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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He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. And I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature among other things of the Trump era.
He understood that there was a set of people, and this is kind of statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged. And what they were seeking was a kind of public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them, too. And so for all of the...
toothlessness of DEI in some circumstances, it still made a really potent target to say that you're uprooting it or that you're removing it. And then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk.
to a point that it becomes kind of pretty close to the old race science, you know, the ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those kinds of things. And so the belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America
is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years.
So I think the thing that's interesting, but there are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election.
The other, however, is that the thing that I think Trump has done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges.
And so for African-American men whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas and the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population. I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters too. And so it is a kind of
house of cards in terms of like the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. But Trump is a master salesman. The idea is that you don't really think about what you've bought until you've left the store. And by that point, it's too late.
You know, if a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously.
And even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of First Amendment complications at the very least, it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in-person harassment, or they may find pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. And so we've seen this over the course of the years, if you remember,
The anti-CRT hysteria, critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the Hunger Games, practically, or WWE, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that really were not being taught in elementary and junior high schools in this country.
Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily, and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country, and everyone is trying to figure this out. So affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court, and there's a significant Venn overlap between affirmative action and DEI, but they're not necessarily the same thing. Explain that.
So one of the parts of inclusion would be like, if we say that we don't have enough African-American or enough Latino engineers, well, we're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that... have significant numbers of Hispanic or African-American students and say, would you like to be an engineer? Well, this is a voluntary thing and it's giving people access to something.
It's not giving them any consideration they didn't already have. That would fall very much on the DEI, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action. Is that permissible? people don't know. And what may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment.
And so we're really waiting in an almost case-by-case basis to see how all of this shakes out. And no one has marching orders just yet.
Certainly for mainstream press, It has been notable, the extent to which the reconciliation has happened, or what has been perceived as a reconciliation with Donald Trump and Trumpism. You know, of course, during the campaign, we saw the LA Times and Washington Post both spike editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Subsequently,
We saw ABC News settle a lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that, you know, many people felt that they had a good chance of winning. And we now have seen reports that Paramount may be in talks with the Trump people about settling a lawsuit over the 60 Minutes case, which Donald Trump felt was defamatory toward him.
Critics on the left of American media have been pointing out the potential for this kind of conflict of interest forever. Even when we think about the old advertisement-supported model of newspapers, which has gone by the wayside, It was at best an imperfect solution that we had what we call the separation of church and state, the separation from the revenue side and the editorial side.
That was never a great situation. And I think that we're seeing this play out on a much bigger scale. This isn't a new problem anymore.
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