An Obsession With OJ Simpson

    OBSESSION
America is obsessed with OJ
Possessed with OJ
Depressed with OJ.

But in the midst of that obsession,
Confession, Depression. and possession,
I cry:
Diallo!
Diallo!
Forty-one times I cry:
Diallo! Amadou Diallo!
The murder of Diallo
Forty-one shots I cry, Diallo!
Amadou Dillo!….

For the 40 righteous men, Black men,
For those 40 more on death-row, Black men,
Waiting to die
For somebody else's wrong
Waiting to die,
For nobody's wrong
For them I cry:
Diallo, Amadu Diallo!

Again another Black man is killed
By another white cop in the line of duty
A wallet becomes a gun
Bang, bang, bang…
A gun/a wallet/a gun
It's all the same in a Black man's hand
He had no identity that bullets will respect
That police will respect
That America will respect.

While they obsess that OJ may have gotten away
Another Black man is killed on the streets 
Of America everyday.

So I am obsessed with  brother Amadou Diallo.

Bang, Bang, Bang!
And no one is to blame
Because a wallet or a gun
For this black man
Is all the same.

Amadou Diallo!
Who will mourn you? Your mother
will mourn you;
We will mourn and moan because of you!
Amadou 
what I have to do
To save my brothers,
Brother Amadou Diallo.
F.Arthur Jones

On any talk show that the issue of the O.J. Simpson Trial is raised, the host, if white, will always asked the guest if he/she thinks that O.J. is innocent. There seems to be an abiding need for all to confirm their belief that OJ actually committed the crime but was financially able to get off. 

Even, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, two of O.J. Simpson's attorneys, in a discussion of their new book on DNA evidence, are asked repeatedly if they think OJ committed the crime. No attorney would sell his/her successfully defended client down the river, so to speak. But the obsession with Simpson's white America declared guilt forces them to pursue this line of question to see if others are similarly opinionated.

If seems strange to me that in the light of the Ramparts Division (LAPD) scandal, where their own police have said that they have planted evidence, shot individuals, physically abused people, etc., there is not a correlation between or a connectivity to this long standing corruption of the LADP and the O.J. Simpson trial. Even in the face of Mark Ferhman, the infamous perjurer and racist police on the OJ Simpson case, having  said that they (the police) plant evidence and that they are god on the streets and can do anything they want to there is still no connectivity of this corrupt police department and that trial. Even in the face of Dr. Lee's statement, in the OJ trial, that there is something wrong with the evidence picture,  white American will not connect the lines. This is because they are obsessed with OJ guilt so that no other picture can be seen. It would never enter their minds that maybe OJ was right.

To them, it is simply beyond their ability to accept the possibility that  OJ may not have committed the crime and was smart even, rich enough to get away from whatever fix the Mark Ferhman's of the police world placed on him, using their own justice system. A system of justice that Vincent Schiraldi was brave enough to see and state the fact, namely that it is not at all colorblind, but that it is bias against blacks and other minorities. 

Every Black person of sound mind in this country knows that the American Justice system, in which I was an administrator for six years, has been used to frame, imprison, distort the minds and behaviors of  young Black males, and that it is a system that has been white America's killing machine of Blacks and other nonwhite people

The case of Amadou Diallo is not new. It is Rodney King of the East. It is a jury, supposedly of these officers' peers looking at the evidence objectively and coming to the historical conclusions that white juries have come to in the killing of Black Americans.

This NY jury, like the Simi Valley jury of California, saw the evidence and said what we (the people who can count 41 times) see clearly is not clear at all. But instead, what we see is an illusion: the wallet did actually look like a gun; it did actually take 41 shots to bring this giant of a man down; the four policemen did, in fact, think that they were in danger of their lives. And since we were not on the scene at that time, we should not second guess the policemen in hot pursuit. And certainly, now that the verdict is in, we should not second guess the jury--there were four Black people on that jury, therefore, we know that this is not a racial matter.

This ninth grade reason is the type of American reasoning we are too familiar with. It is weak and it is optional, depending on the situation. America has always loved situational ethics and reasoning. Such option allows one to be correct under any situation.

In the case of O.J. Simpson, this type of ninth grade reasoning is an option not used. There were whites on OJ's jury--but the decision was somehow a triumph of the Black jurors; the jury's decision was final, but it was second guessed and repudiated--Ron Brown's father sued in Civil Court and determine to take OJ to poverty for a crime he was not convicted of. And America has obsessively persisted in declaring and self-affirming that O.J. Simpson is guilty, he committed the crime, he got away, etc. See the Blindness of Success 

Robert Ornstein once stated, in his Psychology of Consciousness, that assumptions limit the scope of one's investigation. That is what  happened to America with the O.J. Simpson Trial. But the blindness of their assumptions has always existed concerning their police departments'  brutalizing of African Americans and other nonwhites. We have not only been brutalized, we have been framed and systematically killed by a corrupt and unjust system of justice that, at its best, works moderately well for whites, and, at its normal, works for the harm and death of African Americans. 

Gibbs applauds Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project for their DNA works that are freeing Blacks and all innocent people falsely accused and convicted. However, as they stated and we reiterate, the same compensation given to the released white sailor who was falsely convicted and released as a result of their work should also be given to the black man falsely convicted and released--both were wrongly convicted and held; both should be given the same amount of compensation. Yet the State of California, in a private bill, has given the white falsely convicted man almost a million dollar, and the Black Man has been given the standard $10,000. This system of unfairness must STOP.

Gibbs applauds the Governor of Illinois for putting all death sentence executions of hold until it can be determined that these people have been convicted fairly and are guilty of the crimes they have been convicted of. 

Doing the right thing in America should not take the political strength that it does. But when a system is as corrupted and unjust as the American system of Justice has been toward African Americans, it takes tremendous psychological soundness and political strength to say something stinks, not in Denmark, but here. For while whites obsess over whether O.J. Simpson is guilty and used their system to declare his innocence, Black Americans are not so much obsessed as we are oppressed by a system that sees a wallet as a gun in the hand of a Black person but a wallet as a wallet in the hands of a white person.