CNN Contributor: Until We Deal with the Issues of Race, We Will Always Have O.J. Simpson Moments

HUNT: “All of us have only been able to talk about O.J. in a lot of these breaks? Ashley Allison, can you take us into — I mean, he touched on how this really did divide the country in racial ways — kind of what the meaning of this was from that perspective?”
Allison: “Yeah, I mean, I posted something on social media last night about what was your conversation in your home in 1995 when the verdict came down, and what was it last night when we found out O.J. died? And I — my premise is that it‘s still rooted on race, and the issue is, the reason why that case was so charged — I too got to watch the verdict in eighth grade in our class and I saw it happening, I was happy. I don‘t think I had a concept of, like, who was guilty in who was not. I was a child. I probably shouldn‘t have been watching the case about two people being killed, at the end of the day. But it was so racially charged because of what had happened just before with Rodney King, but also just how black Americans feel about policing. It‘s not like O.J. Simpson was the leader of the Civil Rights Movement of his era, you know, 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 have been killed and the history around how black people have been persecuted during slavery. There was just so many layers. And I guess I would just close with this, is that there was racial tension then, there‘s racial tension now. It might not be the backdrop of the Trump campaign, but until this country is ready to actually have an honest conversation about the racial dynamics from our origin story till today, we will always have moments like O.J. Simpson that manifest and our country will always be divided if we don‘t actually deal with the issue of race.”