Berkeley, Calif. ? A sexual assault charge against a glamorous all-star in any sport would catch Americans’ attention. But with Kobe Bryant, a black man, facing an accusation from a white woman, many Americans are viewing the case through the filter of race as much as sex or celebrity.

While some say race shouldn’t be a factor in the Bryant situation, recent polls show a wide divergence in white and black sympathies toward the Los Angeles Lakers player.

White supremacists who scattered fliers headlined “Don’t have sex with blacks” in Eagle, Colo., earlier this month said they were doing so in response to the case. And in conversations with people around the country, it’s not unusual to hear comparisons between Bryant’s case and the racially polarizing murder trial of O.J. Simpson in the mid-1990s.

Once the Bryant trial gets under way, “Trust me, race will be a huge issue,” said Mike Paul, who is black and is president of MGP & Associates PR, a New York reputation management and crisis public relations firm.

Bryant, 25, is accused of assaulting a 19-year-old hotel worker at a Colorado resort in a mostly white community on June 30. Bryant has claimed his accuser had consensual sex with him.

Two CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls in late July and early August found 63 percent of blacks surveyed felt sympathetic to Bryant, compared with 40 percent of whites. About 68 percent of blacks said the charges of sexual assault are not true, but only 41 percent of whites said the same.