By GRAHAM LEE BREWER and AARON MORRISON (Associated Press)

For many people old enough to remember O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, his 1995 exoneration was a defining moment in their understanding of race, policing and justice. Nearly three decades later, it still reflects the different realities of white and Black Americans.

Some people recall watching their Black co-workers and classmates erupting in jubilation at perceived retribution over institutional racism. Others remember their white counterparts shocked over what many felt was overwhelming evidence of guilt. Both reactions reflected different experiences with a criminal justice system that continues to disproportionately punish Black Americans.

Simpson, who died Wednesday, remains a symbol of racial divisions in American society because he is a reminder of how deeply the inequities are felt, even as newer figures have come to symbolize the struggles around racism, policing and justice.

“It wasn’t really about O.J. Simpson the man. It was about the rest of the society and how we responded to him,” said Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor.

Simpson died of prostate cancer in Las Vegas, his family announced Thursday. He was 76.

His death comes just a few months before the 30th anniversary of the 1994 killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Much like the trial, the public’s reaction to the verdict was largely shaped by race.

Today, criminal justice reforms that address racial inequities are less divisive. But that has been replaced by backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, bans of books that address systemic racism, and restrictions around Black history lessons in public schools.

“The hard part is we’re going to keep cycling through this until we learn from our past,” said University of Pennsylvania sociologist and Africana Studies professor Camille Charles. “But there are people who don’t want us to learn from our past.”

During the trial, African Americans were four times as likely to presume Simpson was innocent or being set up by the police, said UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt, who at the time was a young sociologist writing a book about the different ways Black and white Americans saw the trial.

“The case was about two different views of reality or two different takes on the reality of race in America at that point in history,” he said.

Simpson’s trial came on the heels of the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, which was caught on video and exposed America’s deep trauma over police brutality. For many African Americans in 1995, Simpson’s acquittal represented a rebuke of institutional racism in the justice system. But many white Americans believed Simpson and his defense team played the race card to get away with murder.

The difference could also be seen in the ways Black media outlets covered the trial compared to mainstream publications, Hunt said. Those outlets tended to raise questions about whether the justice system was really fair in terms of “what might be called the Black experience,” he said.

Polling in the last decade shows most people still believe Simpson committed the murders, including most African Americans, but the racial and historical dynamics at play in the trial made it about more than the murders.

Hansford, the Howard University law professor who is Black and was 12 years old at the time of the Simpson verdict, said he remembers the differences in white and Black reactions even in liberal environments like Silver Spring, Maryland, the Washington suburb where he grew up.

“When he was acquitted, all the Black students celebrated and ran into the hallways, jumping up and down,” he said. “And the white teachers were crying.”

One of Hansford’s white teachers said something about Simpson that he didn’t agree with, and when he responded, the teacher rebuked him.

“It was one of the worst ways a teacher has ever talked to me,” Hansford said. “The O.J. Simpson trial created a situation where people were dug into their sides.”

The racial turmoil embedded in the court case was at the center of the 2016 Oscar-winning documentary “OJ: Made in America.” Instead of focusing on the murders and the evidence presented at trial, director Ezra Edelman placed the crimes within the context of the Civil Rights struggle, from which Simpson was largely insulated by the warm embrace of the white mainstream.

“All O.J. had to do to get recognized is to run a football,” Edelman told the AP in 2016. “And almost concurrent to that you have a community of people whose only way to get recognized is to burn their community down during the (1965 Watts) riots. Those were the two tracks I was trying to home in on, knowing that they will intersect 30 years later.”

Simpson had married a white woman in a nation that had historically punished Black men who dared to explore mixed-race relationships. But Simpson also was a former football star, a wealthy Hollywood actor and brand spokesman whose money and privilege distinguished him from impoverished Black men that the criminal justice system punished.

“I’m not Black, I’m O.J.,” he liked to tell friends.

He had been admired as a one-of-a-kind celebrity whose transgressions, including a pattern of spousal abuse, were overlooked as incompatible with his All-American persona.

“He actually seemed to go to quite a bit of trouble to distance himself from Black folks,” but the Black support for him wasn’t about that, said Charles, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist. “I think it was about seeing the system work the way we were told it was supposed to.”

Even as systemic racism in criminal justice systems remains an issue, Charles thinks Black Americans have grown less likely to believe in a famous defendant’s innocence as a show of race solidarity.

“The one thing that has changed is that you didn’t see the same kind of getting behind (R&B singer) R. Kelly or Bill Cosby,” Charles said.

“There was much more open conflict about them, and many more Black people were willing to say publicly, ‘Nah, he did that.’ I think it also could represent a better understanding of celebrity and wealth,” she said.

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Graham Lee Brewer reported from Oklahoma City, and Aaron Morrison from New York. They are members of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.

The former No Neck Tony’s in Lake Elmo has found new life as Marma — a chef-driven restaurant that features a range of global cuisine.

Chefs Max Basaker and Marcus Clark, who worked together at Marx Fusion Bistro and Wine Bar, have remade the space, which had previously been a gas station, with new lighting, seating and a new color scheme and art.

The ribeye at Lake Elmo’s new Marma features a chimichurri sauce. (Courtesy of Marma)

The name Marma started as a portmanteau of the chefs’ first names, but when they were researching the name, they discovered that the word means “meeting place” or “essence” in Sanskrit, which seemed just about perfect.

The scratch-made menu ranges from Asian to Latin to a very American burger, and the chefs are aiming to please not just those looking for a date-night spot, but those who are just looking for a good, affordable sandwich.

“The menu is really fresh, really fun, with lots of bold flavors,” Clark said. “There’s not crazy amounts of spice, but we’re also not afraid of spice.”

Clark, who spent the past eight years working for The Velveteen and Wild Hare in Stillwater, said the building, which had only been No Neck Tony’s for three years, is nice and new and the staff is eager to provide the east metro with something new.

The restaurant seats 65 or 70 guests. There’s a full bar, with 10 original craft cocktails, and a patio when the weather warms.

Marma: 11127 Stillwater Blvd., Lake Elmo; marmamn.com

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By FRANK BAJAK (AP Technology Writer)

As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like a swarm of bees to overwhelm an enemy.

The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands of the machines engage in coordinated battle. A single controller might oversee dozens of drones. Some would scout, others attack. Some would be able to pivot to new objectives in the middle of a mission based on prior programming rather than a direct order.

The world’s only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones’ swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots.

The Pentagon is pushing urgent development of inexpensive, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI-enabled weapons are inevitable so they, too, must have them.

The unchecked spread of swarm technology “could lead to more instability and conflict around the world,” said Margarita Konaev, an analyst with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

As the undisputed leaders in the field, Washington and Beijing are best equipped to set an example by putting limits on military uses of drone swarms. But their intense competition, China’s military aggression in the South China Sea and persistent tensions over Taiwan make the prospect of cooperation look dim.

The idea is not new. The United Nations has tried for more than a decade to advance drone non-proliferation efforts that could include limits such as forbidding the targeting of civilians or banning the use of swarms for ethnic cleansing.

MILITARY CONTRACTS OFFER CLUES

Drones have been a priority for both powers for years, and each side has kept its advances secret, so it’s unclear which country might have an edge.

A 2023 Georgetown study of AI-related military spending found that more than a third of known contracts issued by both U.S. and Chinese military services over eight months in 2020 were for intelligent uncrewed systems.

The Pentagon sought bids in January for small, unmanned maritime “interceptors.” The specifications reflect the military’s ambition: The drones must be able to transit hundreds of miles of “contested waterspace,” work in groups in waters without GPS, carry 1,000-pound payloads, attack hostile craft at 40 mph and execute “complex autonomous behaviors” to adapt to a target’s evasive tactics.

It’s not clear how many drones a single person would control. A spokesman for the defense secretary declined to say, but a recently published Pentagon-backed study offers a clue: A single operator supervised a swarm of more than 100 cheap air and land drones in late 2021 in an urban warfare exercise at an Army training site at Fort Campbell, Tennessee.

The CEO of a company developing software to allow multiple drones to collaborate said in an interview that the technology is bounding ahead.

“We’re enabling a single operator to direct right now half a dozen,” said Lorenz Meier of Auterion, which is working on the technology for the U.S. military and its allies. He said that number is expected to increase to dozens and within a year to hundreds.

Not to be outdone, China’s military claimed last year that dozens of aerial drones “self-healed” after jamming cut their communications. An official documentary said they regrouped, switched to self-guidance and completed a search-and-destroy mission unaided, detonating explosive-laden drones on a target.

In justifying the push for drone swarms, China hawks in Washington offer this scenario: Beijing invades Taiwan then stymies U.S. intervention efforts with waves of air and sea drones that deny American and allied planes, ships and troops a foothold.

A year ago, CIA Director William Burns said Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping had instructed his military to “be ready by 2027” to invade. But that doesn’t mean an invasion is likely, or that the U.S.-China arms race over AI will not aggravate global instability.

KISSINGER URGED ACTION

Just before he died last year, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged Beijing and Washington to work together to discourage AI arms proliferation. They have “a narrow window of opportunity,” he said.

“Restraints for AI need to occur before AI is built into the security structure of each society,” Kissinger wrote with Harvard’s Graham Allison.

Xi and President Joe Biden made a verbal agreement in November to set up working groups on AI safety, but that effort has so far taken a back seat to the arms race for autonomous drones.

The competition is not apt to build trust or reduce the risk of conflict, said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

If the U.S. is “going full speed ahead, it’s most likely China will accelerate whatever it’s doing,” Hartung said.

There’s a risk China could offer swarm technology to U.S. foes or repressive countries, analysts say. Or it could be stolen. Other countries developing the tech, such as Russia, Israel, Iran and Turkey, could also spread the know-how.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in January that U.S.-China talks set to begin sometime this spring will address AI safety. Neither the defense secretary’s office nor the National Security Council would comment on whether the military use of drone swarms might be on the agenda.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

A FIVE-YEAR WAIT

Military analysts, drone makers and AI researchers don’t expect fully capable, combat-ready swarms to be fielded for five years or so, though big breakthroughs could happen sooner.

“The Chinese have an edge in hardware right now. I think we have an edge in software,” said CEO Adam Bry of U.S. drone maker Skydio, which supplies the Army, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the State Department, among other agencies.

Chinese military analyst Song Zhongping said the U.S. has “stronger basic scientific and technological capabilities” but added that the American advantage is not “impossible to surpass.” He said Washington also tends to overestimate the effect of its computer chip export restrictions on China’s drone swarm advances.

Paul Scharre, an AI expert at the Center for a New American Security think tank, believes the rivals are at rough parity.

“The bigger question for each country is about how do you use a drone swarm effectively?” he said.

That’s one reason all eyes are on the war in Ukraine, where drones work as eyes in the sky to make undetected front-line maneuvers all but impossible. They also deliver explosives and serve as sea-skimming ship killers.

Drones in Ukraine are often lost to jamming. Electronic interference is just one of many challenges for drone swarm development. Researchers are also focused on the difficulty of marshaling hundreds of air and sea drones in semi-autonomous swarms over vast expanses of the western Pacific for a potential war over Taiwan.

A secretive, now-inactive $78 million program announced early last year by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, seemed tailor-made for the Taiwan invasion scenario.

The Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms is a mouthful to say, but the mission is clear: Develop ways for thousands of autonomous land, sea and air drones to “degrade or defeat” a foe in seizing contested turf.

DRONES IMPROVISE — BUT MUST STICK TO ORDERS

A separate DARPA program called OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics, had the goal of marshaling upwards of 250 land-based drones to assist Army troops in urban warfare.

Project coordinator Julie Adams, an Oregon State robotics professor, said swarm commanders in the exercise managed to choreograph up to 133 ground and air vehicles at a time. The drones were programmed with a set of tactics they could perform semi-autonomously, including indoor reconnaissance and simulated enemy kills.

Under the direction of a swarm commander, the fleet acted something like an infantry squad whose soldiers are permitted some improvisation as long as they stick to orders.

“It’s what I would call supervisory interaction, in that the human could stop the command or stop the tactic,” Adams said. But once a course of action — such as an attack — was set in motion, the drone was on its own.

Adams said she was particularly impressed with a swarm commander in a different exercise last year at Fort Moore, Georgia, who single-handedly managed a 45-drone swarm over 2.5 hours with just 20 minutes of training.

“It was a pleasant surprise,” she said.

A reporter had to ask: Was he a video game player?

Yes, she said. “And he had a VR headset at home.”

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Associated Press Writer Zen Soo in Hong Kong contributed to this report.