A CNN contributor sparked outrage on Thursday after saying that OJ Simpson “represented something for the black community … particularly because there were two white people who had been killed.”
Ashley Allison made the comment during the network’s coverage of the death of the 76-year-old Simpson, the disgraced NFL legend who was acquitted in 1995 of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman.
Allison — a former Obama administration official who also worked on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign as well as his transition team — was weighing in on the racial tensions that pervaded the country during the Simpson trial and its aftermath.
She said the Simpson case brought to the fore “just how black Americans feel about policing.”
“He wasn’t a social justice leader, but he represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been killed,” Allison said.
“And the history around how black people have been persecuted during slavery.”
Allison’s commentary sparked a backlash, with one X user remarking: “Absolutely unhinged racism.”
“They’re continuing to say the quiet part out loud,” another X commenter wrote.
An X user wrote that if they said the same thing about white people on Fox News, “I’d be cancelled so fast.”
The Post has sought comment from CNN and Allison.
Marc Lamont Hill, a prominent media personality and CUNY professor, also made waves when he wrote on his X account that while Simpson was “an abusive liar” and a “monster” who “killed two people in cold blood,” his acquittal “was the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system.”
The X post also prompted pushback, with one commenter writing: “Saying he left the black community and admitting he is a m*rderer but believing he still deserves black criminal immunity is wild.”
Hill defended his claim that the acquittal was just, noting that Mark Fuhrman, the detective from the Los Angeles Police Department who worked the case, “was caught lying” about having referred to black people with racist epithets.
Hill also said that Fuhrman pleaded the fifth when asked whether he planted evidence in the Simpson case.
“That raises legal doubt,” according to Hill. “That’s why the verdict was proper.”
“Regardless of race, the system has to be fair.”
Hill wrote that LA prosecutors “failed to meet [their] burden” and that “a racist police officer created reasonable doubt because of his lies and documented racism.”
“This is how the system is supposed to work,” Hill wrote. “There’s no exception for people you don’t like.”
During the Simpson trial, Fuhrman testified under oath that he never referred to black people as N-words.
But Simpson’s lawyers later introduced into evidence tapes in which Fuhrman is heard using the epithet.