather than being eager to rush to judgment. Every white person I know had made up their mind long before the trial even started. Most of the black people I know were like, “Well, wait a minute, let’s hear him out,” before ultimately going, “No, he’s guilty as shit.” Still, I’ll point out that among the sprinkling of people I’ve spoken to who think OJ is innocent, most are black.

Anyway, so this white guy was telling me how much he loved OJ and had been a fan since whenever, and he’s certain OJ didn’t do it. It was hard to tell if he really thought that, or if he was doing that really annoying thing white guys do: trying to ingratiate himself to a [whatever non-white race here] girl by saying things he thinks she’s wants to hear.

“Oh man, I love Snoop dogg.”
“I don’t.”
“Jay Z?”

Etc…

56

Yes, I was in large part jokingly intending the same point as well, as I as well fall into the gap.

(Though it is also interesting how very few black people we apparently have here.)

57

The OP has over 20k posts here and she’s responsible for most of them, including that retarded Seinfeld factoid. She’s the same way about Woody Allen and Soon-Yi.

58

Yes there are plenty others like her. I worked with an office that argued about it all the time not long after the trial. It was about half and half then (all black but me the beloved token white girl), but I haven’t worked there in a long time so I don’t know if opinion has changed. At the time I was so far out of the celebrity loop I didn’t really follow the story so I don’t even know how to answer.

He does seem rather a stupid, dangerous person though so it wouldn’t surprise me.

I didn’t vote in the poll because I just have no idea if the man is guilty or not.

59

It’s not the board, it’s one person. **Annie **was also the poster who mentioned the Seinfeld joke.

60

White male. Confident he’s guilty. I’ve known people who claimed to think he was innocent- all of them were black.