Richards and the Juice: a week where being anti-Semitic is worse than being anti-black

I keep wondering if Michael Richards would have gotten as bad a rap in New Zealand for his racist comments last week, or would we have moved on? He seems to avoided the press here, but strangely, Mel Gibson did not for his anti-Semitic tirade. Given how race is a contentious issue in the US—for instance, most Americans still have not seen the old BBC documentary about O. J. Simpson and the Nicole Brown–Ron Goldman murder (likely conclusion: O. J. didn’t do it)—I would have expected the use of the n word to have made the American-driven news more substantially.
   The fact that it hasn’t outside the US suggests that being an anti-Semite is more serious than being anti-black.
   So are blacks disadvantaged more Stateside? I mentioned O. J. purposely above. His new book, If I Did It, as many Americans know, was pulled by Rupert Murdoch during the week. The belief was that he should not be allowed to profit from his estranged wife’s and her friend’s murders, even if he was innocent in the criminal trial.
   However, most whites—not just American whites—believe that O. J. did it. Most blacks believe that justice was served in the criminal court and that O. J. didn’t do it.
   After seeing the BBC documentary and learning about Jason Simpson’s (O. J.’s son) tendency to violence, his accessibility (as a chef) to the very type of knife that killed her and Goldman, information about a plot to kill Nicole, and the way the police investigated the case, then it is very easy to come to the same conclusion as most African–Americans. British experts believed that most of the evidence submitted in the Simpson trial would never have been accepted in the UK: that the crime scene was heavily contaminated and that vital blood samples were not taken.
   But the white view seems to have got its way with Murdoch; never mind that an American court of law found the elder Simpson not guilty.
   I personally do not know any racist Americans. So the above is totally conjecture based on how the Michael Richards item was treated by the international press, and the public outcry over O. J.’s attempts to earn dollars off his story—as so many others have done.
   No, I don’t find what Michael Richards said acceptable at all. Nor do I find the murders anything but despicable. However, outside the United States, these items make for very interesting viewing, especially how they travel through the wires. I personally found Richards’ tirade as bad as (possibly worse than) Gibson’s, and question how one race’s viewpoint can so greatly affect whether a book written by a member of another race—yet the powers-that-be in the US, with its constitutional presumption of innocence, don’t seem to agree with me.