Vincent Cunningham
speaker
266 appearances
43 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Vincent Cunningham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the tragic plane crash in Washington, the president also suggested, might well be the result of, yes, DEI. To understand what's happening here and why, I sat down the other day with Jelani Cobb. Jelani Cobb is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's a historian and the dean of Columbia University's journalism school.
Jelani, barely two or three weeks in office, Donald Trump has gone after academia, journalism, and diversity. So you're a dean, you're a journalist, and guess what? So how are you holding up?
Let's break this down then. What are the fears that you're sensing, for example, in academia where you're spending most of your days? You're at Columbia University.
Are those reasonable concerns, Jelani, since the people that are making the tenure decisions are senior faculty and deans?
What executive orders that have been issued so far related to DEI concern you most?
Well, Jelani, what is DEI at its best, in your view? And are there abuses of it, and how would you describe them?
And what's so terrible about that?
They may be toothless, but we're... And there was a book about this called Diversity, Inc. I don't know if you read this. And, you know, if you stick around long enough at any company, sooner or later you'll be sent to a diversity training, which I have to say, certainly one of them that I went to seemed like
beside the point at best and a racket at worst, you know, and didn't really have any positive impact on anybody's consciousness, much less hiring. So there can be an abuse of it, no?
Yeah. That's put in a much more elegant way. I appreciate that. But what causes a president in the United States, on the eve of a horrible tragedy like a plane crash, with seeming sincerity and all the chutzpah in the world, to blame that horrible accident, the deaths of dozens of people, on DEI? And get away with it.
And yet we've seen the vote for Donald Trump among the Black community, among the Latino community, increase this last time around.
Trump also released an executive order saying he would divert federal funds from schools teaching what he calls discriminatory equity ideology. It also said the government would sanction any school that taught that people can be oppressed due to their race, which is kind of amazing. What does that mean in practice? And how can a teacher reasonably deal with this?
I'm speaking with Jelani Cobb. He's the author of The Substance of Hope, Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, and many other books. We'll continue our conversation in a moment.
And wound up killing 20, 30,000 people or so before it was over with.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I've been speaking today with Jelani Cobb, who's a historian and a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're talking about the Trump administration's wholesale assault on DEI, programs in the federal government and elsewhere that encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI is a singular obsession for Donald Trump and his allies.
So I'll return now to my conversation with journalist and historian Jelani Cobb. So in 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling that ended affirmative action as we knew it. Coupled with that, how are these executive orders going to affect the environment that you're in at Columbia and academia writ large?
How do you evaluate as both a journalist and somebody leading a journalism school, the reaction of the press in these early weeks to what's been going on in Washington?
Because Paramount controls CBS. In almost every one of these cases, though, it seems the problem is... that the corporations that own these media outlets have much bigger fish to fry in the corporate world than their media outlets. So Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and bought it for $250 million, that to him is nothing compared to the scale of Amazon itself.
What I notice sometimes speaking with friends who aren't in the press, who are doing all kinds of other things, they don't want to engage with the news too much. They feel exhausted. They feel psychologically self-protective in the way... That is very different from 2017. Any number of people say, you know, I refuse to watch CNN or I refuse to read the paper. And I'm kind of shocked by it.
That's not encouraging at all.
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