I’ve never had a conversation about O.J. Simpson that didn’t begin or end with his relationship to Black women. He left his Black wife for 19-year-old Nicole Brown, and it was a jury made up of predominantly Black women that exonerated him on the streets and in court — Black women who loved him when he was unlovable. “If you’re a Black man in America, you’re fighting our war,” says novelist Walter Mosley in the first episode of ESPN's documentary series O.J.: Made in America (which aired its final episode on June 18). But even though Black women exist on the front lines of that war and in every battalion, their perspective is largely absent in Ezra Edelman’s sweeping account of the American culture that created the athlete who thought he was colorless.Eight black women were on the 12-person jury that acquitted O.J. Simpson in the 1994 murder of his wife and Ron Goldman. But, as Edelman’s narrative argues, the trial was about more than two murders or a famous football star. It was about two separate experiences of America converging in one courtroom: That trial, at that time, showed what happens to whiteness when it is forced to say its own name, and what happens to Blackness when it is named — and that name is heard — for what feels like the first time.To show the collapse of O.J. Simpson, Edelman spends significant time tracing the otherworldly romance of "the Juice." At USC and then with the Buffalo Bills, Simpson was a supernatural football player. He made runs that look impossible until you see him score. He had a charismatic personality, consuming the hearts and minds and consciences of men and women. “And not just any women,” his childhood friend Joe Bell says memorably. “White women.” But when he was on trial for killing a white woman, it was Blackness that he exploited for his freedom, and Edelman mostly shows men recounting the events.Simpson was always surrounded by strong male teams — from the Electric Company offensive line of the Buffalo Bills, to the Johnnie Cochran-led “Dream Team” of defense attorneys, and eventually the less accomplished co-conspirators in a botched robbery that landed him behind bars in 2008. It’s no surprise that much of O.J.: Made in America — produced by ESPN, directed by a man — is dominated by male voices. But, by my count of the film’s more than 60 interviews, only eight of those speakers are women. Only three of those women are Black: jury members Yolanda Crawford and Carrie Bess, and Linda Jay, a California true-crime follower.Edelman has spoken at length about everything he left out of the documentary’s final cut. On Vulture's TV podcast , he saidhe skipped a deep dive into rumors of Simpson’s cocaine use because the evidence was circumstantial, and cut segments about suspicions that the football star was suffering from CTE (a concussion disorder that plagues many football players) because Simpson was never formally diagnosed. At The New York Times, critic A.O. Scott suggested the film could have included a more nuanced discussion of spousal abuse. But O.J.: Made in America talks around the perspective of Black women instead of talking to them.