Is Oscar Pistorius the new OJ Simpson?
OPINION - It was inevitable that parallels would be drawn between the ongoing Oscar Pistorius drama and the O.J. Simpson trial, which hogged headlines the world over in the mid-1990s...
While Pistorius killed a fellow Caucasian, Simpson was accused of the premeditated murder of an ex-spouse who happened to belong to a dominant racial group that had a history of enslaving and oppressing his own racial group.
When Simpson was arrested, a lot of black people in the States and elsewhere chose to believe that he was a blameless “brother”; and they openly jubilated when he was freed, thereby incurring the wrath of several mostly white commentators who were more focused on Brown’s terrible fate.
I was a London-based journalist at the time; and I remember interviewing several black and white Britons about the Simpson case; and the impression I gained from most of the latter was they were especially outraged because they regarded Brown as one of their own and didn’t approve of interracial unions.
I even sensed this simmering racism-driven hostility in some white media colleagues who had, until then, struck me as dedicated liberals.
Meanwhile, the majority of blacks I spoke to said that they had always been unhappy about Simpson’s decision to marry “out”; and I’m sorry to say this, but many of those who wished that Simpson had married a “Sister” came across as being less sympathetic towards Brown than they should have been.
In those days, the tensions between whites and blacks were gradually fading but still palpable in the United Kingdom; and there were, within our community, constant embittered complaints about professional or famous black males who married white females, allegedly to enhance their status.
It was often said back then that they should have kept their assets “in the family,” instead of lavishing the fruits of their success on “outsiders.”
Such toxic racist carping is, thankfully, completely lacking in Pistorius’s case.
If he had made a habit of dating black women and had wound up killing one of them, it is entirely possible that public opinion would have been dangerously polarized along racial lines in a country that is still deeply scarred by decades of Apartheid …a country where even though blacks outnumber whites and now run the show politically, they continue to trail behind whites economically.
Pistorius, however, made conventional romantic choices and we’ll never know what might have been if the poor girl who now lies in a grave in Port Elizabeth had not possessed the same skin tone as the guy who put her there.
The bottom line is that this time around, neither blacks nor whites are emotionally entangled in rancorous, distracting, morally unjustifiable preoccupations with the ethnic origins of the victim and perpetrator.
This time around, it’s just as sad but much less complicated.
Donu Kogbara is a writer, broadcaster and communications consultant who was born in Nigeria and raised in the United Kingdom. She regularly shuttles between Europe, Africa and America.
