OJ and the racial divide and a troubled mind

OJ world finally finished after we clocked in on the 5th and final episode of the excellent ESPN doc OJ: Made in America. Overall sense: it was horrible and frightening how the trial and its outcome split the nation along a racial divide or, maybe more accurately, made the divide apparent to all. The case was prescient - at the time the verdict was clearly seen as a payback for the LAPD beating of Rodney King; the black community in LA saw it as a case against the LAPD in general, the white community could not comprehend how a jury could let a man so obviously guilty based on the facts of the case and the evidence, his history, his motive, his inconsistent story, his lack of an alibi, go free - provoking righteous anger, especially among white progressive women. And today we see that both were right: police brutality against blacks is even more evident today thanks to social media, and violence against women is also more evident. We also sense, from the documentary more than from the Fx docudrama, that OJ was a peculiar and deeply troubled man: incredibly talented, good-looking, charming - who wouldn't want to be his friend? - that that he had a mysterious dark side: clearly beat Nicole on many occasions, flew into rages, at lives lived the thug life and at times the country-club life of the elite. As he himself said he was neither black nor white - or, we might say, he was both - and he was both a hero to the black community and a betrayer. I suspect that to this day he literally does not know if he killed Nicole and Ron Goodman; his mind is so troubled that I think he can just erase parts of his memory. The ESPN is particularly sorrowful as we see OJ in prison at the start and the end, an old man, a broken man, and we think what could have been.