Before we get too deep into the year 2006, allow me to talk about an anniversary that occurred in 2005.
 
No, it’s not the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks, our civil rights heroine, refusing to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Ala. in 1955. I’m talking about that other anniversary -- the 10th anniversary of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial.

For those still obsessing about it, I have just three words of advice.
 
Get over it.

 
You know who you are. Ten years later and some folks just can’t let it go. And I don’t care what the race of the folks who can’t let it go is. You just need to let it go.
 
For the most part, they seem to be white. I even get some among the students in my writing class at Johns Hopkins University. Earlier this semester, one referred to the injustice of the O.J. verdict in a paper.
 
“You need to let that O.J. thing go,” I advised her.
 
Then, as the semester neared its end, there it was in another paper: a second reference to O.J. the murderer. I had the student read it out loud in class. Then I looked her straight in the eye when she was done.
 
“Woman, I thought I told you to let that O.J. thing go,” I admonished her.
 
Some folks just can’t let it go. They either can’t let the verdict go, or they can’t let go of the celebration some black folks had after the verdict. But that’s not a valid reason. Some black folks had a problem with that celebration, when we saw other black folks turn a tragic event into an “Ali-defeats-Foreman” moment for all of black America.
 
The O.J. verdict was the “Ali-defeats-Foreman” moment for black America’s hip-hop generation. That’s a shame. Those of us who were around when Ali dropped Foreman for the count that night in Zaire know there is no comparison between the two.
 
I remember standing outside what was then the Capital Center in suburban Washington, D. C. after the fight. I had my Ali sign thrust proudly in the air. A black man I didn’t know from Adam came dashing out of the arena, grabbed me in a bear hug, spun me around 360 degrees, put me down and then continued on his joyful sprint.
 
Yeah, it was that kind of night, given to us by a genuine black hero.
 
O.J., on the other hand, was accused of killing two people. Even if he was innocent, it’s not as if O.J. had been “down with the brothers” over the years. And he sure as heck wasn’t down with the sisters.
 
So how is that on the day the verdict in the O.J. criminal case was announced, I found myself in a barbershop with a bunch of black men in their 20s who reacted the same way I and probably millions of other black folks reacted when Ali knocked out George Foreman in 1974?
 
I guess some people will do anything to get their own “Ali-defeats-Foreman” moment.
 
But that moment is no excuse for some white folks not letting the O.J. criminal case verdict go. It’s not as if O.J. were the first murderer, ever, in the history of the country to be found not guilty.
 
Snoop Dogg was charged with murder once. He was acquitted. You think some of the folks who can’t let this O.J. thing go could spread some of that hateration around to Snoop Dogg?
 
What about Robert Blake, acquitted of killing his wife? Why aren’t these O.J. obsessors angry about that?
 
Fifty-one years after Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi, people involved in his murder are still walking around free as jaybirds. They’ve been neither tried nor convicted. They haven’t even been taken to civil court, where the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman figure they found some measure of justice.
 
Nope, in the cases of Snoop, Blake and Till the O.J. obsessors can’t seem to find their voices. That inability leaves them open to all sorts of charges.
 
Is it because, in the O.J. case, the accused murderer was black and his victims white? Snoop’s case was a black-on-black crime; the rapper drove the car and one of his buddies in the Long Beach Insane Crips popped a cap in an Ethiopian immigrant named Philip Woldemarian. Blake’s case involved a white-on-white crime.
 
The bottom line is that all the victims are equally dead. If the O.J. obsessors can’t find their voices about them, then they need to shut up and let it go.