So yesterday, O.J. Simpson died at the age of 76. And the media didn't quite know what to do with that.

They didn't know what to do with that because, of course, O.J. Simpson was a murderer. And everyone

knows that he was a murderer, but he spent the last half of his life being treated by some in the media as though he was instead a sort of controversial figure.

A headline from the Washington Post sort of sums

this up, how will O.J. Simpson be remembered? The answer for everyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson

murder trial is he will be remembered as a person who very obviously murdered his ex-wife and a person

named Ron Goldman, and then who proceeded to be alleviated of the criminal responsibility

for that double murder by a jury of people who are politically motivated to the celebration

of a wide swath of the American population. He'll be remembered as a person who really widened

the gap between the races in the United States in a dramatic way and in a way that in some ways

has never truly closed.

It seemed like between O.J. Simpson and the election of Barack Obama, America was becoming more

racially reconciliatory. And then Barack Obama opened those gaps wide again in 2010, 2011,

2012. But the O.J. Simpson trial was the moment when Americans realized that the attempts of the

1960s and the 1970s to move beyond America's terrible history of racism, that that had some

pretty impactful consequences and that there were two sides to the racial conflict in the

United States. Because up until the civil rights movement, there really was only one side.

That side was American white supremacists treating black people as chattel, and then American

white supremacists treating black people as trash. And then after the civil rights movement,

the idea was, okay, we're going to put all of that behind us. We're now going to move forward

in a country that tries to actually meet the guarantees of the Declaration of Independence that

all men are created equal. And then in the OJ. Simpson trial, it became very clear to a lot of

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