Jelani Cobb
speaker
79 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jelani Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Uh, and can you talk a little bit about, you know, why you felt like that was important?
What does that mean to you, to have to do that?
Listen, this has been an incredibly insightful kind of tour of how you think about film and what filmmaking represents to you. Yeah. So I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. And, you know, good luck with the film.
You know, it's kind of like a barrage from all directions. And the one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about, you know, what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment.
In academia, the fears range. So there are people who worry that their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter, anything that the Trump administration looks unfavorably upon, that they won't be able to get funding. And in some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. And so that's a huge fear for people. And then there's the kind of political pressure
I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure. or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. So very much connected to career concerns.
Well, I think that there's a question of... whether or not university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not so unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be, you know, a kind of caricature of what you actually are interested in researching.
One of the things that's really notable is the extent to which people have begun kind of pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis.
In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. So if they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways of kind of arm-twisting people into compliance.
There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas. with the same sort of ease that they once did. And that will, of course, have a financial implication.
And then there's the kind of other power of the purse string, which is the ability, coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a kind of anti-white discrimination.
So at its best, DEI represents an effort from companies... institutions, various kind of walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. And recognizing the kind of disparities that are baked into American life it is an attempt to undo them.
So for instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country, but only about 16 to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups. And often those disparities reflect age-old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups.
And sometimes they just represent a kind of inertia of networks, that people hire people who they know, people who they know tend to have similar backgrounds and that kind of thing. And diversity is meant to be a kind of
self-aware approach to saying, hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had, let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously.
Well, here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, certainly prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. You know, people felt that it was toothless. It was kind of checking boxes.
When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%. which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States went from 89% down to 86, that steep drop in that timeframe. That kind of progress was seen as really incremental. And in fact, the most cynical views of DEI
saw it as a kind of corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies.
So, I mean, I think that there's a kind of skeptical way of looking at this. And certainly, having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling as if I was brimming with new knowledge. Right.
So I think that what's happened around Trump and, you know, we mentioned, you know, the McCarthy era before. And I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy. There are lots of important parallels. But in this one particular case, you know, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened. happened prior to Joseph McCarthy.
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