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 racial justice protests after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, quote, “We live in a time when 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?

JELANI COBB: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And where are we?

JELANI COBB: So, you know, 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, he signed — early August of 1965, he signed, famously, the Voting Rights Act. And 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. And 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, you know, 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 — 

JELANI COBB: That’s right, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — after the killing of Mike Brown.

JELANI COBB: 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 is an animate force. You write, “The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves into my bones. / 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 the events surrounding Brown’s death. I was once a linebacker-sized eighteen-year-old, too. What I knew 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: Yeah. 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, you know, we’re kind of moving toward the reaction that enables Trumpism, that enables, you know, 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. So 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 the African American human rights movement and the Palestinian human rights movement — 

JELANI COBB: Sure, mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: — 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. I mean, 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 — 

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — 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, you know, filming, documenting.

One student, which was — it was amazing because it was the exact right answer, but someone from The New York Times called me on my cellphone, 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.” And I thought that was great. That was the perfect response.

But they were really out there pursuing those stories. And in instances, you know, 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” — you know, at one point, someone threatened to arrest me, and I was just kind of, like, you know, “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 attack on universities, from —

JELANI COBB: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: — 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 antisemitism?

JELANI COBB: Sure. So, 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 an American graduate school, is the first step in someone becoming — 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. Like, that’s the first step. And they are 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 means of — as a wedge issue to kind of — like, “Well, are you opposed to antisemitism, 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 were 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 mean, I think that this is ultimately an attempt — so, 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 —

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — over three years to the federal government, also agreeing to settle, Columbia, investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

JELANI COBB: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: 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 can 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. And 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, when — you know, 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.