2024 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series: Jelani Cobb

I think it’s true, and I’ll get into some of the significance of that a little bit later in the conversation. But on a more fundamental level, statements like the idea that he would be a dictator for one day, or that he would weaponize the federal bureaucracy in service of seeking revenge on people whom he’s deemed his enemies, his desire to weaken the influence and the independence of the press, the fact that neutral arbiters of kind of democratic practice have recognized in the United States what people refer to as backsliding, a democratic backslide. And so all these things have raised the concern and certainly raised the level of anxiety in the population on the cusp of this election. It’s been nine years since Donald Trump emerged in public life, since he came down the gold colored escalator in Trump Tower and announced himself to be a candidate for the presidency of the United States. We are also speaking just on the other side of the rally that took place in Madison Square Garden that even prior to the moment of its announcement, in fact, was compared to the 1939 rally of the German American Bund, one of the most significant, although not the only, enduring moments of popular support for one variety of fascism or another in American life.

Indeed, one of the uncomfortable dynamics we have to confront in looking at the complexities of our particular moment is the long lineage of anti-democratic political behavior and the genetic inheritance that we have received that has flared up in the contemporary world. In 2015, it’s worth remembering that within 24 hours, a 24 hour period, Donald Trump came down that escalator and announced himself to be a candidate for the presidency, and in doing so, he cited a number of reasons. But primary among them was the idea that the country was beset by Mexican rapists. I should point out that I do not assert there to be any causal relationship between these two dynamics. In fact, I believe that both of these dynamics are related to a bigger question of the zeitgeist of that moment. But within 24 hours, a 21-year-old South Carolinian by the name of Dylann Roof entered the sanctuary, actually the basement, of the Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people.

In the course of this murder spree, he fired upon a young man, a 23-year-old by the name of Tywanza Sanders. Mr. Sanders fell to the ground. We have the account of his last moments because his mother, who was also present, witnessed what transpired. She survived the shooting because she lay in a pool of blood and placed her body over the body of her granddaughter, who was 10 or 11 years old. She laid on top of her in order to protect her from Dylann Roof’s murderous intentions. And it succeeded, but it also meant that she had to suffer the most terrible faith that any parent could imagine, which is that she saw her son injured and dying and could not go to him to help. She had a brutal Sophie’s Choice moment in which, in order to save the life of her 12-year-old or her 11-year-old granddaughter, she had to watch her son’s last moments. Or, as she later said in court transcripts, she said that she watched her son take his first breaths and she watched him take his last breaths after he’d been shot. “However,” Mrs. Sanders said to Dylann Roof, “we mean you no harm. Why are you doing this? You don’t have to do this.” Dylann Roof responded that he did have to do it because, quote, “Black men were raping white women and taking over the world.”

And so twice within a 24 hour span, we had this language of the protection of presumably white women from the menace of dark complexioned men cited as a rationale for an action. In one instance it was murderous. In one instance it was political, and some might say implicitly so. So this is the moment, the natal moment at which Trumpism takes form, in which it comes into existence in the world.

If we look now at the kind of bookmark moment on the other side of this, the other side of this is what transpired on January 6, 2021 in the attempt to prevent the certification of the election and the standard ritual of the Electoral College in the tradition of non-violent transfer of power in the United States. And this is disrupted for the first time. There’s been lots of instances of people disrupting voting behavior, but the actual transition of power that begins with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson has happened successively — and succinctly and generally bureaucratically and quietly — until this particular year. It’s worth remembering what was happening in 2015 and thinking about it in order to get a vantage point of it. I, as a person who is both a historian and journalist, tend to find it most fruitful to move back and forth in time, to look at the modern and the contemporary in the context of what’s happened before. A century earlier, in 1915, we saw the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. This was marked culturally in lots of different ways, lots of different reflections and authors and books and articles, but most fundamentally, it was marked by the release of a film called Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation was released in 1915. It is a classic of American cinema. It is also one of the great renderings of white supremacy in American cultural life. The film is disturbing on multiple levels. It lionizes the Ku Klux Klan. It presents the legislators — the Black legislators who took office during the Reconstruction period — as lazy, ignorant, foolish, lascivious, [and] a general civic threat. It is egregiously and almost satirically racist. But, I would contend that people who have ever seen that film, or know what the film is about, tend to get upset about the wrong thing. The problem with Birth of a Nation is not what it says about the past. There have been lots of attempts to distort the past, particularly as it related to Reconstruction, some of which we will talk about later in this conversation.

But its diagnosis and its predictions about the future, he’s dead wrong about the historical part. D. W. Griffith is dead wrong about the historical part. He is stunningly and disturbingly accurate in the predictive part about the future. Well, what was he predicting? The plot of that film holds that the lingering fractures of the Civil War, the division between North and South — as reflected in the two families, the Stoneman’s and the Cameron’s — that these lingering antagonisms can be cemented through their mutual contempt for the Negro. And this is the thing that, North and South, the distant and fractured fraternal relationship, that fracture can be healed once all parties recognize their common problem is the Negro.

Birth of a Nation the film inspires the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. Very many people know this takes place in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and as a testament to the DNA of that film and its relationship to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, we see the emergence of the ritual of the burning cross. The Ku Klux Klan was founded initially in 1866 in Tennessee in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War as a militia, a military group intent upon the white supremacist subordination of the newly emancipated formerly enslaved population of Black people. This is their objective. There is no iconography of a burning cross. In fact, D. W. Griffith, as the director, in the modern context, is thinking about an arresting visual image, a way that he can convey the literally burning passion of these militants who are intent upon reclaiming the South for white people. And he strikes upon the burning cross as an image. And so this cross becomes a part of the Klan’s iconography, straight from D. W. Griffith’s imagination. In the context of 1915, however, the emergence and re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan is tailored to the antagonisms of that moment.

Unlike the singularly focused first iteration of the Klan, the second iteration of the Klan is concerned with a broader set of antagonisms. They hate Jews, they hate immigrants, they hate Catholics, and of course, they maintain their contempt and hatred for Black people. For a very bad pun, whenever I would talk with my students, I would say, “What was the difference between the first Klan and the second Klan?” And I’d say, “The second Klan was more Catholic in its hatreds.” Yeah, okay, I’ll see myself out.

This zeitgeist finds fruition, its full flower, in 1924. In the midst of the eugenics movement to sterilize all populations that are seen as unfit for reproduction, the nation passes the Johnson iImmigration Restriction Act the same year that Howard Zinn is born. This contempt for others — for people from abroad, people who are not considered American, people who lack that fundamental quality that will allow them to be part of the fabric of a democratic society — is embodied, it’s codified in this law, which specifically restricts the number of people who can come from less desirable places. And these are less desirable places in Europe, much less the rest of the world. It is passed in reaction to the 40 years of relatively open immigration from Europe that preceded it, between 1880 to 1920, the period in which most white Americans trace their ancestors coming to the United States. By 2015, at the moment in which we see the emergence of this euphemistically referred to as a “populist surge,” we are in the midst of a similar kind of allergic reaction, this time in response to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act.

There’s a 41-year period in which American immigration is dominated by this idea, this eugenic idea, of protecting the stock and protecting the bloodline. When we hear the language from Donald Trump of groups that are polluting the American bloodline it harkens back to the same sort of language. In 1965 we see the Immigration Reform Act, legislation that is very much impacted by the zeitgeist of the Civil Rights Movement and the influence of the Civil Rights Movement that liberalizes immigration laws and changes, literally, the complexion of American society. Now, immigrants who come from Asia, who come from Latin America, who come from the Caribbean, who come from Africa, who come from the Middle East, places that, by and large, have been prohibited from sending immigrants into the United States under the old dispensation. I’m from Queens. Oh, seriously, there’s a Queens person back there? Cool. We always find each other. I feel bad, sorry about the Mets. We didn’t do it, and then apparently the Yankees won’t do it either. Yeah, no, for the record I did not expect sympathy from this crowd.

But that’s significant. And I don’t want to get into this, because it will become the whole conversation in itself, but I will take a momentary detour to point out one fundamental fact that if you understand it, everything else makes sense. If you do not understand it, lots of things will not make sense. And that is to say, I grew up in Queens, and Queens is, statistically speaking, the most diverse county in the United States. More than 400 languages are spoken there. When I grew up, Queens was very much kind of a backwater of New York City. No one came there unless it was to go to the airport. 

But in recent years, Queens has become a tourist destination, largely because people realize that you can get food from all over the world prepared by people who are from those places. It reflects in my personal biography, which is that I played baseball in high school and when I go back through the lineup, I was a right fielder, the left fielder was South Asian (his family was Sikh), the center fielder was Puerto Rican, the second baseman was Jewish, shortstop was Colombian, catcher was Jamaican. You know, we look like the United Nations taking the field. We also sucked. But that wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that we were engaged in this fundamentally American ritual together. That’s the Queens that I grew up in.

Donald Trump grew up in Queens a generation before I did, when Queens was the second whitest part of New York City. Queens was so segregated that when Jackie Robinson purchased a home there — this is Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers — a cross was burned to let him know that he was not welcome. LaGuardia Airport was segregated, functionally segregated, but not with white and colored signs. But if you were a Black person, you were sent to one waiting area for a flight; if you were a white person, you were sent to a different one. This is the long legacy of housing segregation and racial restrictions and racial covenants in Queens.

The difference between Trump’s time growing up in Queens and mine is the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. The changes that eventually transformed the landscape of American demography first became visible in Queens, New York. My theory for this is that both of the airports are in Queens. I was talking with a friend of mine who’s a journalist. Her parents immigrated from India. She would tease them about coming 7,000 miles to get to America, but then landing and refusing to go more than five miles from the airport when they got here. Like, “Oh, okay. Well, this is America. Good, I’m here.” 

But that demography changed rapidly, and for one set of people, they embraced this and they saw this as a kind of welcome change. For another set of people however, the reaction was to circle the wagons, to wonder, “Who are these people? What god are they praying to? What food are they eating? What language is that that they’re speaking?” And it became a kind of article of resentment, so much so and so apparent that in the 1970s the television producer Norman Lear created a television show called All in the Family in which he depicted a character named Archie Bunker, who was a kind of bewildered bigot surrounded by rapidly changing times. It was set where? In Queens, New York. 

So it’s not coincidental that the most xenophobic modern American politician is a product of the most culturally diverse county in the country, that those two things are wed, that they’re related. Not only this, but it reflects this fundamental anxiety in a fundamental context of American anti-democracy.

The American evasion of democracy has consistently been a product of American anxiety about demography. I could talk about this for the rest of the night, but we won’t get to Howard Zinn. One thing, my last point on this before I move on, however, is this: Many of us remember learning about the 1798 Alien Act in school. If we remember, if you learned it the way I learned it, the Alien Act, you just learned that the Alien Act changed the amount of time it took to become a citizen from 4 or 5 years to 13 years. Inert information, dry, bureaucratic details. What I did not learn, however, was that John Adams, the Federalist president, by 1798 was well aware that he would face Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800 for the presidency, and the Federalist Party had a base which was fairly elite and fairly prominent in the northern part of the country. 

Thomas Jefferson and his newly developing Jeffersonian Democratic Party had a base that was much broader, and it was very popular among what they would have called the Yeomanry, or the small farmers and immigrants. So, in changing the time it took someone to become a citizen from 5 years to 13 years, the Federalist Party was attempting to forestall the number of people who could vote for Thomas Jefferson. Which is to say that the first immigration restriction law in this country’s history was simultaneously a voter suppression law, which is why we have seen these things paired together so frequently over the course of history.

When I talk with my students they say, “Why was Mississippi so racist?” I’ll just say, I’ll just throw it out, “Why would Mississippi be so adherent to the doctrines of white supremacy, so intent on preventing Black people from voting?” And they come through all kinds of explanations: it’s landlocked, it’s this, it’s that. They would kind of go through all these things, and then I’ll say, “The answer is right there in front of you.” Mississippi was the only state, I mean, after South Carolina, it remained the only state in which there was a larger Black population than there was white population. Numbers, numbers. So I would say, when we’re talking about Mississippi with my students, “Do you know how hard it is to stand out for racism in America, how hard you really apply yourself?” It was bad, because it’s like a really off color joke, but I was like, “Mississippi is like the New York Yankees of racism: it’s not always the best, but usually in contention to be the best.” In a Boston crowd, I don’t expect to get anything from that. But that’s where we are. This demography becomes the basis of this concern. And this tradition can go through the Electoral College, can go through the three fifths compromise, can go through all these things, but it finds it rears its head again and again and again and again.

So how does Howard Zinn enter this equation? Resolutely, defiantly, democratically intent upon giving a voice and an understanding of the social movements that have attempted to move in the opposite direction. The novelist Russell Banks once pointed out that America is defined by two narratives. He said that the fundamental romantic narrative of the nation is Go West, Young Man. It’s about the expansion of the country in the westward direction, he said. But the fundamental direction of African American history has been North, the movement from South to North. He proposed that there was a kind of crossroads, a place in which these two narratives, both figuratively and geographically, meet. If we were to adapt that to our purposes, we would say that there is this tradition, this anti-democratic tradition, that we spoke about. And as we enter part two on the meaning of sin, I would propose that we have these narratives that move in opposite directions, an anti-democratic tradition and a democratic tradition — irreconcilable, hostile to each other’s interests, but consistently vying for influence and hegemony in the course of our history and our lives and our society.

Most people have read Howard Zinn’s most well known book, A People’s History of the United States. I have my own story of how I came to that text, and like most people, I tend to see it as a kind of BC and AD experience. I read the book when I was 23 and my understanding of the society that I was living in, my understanding of my responsibilities, my understanding of the past, all of these things exploded into these much more complicated ways of understanding the world around me. In order to properly appreciate the significance of the book, we have to talk about a few public controversies.

In 2019, Nikole Hannah Jones, journalist for the New York Times Magazine, released the 1619 Project, the journalistic, historical commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of 20 Africans who were brought here against their will to where they were enslaved in Jamestown Virginia, or, has generally been suspected, afforded the status of indentured servants in Jamestown, Virginia. The 1619 Project immediately became controversial in the midst of the last year of the Trump presidency, a kind of revanchist Empire Strikes Back. A movement developed fairly quickly, intent upon criticizing and taking down this project as propagandistic, unfit for scholarly examination, and so on. Had we been paying attention the conflict that emerged around that project probably should not have surprised us.

In 1995, some of us will recall that the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition of the Enola Gay. The Enola Gay was the airplane that carried the first atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, and in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, the museum intended to display the fuselage of the plane and have an exhibit that contextualized the dropping of the atomic bomb. It generated a huge degree of public controversy. On the one hand, the act of dropping a bomb and the instantaneous incineration of 70,000 human beings had been understood as the punctuation to World War II. In subsequent years, however, scholarly evaluation had raised questions about whether the dropping of the atomic bomb was a necessity, a military necessity, and whether the objectives in ending the war quickly had more geopolitical interests and geopolitical motivations to conclude the War before the Soviet army joined in the Pacific Theater. So there’s a huge controversy. Ultimately, the fuselage is displayed, but there’s no broader exhibit, and there’s no text that could be interpreted as lionizing or condemning the decision to display the fuselage of the legate.

Three years before that, we saw the sesquicentennial of Columbus’s arrival, and that also elicited a public controversy, a significant public controversy. On the one hand, there was a sense of people who had consumed the general public understanding of Columbus. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the narrative of heroism and discovery, particularly the significance of Columbus to Italian Americans, and the origin of that holiday as a means of presenting a brief for the inclusion of Italians who had suffered a bigoted antagonism as they arrived in significant numbers as immigrants. Columbus, as his heroism became the brief for Italian contributions to the Western world, a Western tradition. There’s also the narrative of genocide, of imperialism, of colonialism, of the subordination and slavery that emerge in the wake of Columbus’s arrival. So when we look at this moment, there’s a great deal of confusion about how we should understand it.

This is where A People’s History comes in. These conflicts, if we look at them, they have one thing in common, which is that there is a general public in lay perception of a particular question about history, and a perception of scholars and the scholarly dialog that has moved in a direction far afield, far different from where the general public understands this perception to be. Not surprisingly, museums and cultural institutions that are meant to be the kind of mediating body between the scholarly world and the lay public find themselves in the crosshairs, and all of these kinds of conflicts. What A People’s History of the United States did was demonstrate the power of synthesis. That book brilliantly and enduringly stood in the middle and translated decades of scholarly currents and developments into language that was accessible and appealing to the lay reader, to the common reader of American history. As a consequence, the book has sold more than two million copies, which is unbelievable for a history book.

One of the things that’s crucial to understanding the importance of this book appearing in 1980 is that it is both a history of the United States and a reflection of the history of the historical profession itself. Howard Zinn has talked very significantly about the way in which his personal biography influenced his academic, the time that he spent, the nature of labor in American life, his time as a professor at a southern HBCU — which I will talk about in more detail in a moment — and his experience as a bombardier in World War II. All of these went into the framing and the intellectual outlook that eventually culminated in Professor Zinn’s work. He studied at NYU under the GI Bill and then at Columbia University, where he did his doctorate degree and completed it in 1957. His doctoral dissertation examined the congressional career of Fiorello La Guardia, the congressional rep and Mayor of New York City for whom the aforementioned airport is named.

During his time at Columbia, the field of history was beginning to change from the staid, establishment oriented perspective, the drawing room historian, to a much more dynamic and engaged profession, one that was connected to and reflective of the currents in which the work was being produced. Notably, he does this work in the course of the McCarthy period. Biographers and observers have noted, have questioned, how someone with Zinn’s politics had the audacity to write a doctoral dissertation about this unabashedly leftist figure in American life, and would there be a general climate of intellectual chill? Well, he had the benefit of two very notable defenders: Henry Steele Commager and Richard Hofstadter, both of whom had been validly anti-McCarthyite. We could have a whole entire conversation about Richard Hofstadter and what he proposes in the paranoid style of American politics, which is also an instructive lens to read Professor Zinn’s subsequent work through.

But, by the 1960s and 1970s, the baby boom generation — the generation that had seen the initial days of the Civil Rights Movement, that had initiated the anti-Vietnam War Movement, that had seen the emergence of the Women’s Movement — that generation was beginning to enter graduate school, and they were beginning to ask different questions. They were seeking a more urgent form of scholarship that examined questions about imperialism, that examined the significance of race in American life, that looked at the now classic trinity of race, class, and gender. Those questions came to the fore in the work of this generation of historians, both domestically and internationally.

One of the most instructive ways of understanding A People’s History of the United States is via the footnotes. Not simply for the delectable tidbits of information that are included in there, but the specific historians that Professor Zinn is quoting. He puts together a synthesis of where the historical scholarship has taken itself in the preceding years, when Gary Nash and Jesse Lemisch began asking questions, and other historians. The problem is that you leave people out. Just suffice it to say for everyone I mentioned, they are a placeholder for people I’m not mentioning. But when they began asking about how the everyday person experienced the American Revolution, and pointing out the distinctions between how the political and economic elite experienced the transition from colony to nation, and saying that this was distinct from the way that the yeoman, the laborer, or the dispossessed person experienced this change. When a new generation of historians, informed by the Civil Rights Movement, begins to overturn the stagnant historiography of slavery and begins to overturn the mythology of Reconstruction — which had been codified and generated in the history department at Columbia itself, the Dunning School, which articulated these ideas of white supremacist belief about what Reconstruction had been. So, in surveying the landscape in which all of these changes had taken place, Professor Zinn brilliantly puts together this synthesis of that body of work into a cohesive way of understanding the nation.

Now this doesn’t happen without consequences. As a matter of fact, I took note of what the historian Sean Wilentz said, that Howard Zinn was a popular popularizer, not a scholar of original thought. [There is] no basis for this. I think this is the type of thing that people say about people whose books actually get read. If we think about this, the other significant point about Professor Zinn is his engagement with the question of objectivity and the subjectivity of the people who are producing scholarly work. His critique of the aerial bombing missions that he participated in in World War II precedes by decades the recognition of the moral implications of drone warfare. This is ongoing.

As a matter of fact, one of my faculty members, Azmat Khan, won the Pulitzer Prize three years ago for her work in highlighting the vast disparity between the numbers of people that the United States government, via its military, attest have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of drone bombings and the number of people who have actually been killed. In order to discover this, she put on a helmet and went to Iraq and Afghanistan and counted casualties and families as a consequence of drone bombing. So Professor Zinn is far ahead of us in understanding this. He understands objectivity to be a false pursuit, and he makes a brief for the historian as an actor in the world, as a person who is actively in pursuit of a more fair social order.

Now, there is a significant footnote that I think Professor Zinn would do well to have pointed out — that there were lots of people who believed the historian should be an actor. We were awash in Marxist histories and Freudian histories and histories of one ideological sort or another. The problem wasn’t necessarily whether or not historians would be actors, but the question was exactly what production they were acting in. Also the belief that historians had heretofore too often created work that, passively or actively, willingly or unwittingly, upheld the dominant social order, which is a critique that bears particular similarity and resonance to the critique that Professor Derrick Bell makes, the critical race theorist, about the way that our legal structure operates. It might be interesting to think about Professor Bell and Professor Zinn and their work in the context of each other.

Finally, there’s one significant point that I believe Professor Zinn’s work could have been better informed by engaging. He resolutely and consistently speaks to the importance of populist movements like Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion and the movement to decentralize the authority of central government that might be oligarchic and so on. Needless to say, this legacy has been complicated as we look at that idea of a left populism. But it has fundamentally, most commonly in our politics, been articulated on the far right. And this is the kind of populist ideology that unites the militias of various stripes. Indeed, the presumption that the actors from Shays’s Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion were necessarily the heralds of a progressive politics is not . . . . I think the reality is more complicated than we might have gathered from Professor Zinn’s admiration for those movements.

The final section, A People’s Future of the United States. As I mentioned at the outset, we have this conversation in the midst of a political and social potential peril. Perhaps the enduring significance of Professor Zinn’s work in a moment like this is that he consistently reminded us of the battles we’ve fought and he consistently reminded us of the battles we’ve won. He was critical of the mindlessly triumphalist version of American history, but his work contains plenty of victories, and more so his work contains granular explication of how those victories were achieved and how those gains were attained.

As we’ve looked around and we’ve seen book bans proliferate across the country, people have attempted to hide our history at the exact moment that we most need to engage with it. It is at this moment that we hear the voice of Howard Zinn reminding us from the ethers — and in the incredible body of his work — that we have won before and that against great and difficult odds, it’s possible, maybe not even entirely probable, but possible, that we will win again. Thank you.

Q&A

Question: I’ve been wanting to ask you this from before I knew I was going to be introducing you. You mentioned the statement that democracy is on the ballot. We’ve been hearing that for a long time. When I think about the fact that we’re dealing with media, press disinformation, propaganda, etcetera, is it too melodramatic, if not too colorful, to suggest that journalism is on the ballot?

Cobb: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, I don’t think it’s melodramatic at all. That’s one of the things. I mean, we had a meeting about this the other day. We were talking about the fact that as journalists, we’re not taking a position about any particular administration. I mean, I’m making a personal critique of Trump and Trumpism, but as journalists, institutionally, we’re not taking a particular position. However, there are explicit threats and policies that are detrimental to the idea of it being a free press. Yes. For instance, the overturn of New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan, which presidential candidate Trump has said he will seek to remove the broadcast licenses from news outlets and news organizations that are critical of him, which also would be a blow against the free press. But there’s a whole array, not even thinking about misinformation, disinformation. These are things that are all detrimental to journalism as a public good.

Question: Does the recent Washington Post fiasco fit into this conversation?

Cobb: It does. Do we need to define the fiasco? Everybody knows, right? Yeah, you know. So the decision not to endorse, first of all it was a kind of strange decision, because it’s like the dog that didn’t bark. By not endorsing you create a much bigger firestorm than you would by endorsing, because nobody pays attention to endorsements anyway. But not endorsing is immediately read, and I think probably correctly read, as an attempt to curry favor with a potential Trump administration. And that is what we saw previously in the Trump administration, that he attempted to attack Amazon and their postal distribution deals as a means of getting back at the Washington Post for its coverage of the Russia situation. We’ve gotten conflicting messages about the LA Times, but it’s not impossible that their motivation is the same as well. I think that’s what’s happening, and it is the preemptive compliance, yes, that we’re already in it. That we’re already in it, yeah. Democracy is really not for the faint of heart, if you really do believe — and I don’t mean like the kind of passive seventh grade civics democracy, I mean like actual democracy. You have to be willing to risk something, to be willing to put something at stake.

Question: A little while ago you made the statement that you wanted to not be partisan in your talk. I want to ask you to be partisan for a moment, but not politically partisan, professionally partisan. I want to ask you a question as a journalist and as a dean of a journalism school. This goes back to after Trump won. Two things that happened to me immediately. First and foremost, one of my colleagues walked into the English Department, this is before I came to BU, and burst into tears, which was not unusual after Trump won the first time. But he burst into tears. He said, “It’s our fault.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He said, “Education. We failed.” Oh, yeah. But then the second thing, right after that another student, a colleague of mine and a student came into my office, and he was not interested in journalism at all. But for some reason, after Trump won and he saw what was going to happen, he immediately thought, “Screw grad school. I need to be a journalist.” And he went into journalism. Those two stories, for me, say something about futurity and possibility, and I’m wondering what you think about how they fit into this moment?

Cobb: About the educational part, I think that’s the most accurate diagnosis. I mean, I’ve been saying that. The morning after the election, I spent the election in North Carolina, I was covering it for the New Yorker, I was covering the statewide races in North Carolina, and I got an early flight back. On the flight, there were two women seated behind me, and they were crying. I somehow knew that this was connected to the election, and I assumed that they knew each other. At some point, I just turned around and I said, “Are you talking about what happened yesterday?” Just a kind of the journalist in me. And they said, “Yes.” To my surprise they did not know each other, but they had discovered at some point in the waiting area and the gate that they were both mothers of children with developmental disabilities, and they were terrified at the kind of bullying that would be sanctioned now because they remembered what Trump had done when he ridiculed the disabled journalist, and they were saying that now every schoolyard terrorist would be licensed to emotionally harm their children.

We got into a conversation, and I said, “We’re going to spend a lot of time trying to understand what exactly has happened.” One of the women said, “It won’t take that much time.” She said, “I’m a teacher, and we have failed in American education. We’ve failed in American education for a really long time,” and that this was ultimately the yield of it, irrespective of people’s political orientation.

Question: That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is recognizing the core civic fundamentals that this entire rubric is supposed to operate under. The idea that we can countenance a potential presidency by someone who attempted to overthrow the last election highlights the severe crisis that we’ve had in terms of civic education. So in terms of civic education and crisis, this is me going back to you being partisan as a journalist and as a dean of journalism, how would you grade the press at this point?

Cobb: I get that question, and it’s a difficult question. I promise I’m not dodging it. The press is disparate and wide and certainly varied, and even sometimes the same organization is inconsistent. I mean, try to grade the New York Times. You could find evidence for anything that you wanted in the Times. The Times has done astounding journalism and has also done really bad, poorly conceived journalism. And that’s been the kind of mix of things that’s happened. Then there’s also lots of different organizations that are under that rubric of media. I think, generally speaking, the press has done a better job in 2024 than it did in 2020 or 2016 in highlighting the policy stakes. There was much more horse race kind of stuff in the previous elections, but there was more explication of specific policy issues, I think, across a lot of different kinds of play.

Question: Because what I was going to ask you is, how would you grade the last go round versus the previous one?

Cobb: I mean, I think, again, they learned it’s unwieldy. But I think that there was a generally lower . . . . Here’s one thing that I’ll say, that whole first section, the American evasion of democracy, that’s the part that we never talk about. And the consequence of never talking about that, of never talking about the things that Professor Zinn talked about, was like, “Oh, you’re trying to tear the country down.” There was a quote that I was going to read. I didn’t read it for time’s sake, but he talks about when the student comes up to him and she’s read his book, and she’s like, “Why do you live in this country if this is what you think of it?” She asks Zinn that, and she completely misreads what he was doing. He’s trying to immunize us against the shortcomings of the past by pointing them out in the present, which is what history is fundamentally supposed to do. So, to the extent that we don’t engage with that, journalists and civilians alike walk around with this ironclad presumption that American democracy is impregnable, that it began with a few flaws but invariably moved in a more democratic direction, and that whatever wrinkles and difficulties we have now are just momentary aberrations that will likely resolve themselves. And journalism is as guilty as any institution of operating with those kinds of presumptions.

Question: I’ve never been able to get over that student and just that passion, that moment where a Black student just decided, “Oh, wait a minute, I’ve been wrong. Journalism is where I need to go to respond to this moment.” So I’m just curious. It might sound like I’m holding out for some kind of hope, although perhaps I’m too old to hope for things at this point, but the students you work with, what do you see happening in terms of students engaging with journalism in this particular climate?

Cobb: I think that if we talk about institutionally, everything I said applies institutionally, that kind of reluctance, and it applies to a lot of people who are operating in their profession. I don’t think that that’s the only vantage point that people have in the profession. They’re people who know exactly what’s at stake. And for us at the journalism school, anybody who goes into journalism now, yeah, yes, is very serious about it. They are very dedicated and very devoted. These are people who really believe that the press is the bulwark of democracy and that journalism is a public good. Each time I interact with the students, I derive as much inspiration from them as they might from anything that’s happening in the classroom. So I don’t think that you’re too old to have to seek out hope. I think I’m probably older than you, and I haven’t stopped. We don’t know. We don’t. We’ll figure it out after a big reveal. But I think that hope is crucial. If you don’t have hope, then why bother? I think that we have to avoid cheap hope. The thing that we were talking about where good things happen on autopilot, like, yeah, that’s not hope. That’s actually abdication and laziness. But the actual kind of grizzled, battered, bruised but not defeated, valiant hope that says that — as I used to always say to my students — “I have the optimism of a boxer in the late round,” which means if you’re still on your feet, you still have a chance at winning.

Question: The reason I keep going back to this student is because for me, hope is always there, and that’s why I wanted to know what you felt in relation to your students. That one particular student, that level of enthusiasm he had for the possibility of journalism. I just wanted to see if that’s something.

Cobb: No, I have a building full of people like that.

Question: My name is Diane Barry and I have a question. It’s a struggle I’ve been seeing in journalism, both in the print and in radio, for about the past five to eight years. I will date myself. I’m 63. I would say growing up, there was a movement to try and present balanced journalism, that we’re going to present something from this side, something from that side. They were going to present them both in a reasonable way. There’s been a struggle in the last five to eight years of what to do with that. When is it right to point out that one side is ethically wrong or ethically questionable? Is it wrong to present them as equal when one side is a very minority view? Those kinds of questions, I can see that journalism is struggling with them and is getting a lot of criticism for it, and doesn’t know what to do about it. SoI would like to know your thoughts on that subject.

Cobb: One of the things that has happened . . . . I also talk to my students and say that, for journalism, our ethics have generally been refined in the context of crisis. Each development in terms of how we approach journalism and how we understand the craft of journalism has come, generally speaking, in the aftermath of a crisis. So the crisis that we’re in is generating those kinds of questions. At a certain point, it was probably possible to have that undifferentiated kind of presentation. I don’t know that that was ever the best way of approaching news, but the default house style of some people like ketchup, some people like mustard. When you’re saying some people like ketchup, some people like strychnine, those two things, you really wind up failing in your core mission — which is to educate the public, to give the public the information that it needs to make decisions. It normalizes it.

The other part of it, though, is that there’s an allergic response within the media, because they feel like they’re putting the thumb on the scale to actually point out the differences. Where the equality is supposed to be is in scrutiny. You’re not supposed to necessarily guarantee equality of results, but we’re going to check everyone to see if this is bullshit. And if it is, we’re going to say it. And we say that this person is 10 percent bovine manure guaranteed here, this person has a fertilizer truck, and so that’s where I think we sometimes fall down in our unwillingness to commit to the idea that these things are not necessarily equivalent.

Question: Hi, I’m Deja, and I’m a journalism grad student here. I’m so excited that you’re here. I love your work, and you have been on my vision board. Anyway, I’m getting ready to graduate this year, and when you were talking about objectivity, it has been one of the struggles that I’ve had with journalism, especially wanting to be a race reporter, because it seems like the only time objectivity comes up is when it involves race. As someone who’s getting ready to graduate, who wants to get into that type of journalism, those jobs seem to be drying up because of the DEI situation. What would you recommend for us as journalists? How do we grapple with that, or how do we navigate that?

Cobb: I think there has to be a fundamental commitment to fairness. Given all the things I just said, this is a very difficult rope to walk, I know, but there has to be a fundamental commitment to fairness. And I say this all the time: the minute that an audience member or reader or viewer, whatever, the minute they have a sense that you have your thumb on the scale one way or another, you’ve lost them and you won’t ever get them back. But you have to have a fair minded grappling, which doesn’t mean that these things have to come out equal on the other side. But there has to be a fair commitment to understanding.

Since I’m in such receptive territory, I will tell yet another Yankees story. It’s significant. There’s a Red Sox angle to this story too. In 2018, I think it is when the Dodgers and the Red Sox [were] in the World Series, I and a friend of mine who lives in LA, at the beginning of the year we agreed that we were going to go to the World Series, wherever it was. It just so happened to be in LA, so he just had to leave his house and drive downtown to the game. I had to fly all the way across the country. So, I go out to LA, and on the flight out, there’s a guy from New York who’s doing the same thing. He’s flying out for the World Series. And then also the actor, Gary Busey. Just a very weird, random thing, right? It’s like me and this guy, like the guy sitting next to me, he’s watching the game, and we get into a conversation about the game. Gary Busey then notices us and there’s an open seat next to us and sits down and starts talking, and it’s the beginning of a really bad joke. It’s like this very weird thing.

But then this strange thing happens, and it pointed out the importance of not operating with presumptions about how people understand the world. I am supporting the Dodgers because I’m from New York. The Dodgers used to be a New York team, and I certainly would be thrown out of the city if I supported the Red Sox against the Dodgers. And I just presumed that this guy is the same. Then the Red Sox score, and he’s happy about it! And I was like, “Wait, what? You’re from Brooklyn? What’s happening?” He was like, “No, no, I want the Red Sox to win.” And I was like, “How on earth could a Yankee fan” — and the Yankees were eliminated by the Red Sox en route to this world series — “how on earth can you rationalize supporting the Red Sox?” And he said, “Well, if the Red Sox win the World Series, it means that the Yankees were eliminated by the best team in baseball, and in theory, they could be the second best team this year if the Dodgers beat the Red Sox. It means that the Yankees were, at best, the third best team in baseball. So I’m rooting for the Red Sox because I’m rooting for the Yankees.” The human mind, right?

Now, I thought this was bizarre. It was logically accurate, but the importance here was not about the teams. If we replace any other position, it is that people have their own way of understanding the world, and they come to conclusions that on the face might seem bizarre to you. But if you engage them and listen to them, they have a vantage point that might actually teach you something. And I think that’s the most important thing. Our ability to do that, the ability of the public to regain the trust of the public, is directly proportional to our ability to do that.

Question: I want to ask a favor of you, sir. I wanted to return to a piece of your question that disappeared. You said something about objectivity emerging in the context specifically of race. That’s fascinating. You left that behind. Could you go back to that for me, please?

Cobb: Two things. One, there’s a book called The View from Somewhere which actually grapples with these questions. I don’t think that race is the only place where that happens. I do think that it is a preponderance that people have these. It’s also probably related to the fact that there are proportionately fewer people of color in news organizations than there are in the general public, kind of representation. At the same time, I think that there’s a house presumption very often that if you’re a Black person and you’re writing about race, that you have a particular bias. As if a white person writing about race doesn’t. That gets back to the objectivity question, because the biases that are less visible, or are considered to be or less noticeable, are considered to be objective. Whereas even pointing out those biases is considered to not be. But the thing that I will also tell you is that, for me, it’s been important to pick my fights — which doesn’t mean I didn’t fight ever, it just meant I picked my fights. And we can talk about this more later.

Question: I was wondering if you might speculate on how you think Zinn’s take would be on Project 2025? And do you think we ought to be worried about it?

Cobb: Yeah, I think we should be very worried about it. What would Howard have to say? I never met him. But if I was extrapolating out from reading his work, and what I know of him, I presume that he would have articulated this in the same terms that he critiqued Reagan and Reaganism in terms of what it did to poor people, what it did to civil rights, what it did for labor, working people. The ultimate implications of Project 2025, particularly like the worsening and accelerating of the climate crisis and in gutting the non-partisan federal infrastructure in pursuit of a completely debunked and invalid idea, of there being some sort of deep state that has liberal biases and tendencies, that is something that you don’t come back from, especially when you’re talking about the sensitive mechanisms of government being in the hands. You do not want the entire personnel of the government changing every four years, or even every eight years. There’s institutional knowledge that has to be maintained, and that is, I think, one of the least examined and most dangerous parts of that project, although, I mean, there are very many that you could pick from.

Question: Thank you, nice to see you. I watch you quite often on MSNBC. But my question with journalism, coming from another country, Ghana and West Africa, our education is so comprehensive. You learn around the world. Before we came here, we already knew the 50 states of the U.S. You know who is the president of India. When I got here and I told people I’m from Ghana, this is back in 75, people had no idea. I have to always say I’m from Africa. But lately, when I tell people I’m from Africa, people have started to ask which part. So I’m glad to see improvement. I feel that journalism has to be more comprehensive, especially looking at developing nations. We make a lot of contributions to the development of the Western world — the raw materials, the forced labor, slavery building this country, the enormous economic power of this country. I get frustrated when I listen to news and they are talking about global issues. You hardly hear about Africa. You hardly hear about the poor developing nations. It seems the world begins and ends in America, in the Western world. Yet, with what I see from my own studies in America, particularly looking at epidemiology and public health that I studied, you’re looking at the distribution of wealth, distribution of causes, and distribution of diseases. Everything ties in, ultimately, to the economy, the economy of developing nations, as compared with the Western nations. I want journalists to bring these comparisons. Yes, we have people at the border. How did they get to the border? What did they supply? Fifty to sixty percent of our vegetables are coming from Latin America. The chocolate that we all love, the cocoa beans come from Ghana. Yet the big time corporations control these economies, and it keeps these people poor. And when you are poor, you’re going to go to where you can get food to eat.

So my question is, can journalism elaborate and make messages more inclusive, especially with developing nations and our contributions? To me, it’s not sustainable for, say, the Western world to continue to get all their resources, and yet, the majority, 80 percent of the world, people are suffering — brutal suffering, poverty. So Mr. Cobb, how do we get there? 

Cobb: Personally, I feel like journalism should include studies like public health to really lay the relationship between economic development and where our supplies are coming from. The average American will say, “Oh, they are coming to take our job. They’re coming.” We have to know where our food is coming from. We have to know where our resources are coming from. We have to know the role the Congo played in the second World War for us to defeat Japan, that all of the uranium was mined from Congo and these people are still impoverished. Why isn’t journalism including these facts to the knowledge of fellow Americans?