[[link removed]]

JOURNALIST JELANI COBB ON RACE IN DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA  
[[link removed]]


 

David Smith
October 18, 2025
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark.’ 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. _

Jelanie Cobb, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and
writer for The New Yorker, moderates the conversation with Stacey
Abrams , credit: Brookings Institution (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

From the vantage point of the newsroom, the first story is almost
never the full story,” writes Jelani Cobb
[[link removed]]. “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 [[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]],
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”.

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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] [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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered
whether thwhois 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.”

_David Smith is the Guardian's Washington DC bureau chief. Click here
[[link removed]] for David's
public key. Twitter @smithinamerica
[[link removed]]_

_The Guardian [[link removed]] is globally renowned
for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
subjects you care about with the Guardian's brilliant email
newsletters
[[link removed]],
free to your inbox._

* Jelani Cobb
[[link removed]]
* Journalism
[[link removed]]
* race
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* race and gender
[[link removed]]
* race and class
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]