Why O.J. Simpson is the ultimate American

And using O.J.: Made In American to teach race and ethnicity

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I’m always slightly behind the binging curve, which means I didn’t get around to watching the ESPN documentary, O.J.: Made In America, until last year. My husband and I started watching together and then I finished the five-part series alone in a hotel room in St. Petersburg (the Florida one) at a writing conference.

I don’t know how far into the series we were when I decided I wanted to construct my upcoming race and ethnic relations class around the documentary. Students are always more excited about watching than they are about reading. The O.J. documentary also aligns with their true crime obsessions. A lot of the students we get in our sociology classes are there because our classes are as close as they can get to criminology at our college.

I decided to incorporate the documentary because it serves as such a great entryway to so many of the key dynamics of race and ethnicity in the United States. O.J.’s parents and family end up in San Francisco because of the Great Migration, the historic movement of Black people out of the South and into cities in the North and West. With the Great Migration, segregation in the U.S. goes from being largely regional—the bulk of Black people in the South and Brown people in the Southwest—to being urban—individual cities divided up into racialized zones.

This racial structure of our cities—Black and Brown people in the core and white folks in the suburbs—shapes the racial dynamics of the 20^th century and is still central to our understanding of race. It is why so many people perceive cities as dangerous. They’re dangerous because they are where all the Black and Brown people are. That racial shape of cities like Los Angeles is central to O.J.’s story.

O.J. also provides an entryway to one of the other core dynamic shaping the experiences of Black people in the 20^th century—sports.

There are so many reasons to start a class on race and ethnic relations with O.J., including that, as the title of the documentary suggests, it is a uniquely American story. In so many ways, O.J. is the ultimate American.

O.J. is the ultimate American because Black people are arguably the most American among us. The institution of slavery is at the very heart of American history, the contradiction between freedom and bondage that still lies at the twisted core of our identity. There is no America without slavery. It’s this central truth that the attempts to eradicate critical race theory from curriculum seeks to deny. Not teaching it, though, doesn’t make it any less true.

Black people are also the most American because so many of the things that we think of as quintessentially American are African in origins. Jazz. Rock and roll. Hip hop. Country music. Yep, country music, too, because in its beginnings, there was no difference between rock and country. It was all mixed up together and if you think a banjo is a country music instrument, well, the banjo is African.

O.J. is also the ultimate American because he is a textbook lesson in our elevation of individualism to religious stature. It’s clear in the documentary that O.J. is, in the end, all about O.J. What’s more American than putting yourself first?

In part one of the documentary, we watch O.J.’s meteoric rise, first at University of Southern California and then playing for the Buffalo Bills. O.J.’s senior year at USC was 1968 and in a brilliant back-and-forth, the documentary demonstrates the disconnect between both O.J.’s life and the culture of southern California and what’s going on in the rest of the world. In the rest of the country, 1968 is the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy are assassinated. It’s the year in which Black athletes contemplated boycotting the Olympics. It’s the year when Tommie Smith and John Carlos get sent home for raising their fists on the Olympic medal stand.

At USC, it’s all about O.J.

In an interview, O.J. speaks about the attempts by leaders in the civil rights movement to recruit athletes to their cause. He says he felt like the activists were using the athletes for their own platform. “If I stand on a platform,” O.J. says, “I’m going to be speaking for O.J.” O.J., in other words, is first and foremost, about O.J. Just like every good American should be.

There are clips in the documentary of Dr. King, expressing his support for Tommie Smith and John Carlos. For other Black athletes like Muhammad Ali, who went to jail for refusing to fight in Vietnam. For Jim Brown and Careem Abdul-Jabar and Bill Russell. It’s funny how history and memory work. Today we have a national holiday for Dr. King, but at the time he was seen as deeply un-American. All the civil rights activists were un-American. To protest is un-American. To point to the flaws in our nation is un-American. To put the needs of the collective over your own needs—that might be the most un-American thing of all.

Photo by Raffaele Nicolussi on Unsplash

O.J. points out that those athletes who did stand up for their rights were hurt by it. They didn’t get to star in movies or make millions in commercials. They didn’t hang out with the Kardashians. They didn’t get let into those clubs. Sometimes, they didn’t even get to keep playing their sport.

O.J. understood the way the system worked perfectly. Don’t make a fuss. Always put yourself first. He learned that lesson well.

O.J., like some of the other Black celebrities of that time period, appeared to transcend race, and that is also very American. We are, after all, all the same here. We are melted into on big undifferentiated mass of, let’s be honest, whiteness.

Through his sheer, ruthless individualism, O.J. transcended race. Until he didn’t. Which is also a deeply American story.