CNN Contributor Ashley Allison Blasted for Saying OJ Simpson ‘Represented Something’ for Black Community

A CNN contributor sparked outrage Thursday by 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.”

{snip}

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.”

{snip}