E01 OJ was saying, "I want to be judged not by the color of my skin. I want to be judged by the content of my character, and most of all, the caliber of my competence. I think I am the greatest football player that this country has ever seen, that's all I want to be judged by. Don't tell me I've gotta to do this because I'm black.
He was enormously self-conscious of who he was and who he needed to be to get over. That there was this character, OJ, which he was creating.
OJ's quest was to erase race as a defining factor in his life, and that was the basis upon which white society not only accepted him, but embraced him. Now there are problems with that because what enabled OJ to be OJ and not be black was that so many negroes and black people stood up, made the sacrifice, paid the price. They are the ones that set the table for OJ and what he was saying was "OK, we may not have arrived, but I've arrived, and as far as I am concerned, everybody else can get here the same way I did and when they get here, they can do what I do." He was so privileged, he was so accepted, he was so embraced that he was immune from the reality that you could find in the mirror every morning that he was a black man.
E05 It may have been payment. But it wasn't payback for anything that happened recently. It was payback for what's happened over the last 400 years. It was payback for how black people are treated in America. I believed that that was on the minds of every black person in America.
People were on fire, excited about finally, the criminal justice system worked in favor of an African-American man. But everything is not about race. Everything is not about how we were treated historically in this country. I can see it as an example of African-Americans being free or we beating the criminal justice system, not for Africa-Americans. It was a victory for a rich guy named OJ Simpson.
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