‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America
In a new essay collection, the dean of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism makes a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy
Jelani Cobb at the Obama Foundation democracy forum in New York in 2022. Photograph: Peter Foley/UPI via Alamy
“From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb. “You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances.”
The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.
“The Martin case – the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history – ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now ‘post-racial’,” Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.
Many of the essays in the collection were written contemporaneously, affording them the irony – sometimes bitter irony – of distance. Together they form a portrait of an era bookended by the killing of Martin and the return to power of Donald Trump, with frontline reporting from Ferguson and Minneapolis along the way. They make a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy.
As Cobb chronicles across 437 pages, the 2013 acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, became a catalyst for conversations about racial profiling, gun laws and systemic racism, helping to inspire the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Three years later, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, attended a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. Cobb notes that Roof told police he had been “radicalised” by the aftermath of Martin’s killing and wanted to start a “race war”.
“From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb. “You hear stray wisps of information, almost always the most inflammatory strands of a much bigger, more complicated set of circumstances.”
The dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York could be reflecting on the recent killing of the racist provocateur Charlie Kirk. In fact, he is thinking back to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American student from Florida who was shot dead by a white Latino neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.
“The Martin case – the nightmare specter of a lynching screaming across the void of history – ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president, and in a dizzying moment of self-congratulation, began to ponder on editorial pages whether the nation was now ‘post-racial’,” Cobb writes in the introduction to his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.
Many of the essays in the collection were written contemporaneously, affording them the irony – sometimes bitter irony – of distance. Together they form a portrait of an era bookended by the killing of Martin and the return to power of Donald Trump, with frontline reporting from Ferguson and Minneapolis along the way. They make a compelling argument that everything is connected and nothing is inevitable about racial justice or democracy.
As Cobb chronicles across 437 pages, the 2013 acquittal of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, became a catalyst for conversations about racial profiling, gun laws and systemic racism, helping to inspire the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Three years later, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, attended a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, then opened fire and killed nine Black parishioners. Cobb notes that Roof told police he had been “radicalised” by the aftermath of Martin’s killing and wanted to start a “race war”.
Jelani Cobb’s Three or More Is a Riot. Photograph: One World
Speaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”
Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.
Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.
“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”
Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.
“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.
No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.
What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.
“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”
Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.
He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.
“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”
Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”
That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.
Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.
“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”
It is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.
‘Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?’
Jelani Cobb
He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”
Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.
“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”
He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.
“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”
It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”
Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.
Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”
He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.
“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.
“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”
That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.
Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.
“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.
“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.”
Explore more on these topics:
Columbia University
US constitution and civil liberties
Race
US politics
interviews
Speaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”
Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.
Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.
“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”
Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.
“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.
No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.
What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.
“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”
Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.
He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.
“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”
Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”
That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.
Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.
“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”
It is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.
‘Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?’
Jelani Cobb
He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”
Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.
“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”
He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.
“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”
It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”
Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.
Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”
He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.
“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.
“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”
That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.
Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.
“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.
“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.”
Explore more on these topics:
Columbia University
US constitution and civil liberties
Race
US politics
interviews
Jelani Cobb’s Three or More Is a Riot.
Photograph: One World
Speaking by phone from his office at Columbia, Cobb, 56, says: “It was a very upside-down version of the facts because he looked on Martin’s death and somehow took the reaction to it as a threat to white people and that was what set him on his path. Roof was this kind of precursor of the cause of white nationalism and white supremacy that becomes so prominent now.”
Then, in the pandemic-racked summer of 2020, came George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man murdered by a white police officer who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as Floyd said, “I can’t breathe,” more than 20 times. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets with demands to end police brutality, invest in Black communities and address systemic racism across various institutions.
Cobb, an author, historian and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, continues: “It was the high tide. A lot of the organising, a lot of the kinds of thinking, the perspective and the work and the cultural kinds of representations – these things had begun eight years earlier with Trayvon Martin’s death.
“This was an excruciating, nearly nine-minute-long video of a person’s life being extinguished and it happened at a time when people had nothing to do but watch it. They weren’t able to go to work because people were in lockdown. All of those things made his death resonate in a way that it might not have otherwise. There had been egregious instances of Black people being killed prior to that and they hadn’t generated that kind of societal response.”
Cities such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles reallocated portions of police budgets to community programmes; companies committed millions of dollars to racial-equity initiatives; for a time, discussions of systemic racism entered mainstream discourse. But not for the first time in US history, progress – or at least the perception of it – sowed the seeds of backlash.
“It also was a signal for people who are on the opposite side of this to start pushing in the opposite direction and that happened incredibly swiftly and with incredible consequences to such an extent that we are now in a more reactionary place than we were when George Floyd died in the first place,” Cobb says.
No one better embodies that reactionary spirit than Donald Trump, who rose to political prominence pushing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace and demonising immigrants as criminals and rapists. His second term has included a cabinet dominated by white people and a purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Trump lost the presidential election a few months after Floyd died but returned to power last year, defeating a Black and south Asian challenger in Kamala Harris. According to Pew Research, Trump made important gains with Latino voters (51% Harris, 48% Trump) and won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% in 2020.
What does Cobb make of the notion that class now outweighs race in electoral politics? “One of the things that they did brilliantly was that typically politics has worked on the basis of: ‘What will you do for me?’” Cobb says. “That’s retail politics. That’s what you expect.
“The Trump campaign in 24 was much more contingent upon the question of: ‘What will you do to people who I don’t like?’ There were some Black men who thought their marginal position in society was a product of the advances that women made and that was something the Republican party said overtly, which is why I think their appeal was so masculinist.”
Trump and his allies weaponised prejudice against transgender people to attract socially and religiously conservative voters, including demographics they would otherwise hold in “contempt”. “I also think that we tended to overlook the question of the extent to which Joe Biden simply handing the nomination to Kamala Harris turned off a part of the electorate,” Cobb says.
He expresses frustration with the well-rehearsed argument that Democrats became too fixated on “woke” identity politics at the expense of economic populism: “They make it seem as if these groups created identity politics. Almost every group that’s in the Democratic fold was made into an identity group by the actions of people who were outside.
“If you were talking about African Americans, Black politics was created by segregation. White people said that they were going to act in their interest in order to prevent African Americans from having access. Women, through the call of feminism, came to address the fact that they were excluded from politics because men wanted more power. You could go through every single group.”
Yet it remains commonplace to talk about appealing to evangelical Christian voters or working-class non-college-educated voters, he says: “The presumption implicit in this is that all those people see the world in a particular way that is understandable or legible by their identity, and so there’s a one-sidedness to it. For the entirety of his political career, Trump has simply been a shrewd promulgator of white-identity politics.”
That trend has become supercharged in Trump’s second term. He has amplified the great replacement theory, sought to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and complained that museums over-emphasise slavery. His actions have built a permission structure for white nationalists who boast they now have a seat at the top table.
Many observers have also expressed dismay at Trump’s concentration of executive power and the speed and scale of his assault on democratic institutions. Cobb, however, is not surprised.
“It’s about what I expected, honestly,” he says, “because throughout the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump mainly campaigned on the promises of what he was going to do to get back at people. They’re using the power of the state to pursue personal and ideological grievances, which is what autocracy does.”
It is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.
‘Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?’
Jelani Cobb
He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”
Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens.
“The constitution gave Black people the right to vote but, if you voted, you’d be killed and this was a known fact,” he says. “This went on for decade after decade after decade. You can call that a lot of things. You can’t call that democracy. It was a kind of racial autocracy that extended in lots of different directions.”
He adds: “We should have been mindful that the country could always return to form in that way, that its commitment to democracy had been tenuous. That was why race has played such a central role in the dawning of this current autocratic moment. But it’s not the only dynamic.
“Immigration, which is tied to race in some ways, is another dynamic. The advances that women have made, the increasing acceptance and tolerance of people in the LGBTQ communities – all those things, combined with an economic tenuousness, have made it possible to just catalyse this resurgence of autocracy in the country.”
It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”
Cobb’s own employer has been caught in the maelstrom. In February, the Trump administration froze $400m in federal research grants and funding to Columbia, citing the university’s “failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment” during Gaza protests last year. Columbia has since announced it would comply with nearly all the administration’s demands and agreed to a $221m settlement, restoring most frozen funds but with ongoing oversight.
Cobb does not have much to add, partly for confidentiality reasons, though he does comment: “In life, I have tended to not grade harshly for exams that people should never have been required to take in the first place.”
He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion.
“The cover story was that Columbia and other universities were being punished for their failure to uproot antisemitism on their campuses. But it’s difficult to understand how you punish an institution for being too lenient about antisemitism and the punishment is that you take away its ability to do cancer research, or you defund its ability to do research on the best medical protocols for sick children or to work on heart disease and all the things that were being done with the money that was taken from the university.
“In fact, what is being done is that we are criminalising the liberal or progressive ideas and centres that are tolerant of people having a diverse array of ideas or progressive ideas. The irony, of course, is that one of the things that happens in autocracy is the supreme amount of hypocrisy. They have an incredible tolerance for hypocrisy and so all these things are being done under the banner of protecting free speech.”
That hypocrisy has been on extravagant display again in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing by a lone gunman on a university campus in Utah. Trump and his allies have been quick to blame the “radical left” and “domestic terrorists” and threaten draconian action against those who criticise Kirk or celebrate his demise. The response is only likely to deepen the US’s political polarisation and threat of further violence.
Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.
“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.
“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.”
Explore more on these topics:
Columbia University
US constitution and civil liberties
Race
US politics
interviews
How We Got Here: Jelani Cobb on Rise of Trump & White Nationalism After Push for Racial Justice
Story
November 10, 2025
Topics:
Journalism
Donald Trump
White Supremacy
Black Lives Matter
Trayvon Martin
George Floyd
Racism
Student Protests
Immigrant Rights
Guest:
Jelani Cobb
staff writer at The New Yorker.
Links:
Jelani Cobb articles
"Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-2025"
Jelani Cobb, the acclaimed journalist and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has just published a new collection of essays, “Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.” The book collects essays beginning in 2012 with the killing of Travyon Martin in Florida. It traces the rise of Donald Trump and the right’s growing embrace of white nationalism as well as the historic racial justice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. “What we’re seeing is a kind reactionary push to try to return the nation to the status quo ante, to undo the kind of demographic change, literally at gunpoint, as we are pushing people of color out of the country by force,” says Cobb.
Transcript:
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here. That’s the name of a new collection of essays by Jelani Cobb, the acclaimed journalist, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The book collects essays beginning in 2012 with the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, it traces the rise of Donald Trump and the right’s growing embrace of white nationalism as well as the historic injustice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, quote, “We live in a time where writers like Cobb are being targeted by the highest powers in this nation. Read this book to understand why.” Jelani Cobb, thanks so much for being with us. Congratulations on the release of your book. Why don’t we just start off with the title? Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here. How did we get here, and where are we?
JELANI COBB: So, there’s an interesting kind of dynamic here. I wrote about this recently in that in the summer of 1965 – well, summer/fall of 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are really at the center of the kind of volatile politics that we’re dealing with now. In August, early August of 1965, he signed, famously, the Voting Rights Act, then in early October of that same year, he signed the Immigration – Hart-Celler’s Immigration Reform Act.
The Immigration Reform Act transformed the face of American immigration. It opened the doors for immigration from places like Africa, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America, places that had been widely prohibited for people from immigrating from in earlier versions of American immigration law. The Voting Rights Act changed the face of the American electorate.
What we’re seeing, and what I didn’t understand when I first started writing these essays, and I couldn’t because some of this history hadn’t played out yet – what we’re seeing is a kind of retrograde push or reactionary push to try to return the nation to the status quo ante, to undo the kind of demographic change, literally at gunpoint, as we see, and at the same time as we are pushing people of color out of the country by force, we are making space for specifically white South Africans. Not just South Africans, but specifically white South Africans.
And we see these cases being brought to try to diminish, if not completely eviscerate, the Voting Rights Act. And so, it’s trying to return to a kind of the old demography, or the demography of old. And as I was starting writing for The New Yorker in 2012, the first thing I wrote about was Trayvon Martin, who becomes this kind of almost inciting incident.
Black Lives Matter emerges out of that. And to a strange degree, a great deal of radicalization on the right comes out of that as well because just a few years later, we see the horrific murder of nine African-Americans in the church, in Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina. The person who was responsible for those homicides, Dylann Roof, said that he did it as a call to arms for white people, that he wanted white people to reassert their place and their primary position in American society, and that he had been radicalized by, of all things, the Trayvon Martin incident. And so, these things have kind of unfolded in a kind of tree diagram almost since then.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember we interviewed you first in Ferguson after the killing of Mike Brown.
JELANI COBB: That’s right, yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Maybe we have that clip. But you have an essay in the book, “What I Saw in Ferguson.” You open it by quoting Richard Wright’s poem, “Between the World and Me,” about a lynching and how history’s an animate force. You write, “The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones, and the gray ashes formed flesh, firm and black, entering into my flesh.” And then, you write, “I spent eight days in Ferguson, and in that time, I developed a kind of between-the-world-and-Ferguson view of events surrounding Brown’s death. I was once a linebacker-sized 18-year-old, too, and I saw then what Black people have been required to know is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger.”
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Take it from there.
JELANI COBB: So, what we saw, even in Ferguson, which was, like, another stair step in this kind of ratcheting intensification of these dynamics – and this is happening in the Obama era, and the Obama DOJ is being – people are seeking some sort of assistance from the Obama DOJ in these instances. Or will this be different? Will the fact that there’s a Black president mean that this will be handled differently?
And at the same time, there is this kind of growing white allergic reaction to these social demonstrations. Now, Michael Brown was killed. His body lay in the street for almost four hours on an August day, a kind of blazing-hot August afternoon. And there is an entire community traumatized by there being a dead body, a person whom they know, who’s laying in the street for hour, after hour, after hour.
And out of that, there was another kind of step that we saw, and that was where kind of Black Lives Matter came into full fruition, and you began to see that movement grow and develop. On the other side of it, we’re kind of moving toward the reaction that enables Trump-ism, that enables when he comes down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, June of 2015 – coincidentally, he does this, comes down the escalator and announces his candidacy the day before the incident in which the nine people are killed in Charleston. Those things happened 24 hours apart. Not that there’s a causal relationship between these or anything like that. But it’s just this common response to the zeitgeist and the belief that somehow, white people have been pushed out of their ordained position in American society.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a great deal of solidarity between African-American human rights movement and the Palestinian human rights movement. And also, the Jewish human rights movement. You are the Dean of the prestigious School of Journalism at Columbia University. You were there during the encampments and Columbia calling in the police several times. I’m wondering if you can talk about both situations.
One, the journalists, and a number of them from your own school. Journalists were seeing your school as a shelter. You even had a showdown with police, telling them to stop arresting journalists. If you can talk about the students at WKCR, Columbia Spectator, your own students, the graduate students in your school being attacked by police or arrested by police and the response of your university, Columbia.
JELANI COBB: I’ll just tell you, I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s hard for me to believe, but I have been teaching for almost 30 years. I have never been more proud of a group of students than I was of those students who went out and reported. There were students who – and I didn’t encourage them to do it, as a matter of fact, I encouraged them to do the opposite, but there were students who were out doing 24-hour shifts, reporting on what was happening, filming, documenting.
One student, it was amazing because it was the exact right answer, but someone from The New York Times called me on my cell phone, and I was in the middle of doing a bunch of things, and I’m kind of running around, and they said, “Can someone give me, like, just some color about what’s going on on the campus?” And I hand the phone to a student, and I was like, “This is someone from _The Times–. They just want to know what’s going on,” and the student said, “Yeah, I have my own story to work on.” [Laughs] I thought that was great. That was the perfect response.
But they were really out there pursuing those stories. And in instances, I did have to come out and intervene because there were police officers, NYPD, once they got to the campus, and they were not making any distinctions, they were just kind of arresting people.
And I was like, “These are students, these are journalists. These are the kind of people” – at one point, someone threatened to arrest me, and it was just kind of, like, “It’s my job as Dean to work on behalf of my students.” And so, on the Columbia side, a lot of that is kind of privileged, but what I’ll say is that our interactions – in our interactions with everyone from the outside community, to inside, to the leadership, our kind of marching orders were to defend the freedom of the press and defend the First Amendment, and academic freedom and our students’ ability to report. That was the students from KCR, who weren’t even students at the Graduate School of Journalism, but students from the Spectator, which is the student paper, and the students who were enrolled at Columbia Journalism School. And that was what we articulated to the best of our ability.
AMY GOODMAN: And overall, as you talk about Notes on How We Got Here, President Trump’s attacks on universities, from Columbia to schools all over the country–
JELANI COBB: So, here’s the thing…
AMY GOODMAN: –and the connection between DEI and what he calls anti-Semitism.
JELANI COBB: Sure. On the first thing, one of the things that few people have noticed, or maybe people have noticed, but it hasn’t gotten a ton of attention, is that in all of these incursions into the autonomy of these institutions, one of the main things that the administration has demanded is that there’s some language about reducing the number of international students on their campuses. And this has been done because very often, acceptance into an American university, acceptance into American graduate school, is the first step in someone ultimately becoming a citizen.
They may graduate, they’ll get sponsored for a work visa, and then green card and then become a citizen. Or perhaps they marry someone. That’s the first step. And they’re attempting to foreclose that route. They’re attempting to reduce the number of people who are becoming naturalized citizens, and they’re using the pressures that they’re exerting on American universities in order to do so.
And it was convenient, I think, to use these kind of canards about DEI as a wedge issue to kind of – like, “Well, are you opposed to anti-Semitism, or are you in favor of DEI?” as if a person couldn’t hold both of those views. There was no natural reason that you couldn’t hold both of those views. But for a moment, this is kind of the rhetoric that we we receiving, the kind of propaganda we were receiving. And you would actually believe that these things are opposed or oppositional.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can comment on just Friday, the Trump administration reaching a multimillion-dollar deal with Cornell University to restore more than $250 million in federal funding for the school, the Education Secretary saying, “The Trump administration secured another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies.”
JELANI COBB: Yeah, I think this is ultimately an attempt – it begins with the kind of belief that no one who holds a position, unless apparently they are white men, is actually qualified or entitled to be in that position and that DEI, which has been an effort to look beyond the normal parameters of what had been natural – what had become routine parameters to hire the same people who had been in the same positions from the start of time, virtually, and to say, “We want our institutions to be inclusive of everyone who can possibly contribute to the institution.” That’s not a radical idea, but it has been reframed in such a way as a kind of zero-sum game, in which white men are being denied the positions that they should rightfully hold. And that’s what’s at stake here.
AMY GOODMAN: And you have Cornell – rather Columbia, your institution, will pay a $200-million settlement over three years to the federal government, also agreeing to settle Columbia investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Do you see this as a huge concession? Are you critical of this?
JELANI COBB: See, a lot of that is kind of, like, privileged because I’m a Dean. What I’ll say is that I wasn’t happy with the situation at all. And what I tended to do was that I could exert my energy being kind of internally critical, or I could exert my energy about the fact that we should never have had to make those decisions in the first place. And so, my criticism has been that this is an unprecedented incursion into the autonomy of an institution of higher education, and it sets a terrible precedent.
And so, academic freedom has been infringed upon. The ability of even kind of to the point of making demands about particular departments and programs at a university. This is unheard of. This is not something that we’ve seen before, outside of the McCarthy period, which is the closest thing that we’ve seen. The great historian, Ellen Schrecker, had done her work on McCarthyism in higher education, and all of a sudden, we’re looking at these books about the 1950s and American universities–
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
JELANI COBB: –and seeing templates for what’s happening in the 2020s in American universities.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jelani Cobb, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, Staff Writer at _The New Yorker_ magazine. His new book, Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025.
I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
Cobb on Trumpism, Racism Within GOP, the Election of Mamdani in NYC & More Pt. 2
VIDEO:
November 10, 2025
More from this Interview:
Part 1: How We Got Here: Jelani Cobb on Rise of Trump & White Nationalism After Push for Racial Justice
Part 2: Jelani Cobb on Trumpism, Racism Within GOP, the Election of Mamdani in NYC & More Pt. 2
Donate
Topics:
Journalism
Donald Trump
White Supremacy
Black Lives Matter
Trayvon Martin
George Floyd
Racism
Student Protests
Immigrant Rights
Guest:
Jelani Cobb
staff writer at The New Yorker.
Link:
Jelani Cobb articles
"Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-2025"
staff writer at The New Yorker.
Link:
Jelani Cobb articles
"Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-2025"
Jelani Cobb, the acclaimed journalist and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has just published a new collection of essays, “Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.” The book collects essays beginning in 2012 with the killing of Travyon Martin in Florida. It traces the rise of Donald Trump and the right’s growing embrace of white nationalism as well as the historic racial justice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. “What we’re seeing is a kind reactionary push to try to return the nation to the status quo ante, to undo the kind of demographic change, literally at gunpoint, as we are pushing people of color out of the country by force,” says Cobb.
Transcript:
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here. That’s the name of a new collection of essays by Jelani Cobb, the acclaimed journalist, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The book collects essays beginning in 2012 with the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, it traces the rise of Donald Trump and the right’s growing embrace of white nationalism as well as the historic injustice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, quote, “We live in a time where writers like Cobb are being targeted by the highest powers in this nation. Read this book to understand why.” Jelani Cobb, thanks so much for being with us. Congratulations on the release of your book. Why don’t we just start off with the title? Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here. How did we get here, and where are we?
JELANI COBB: So, there’s an interesting kind of dynamic here. I wrote about this recently in that in the summer of 1965 – well, summer/fall of 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are really at the center of the kind of volatile politics that we’re dealing with now. In August, early August of 1965, he signed, famously, the Voting Rights Act, then in early October of that same year, he signed the Immigration – Hart-Celler’s Immigration Reform Act.
The Immigration Reform Act transformed the face of American immigration. It opened the doors for immigration from places like Africa, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America, places that had been widely prohibited for people from immigrating from in earlier versions of American immigration law. The Voting Rights Act changed the face of the American electorate.
What we’re seeing, and what I didn’t understand when I first started writing these essays, and I couldn’t because some of this history hadn’t played out yet – what we’re seeing is a kind of retrograde push or reactionary push to try to return the nation to the status quo ante, to undo the kind of demographic change, literally at gunpoint, as we see, and at the same time as we are pushing people of color out of the country by force, we are making space for specifically white South Africans. Not just South Africans, but specifically white South Africans.
And we see these cases being brought to try to diminish, if not completely eviscerate, the Voting Rights Act. And so, it’s trying to return to a kind of the old demography, or the demography of old. And as I was starting writing for The New Yorker in 2012, the first thing I wrote about was Trayvon Martin, who becomes this kind of almost inciting incident.
Black Lives Matter emerges out of that. And to a strange degree, a great deal of radicalization on the right comes out of that as well because just a few years later, we see the horrific murder of nine African-Americans in the church, in Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina. The person who was responsible for those homicides, Dylann Roof, said that he did it as a call to arms for white people, that he wanted white people to reassert their place and their primary position in American society, and that he had been radicalized by, of all things, the Trayvon Martin incident. And so, these things have kind of unfolded in a kind of tree diagram almost since then.
AMY GOODMAN: I remember we interviewed you first in Ferguson after the killing of Mike Brown.
JELANI COBB: That’s right, yeah. I remember that. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Maybe we have that clip. But you have an essay in the book, “What I Saw in Ferguson.” You open it by quoting Richard Wright’s poem, “Between the World and Me,” about a lynching and how history’s an animate force. You write, “The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones, and the gray ashes formed flesh, firm and black, entering into my flesh.” And then, you write, “I spent eight days in Ferguson, and in that time, I developed a kind of between-the-world-and-Ferguson view of events surrounding Brown’s death. I was once a linebacker-sized 18-year-old, too, and I saw then what Black people have been required to know is that there are few things more dangerous than the perception that one is a danger.”
JELANI COBB: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Take it from there.
JELANI COBB: So, what we saw, even in Ferguson, which was, like, another stair step in this kind of ratcheting intensification of these dynamics – and this is happening in the Obama era, and the Obama DOJ is being – people are seeking some sort of assistance from the Obama DOJ in these instances. Or will this be different? Will the fact that there’s a Black president mean that this will be handled differently?
And at the same time, there is this kind of growing white allergic reaction to these social demonstrations. Now, Michael Brown was killed. His body lay in the street for almost four hours on an August day, a kind of blazing-hot August afternoon. And there is an entire community traumatized by there being a dead body, a person whom they know, who’s laying in the street for hour, after hour, after hour.
And out of that, there was another kind of step that we saw, and that was where kind of Black Lives Matter came into full fruition, and you began to see that movement grow and develop. On the other side of it, we’re kind of moving toward the reaction that enables Trump-ism, that enables when he comes down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, June of 2015 – coincidentally, he does this, comes down the escalator and announces his candidacy the day before the incident in which the nine people are killed in Charleston. Those things happened 24 hours apart. Not that there’s a causal relationship between these or anything like that. But it’s just this common response to the zeitgeist and the belief that somehow, white people have been pushed out of their ordained position in American society.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s a great deal of solidarity between African-American human rights movement and the Palestinian human rights movement. And also, the Jewish human rights movement. You are the Dean of the prestigious School of Journalism at Columbia University. You were there during the encampments and Columbia calling in the police several times. I’m wondering if you can talk about both situations.
One, the journalists, and a number of them from your own school. Journalists were seeing your school as a shelter. You even had a showdown with police, telling them to stop arresting journalists. If you can talk about the students at WKCR, Columbia Spectator, your own students, the graduate students in your school being attacked by police or arrested by police and the response of your university, Columbia.
JELANI COBB: I’ll just tell you, I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s hard for me to believe, but I have been teaching for almost 30 years. I have never been more proud of a group of students than I was of those students who went out and reported. There were students who – and I didn’t encourage them to do it, as a matter of fact, I encouraged them to do the opposite, but there were students who were out doing 24-hour shifts, reporting on what was happening, filming, documenting.
One student, it was amazing because it was the exact right answer, but someone from The New York Times called me on my cell phone, and I was in the middle of doing a bunch of things, and I’m kind of running around, and they said, “Can someone give me, like, just some color about what’s going on on the campus?” And I hand the phone to a student, and I was like, “This is someone from _The Times–. They just want to know what’s going on,” and the student said, “Yeah, I have my own story to work on.” [Laughs] I thought that was great. That was the perfect response.
But they were really out there pursuing those stories. And in instances, I did have to come out and intervene because there were police officers, NYPD, once they got to the campus, and they were not making any distinctions, they were just kind of arresting people.
And I was like, “These are students, these are journalists. These are the kind of people” – at one point, someone threatened to arrest me, and it was just kind of, like, “It’s my job as Dean to work on behalf of my students.” And so, on the Columbia side, a lot of that is kind of privileged, but what I’ll say is that our interactions – in our interactions with everyone from the outside community, to inside, to the leadership, our kind of marching orders were to defend the freedom of the press and defend the First Amendment, and academic freedom and our students’ ability to report. That was the students from KCR, who weren’t even students at the Graduate School of Journalism, but students from the Spectator, which is the student paper, and the students who were enrolled at Columbia Journalism School. And that was what we articulated to the best of our ability.
AMY GOODMAN: And overall, as you talk about Notes on How We Got Here, President Trump’s attacks on universities, from Columbia to schools all over the country
JELANI COBB: So, here’s the thing…
AMY GOODMAN: –and the connection between DEI and what he calls anti-Semitism.
JELANI COBB: Sure. On the first thing, one of the things that few people have noticed, or maybe people have noticed, but it hasn’t gotten a ton of attention, is that in all of these incursions into the autonomy of these institutions, one of the main things that the administration has demanded is that there’s some language about reducing the number of international students on their campuses. And this has been done because very often, acceptance into an American university, acceptance into American graduate school, is the first step in someone ultimately becoming a citizen.
They may graduate, they’ll get sponsored for a work visa, and then green card and then become a citizen. Or perhaps they marry someone. That’s the first step. And they’re attempting to foreclose that route. They’re attempting to reduce the number of people who are becoming naturalized citizens, and they’re using the pressures that they’re exerting on American universities in order to do so.
And it was convenient, I think, to use these kind of canards about DEI as a wedge issue to kind of – like, “Well, are you opposed to anti-Semitism, or are you in favor of DEI?” as if a person couldn’t hold both of those views. There was no natural reason that you couldn’t hold both of those views. But for a moment, this is kind of the rhetoric that we we receiving, the kind of propaganda we were receiving. And you would actually believe that these things are opposed or oppositional.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can comment on just Friday, the Trump administration reaching a multimillion-dollar deal with Cornell University to restore more than $250 million in federal funding for the school, the Education Secretary saying, “The Trump administration secured another transformative commitment from an Ivy League institution to end divisive DEI policies.”
JELANI COBB: Yeah, I think this is ultimately an attempt – it begins with the kind of belief that no one who holds a position, unless apparently they are white men, is actually qualified or entitled to be in that position and that DEI, which has been an effort to look beyond the normal parameters of what had been natural – what had become routine parameters to hire the same people who had been in the same positions from the start of time, virtually, and to say, “We want our institutions to be inclusive of everyone who can possibly contribute to the institution.” That’s not a radical idea, but it has been reframed in such a way as a kind of zero-sum game, in which white men are being denied the positions that they should rightfully hold. And that’s what’s at stake here.
AMY GOODMAN: And you have Cornell – rather Columbia, your institution, will pay a $200-million settlement over three years to the federal government, also agreeing to settle Columbia investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Do you see this as a huge concession? Are you critical of this?
JELANI COBB: See, a lot of that is kind of, like, privileged because I’m a Dean. What I’ll say is that I wasn’t happy with the situation at all. And what I tended to do was that I could exert my energy being kind of internally critical, or I could exert my energy about the fact that we should never have had to make those decisions in the first place. And so, my criticism has been that this is an unprecedented incursion into the autonomy of an institution of higher education, and it sets a terrible precedent.
And so, academic freedom has been infringed upon. The ability of even kind of to the point of making demands about particular departments and programs at a university. This is unheard of. This is not something that we’ve seen before, outside of the McCarthy period, which is the closest thing that we’ve seen. The great historian, Ellen Schrecker, had done her work on McCarthyism in higher education, and all of a sudden, we’re looking at these books about the 1950s and American universities–
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
JELANI COBB: –and seeing templates for what’s happening in the 2020s in American universities.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jelani Cobb, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, Staff Writer at _The New Yorker_ magazine. His new book, Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
