“People Vs. OJ” Still Relevant to Justice System Vs. Minorities

When the series “The People Vs. OJ Simpson” started, it took several weeks for me to even begin watching it. I just couldn’t find a way to get interested in an OJ Simpson trial that I thought I already knew a lot about and was already the most overly publicized trial in my lifetime. All in all, it seemed like a poor successor to the “Justified” time slot that series had occupied for the last six late Winter/early Spring periods.

And then I actually saw it. “The People Vs. OJ” wildly surpassed my ho-hum expectations to become the best series so far this year. It’s also a dramatic departure for Ryan Murphy who likes his media circuses a lot more campy (Scream Queens, Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, Glee) and more squarely confined to a genre that he doesn’t so much reinvent as heighten into absurd (and rarely satisfying) spectacles. This is his most adult and satisfying work to date, and one of the few that could squarely be called a “drama.”

However, this isn’t so much a review of the series as it is an acknowledgment of pop culture’s unique ability to flesh-out and explore hot-button political issues. And hopefully get you to see the people behind the political positions. I can now see why “The People Vs. OJ” was thought timely in a period where police vs. minorities are still “relevant” or never really went away.

“OJ” shows how Johnny Cochran used race to motivate a majority-black jury into thinking a guilty man was innocent less as a matter of fact but as a symbol of resistance to police brutality. And the more clinical but tone-deaf prosecution was particularly slow to pick up on the subtext beneath the case with Marcia Clark handing Cochran his greatest gift in the testimony of notorious LAPD detective Mark Furhman. By putting a known-racist LAPD detective on the witness stand—despite the objections of her black co-council Christopher Darden—it allowed the elephant in the room to become a lion, and Cochran could point to a breathing example of the police corruption he’d been talking about in cases even before O.J.

At one point, Cochran’s wife even says “OJ is an imperfect vehicle for a necessary message.” And the series shows that very real police oppression and brutality has created a reluctance in some African-Americans to believe any black man is guilty (OJ, the ATL child killer, the Grim Sleeper, Cosby) or that even ones that definitiely are have been demonized (Chris Brown) or railroaded (Michael Vick). The existential crisis between police and the minority communities they patrol has created the perception that black people will never get a fair trial in America, and “People Vs. OJ” shows that’s probably true, in many cases for worse (thousands if not millions of black men incarcerated for crimes based on shaky eye-witness evidence, including Troy Davis who Georgia executed) and in at least one very famous case, for better.