Graduation Week with Columbia Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb

Even before Jelani Cobb became Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, he was an educator. His reportage at The New Yorker (where he’s been writing about race and politics since 2012), steeped in history. And yet not even Cobb could’ve been prepared for what he’s described as a “harrowing” year in academia https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/a-tumultuous-spring-semester-finally-comes-to-a-close. On the heels of graduation week at Columbia, Cobb joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about the climate on campuses across the country (5:17), the Trump administration’s sustained attacks on higher education (9:07), and the “potentially unlawful” detainment of student activist Mahmoud Khalil (15:57). Then, Cobb speaks to the challenges of public trust in journalism (30:35), “the beneficial workplace” he hopes to cultivate in newsrooms (39:39), and why young journalists continue to inspire him (45:45). On the back-half, Jelani reflects on the five years since the murder of George Floyd (55:55), the fleeting corporate activism of 2020 (1:01:05), the importance of understanding Civil Rights history (1:06:13), and why he’s determined to continue telling stories in “dangerous times” (1:10:30). Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, journalist and professor Jelani Cobb. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he's covered race, politics, and history for over a decade. Cobb also presides as the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, which is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious programs in the country. But since the beginning of the war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, the school has been in the headlines over pro-Palestinian protests organized on campus. These protests, which began with demands for the university to divest from companies profiting from Israel's military actions, quickly spawned an encampment movement that spread to over 100 campuses.

• 1:21Sam Fragoso?

  Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia grad who was often on the front lines of those protests, was detained earlier this spring by ICE. The Trump administration justified his detention, citing a little-used statute regarding national security interests. At the time of recording, Khalil remains in a Louisiana holding cell. The backdrop to this detainment was a letter from House Republicans demanding federal investigations into what they call "a crisis of antisemitism on college campuses." Even as recent as this week, the Trump administration has continued to target Columbia, claiming the school has violated federal civil rights

• 2:04Sam Fragoso?

  law by acting with "deliberate indifference toward harassment of Jewish students on campus.

• 2:11Sam Fragoso?

  Khalil's detention and Trump's subsequent demands of universities like Columbia and Harvard have raised questions not just about free speech, but campus surveillance, academic freedom, and who gets to decide what is acceptable dissent? Speaking of dissent, I last spoke to Jelani in the summer of 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. If you're listening to this on Sunday, May 25th, today marks the five-year anniversary of Floyd's passing. We talk about that summer of protest and Floyd's enduring legacy on the back end of

• 2:55Sam Fragoso?

  this episode. But there was no way we couldn't begin in the present. As you'll hear, we taped over the holiday weekend, just a few days after graduation ceremonies were held at the university. As Jelani writes in his latest dispatch for The New Yorker, "Spring is typically a joyous time on campus, when graduating students celebrate having overcome whatever challenges they may have faced along the way." This month, he writes, "Administrators and faculty are likely equally relieved to have made it through." And so, on the other side of that, as Columbia's school year comes to a close, with its precarious

• 3:37Sam Fragoso?

  future hanging in the balance, here is my conversation with journalist and dean Jelani Kopp. Jelani Kopp, welcome back to the show.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been a minute.

• 4:01Sam Fragoso?

  It's been almost exactly five years since we last spoke on the record.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Are you serious? Wow.

• 4:09Sam Fragoso?

  We spoke in May of 2020. You remember that time, right?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I just didn't realize it had been that long.

• 4:15Sam Fragoso?

  Have you missed us?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  100%. Things have been so uneventful since the last time we spoke, so.

• 4:21Sam Fragoso?

  I was thinking that. I was thinking, like, how are we gonna fill the 65 minutes in which we are speaking? There's just so little that has happened in your life.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:33Sam Fragoso?

  We're gonna have to resort to small talk. How is it over there in New York?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  You know, we have been hoodwinked and bamboozled. We were told that it's spring, but there's no weather to actually indicate that it's spring because it is cold and rainy here.

• 4:50Sam Fragoso?

  And that concludes the end of our small talk, listeners.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  All right.

• 4:57Sam Fragoso?

  As you know, Talk Easy airs just about every Sunday morning, and we are taping this on Saturday, the 24th, and we'll be turning it around for listeners in less than 24 hours, which there's a good reason for that, which is this has been a historically eventful week in what has been a historically eventful year at Columbia University, where you serve as the dean of the journalism school. In your latest piece for The New Yorker, where you also work as a staff writer, you've described this academic year, let's just come to a close, as, quote, harrowing. So let's start here. Schools out for summer.

• 5:39Sam Fragoso?

  In what ways has it been harrowing for you?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I mean, not just for me. I think it's been for people who work in higher education, period. Specifically, more specifically, people who work at Ivy League institutions. And then even with a greater degree of specificity, people who work at Columbia, and I would say probably Harvard, too. And, you know, that's because we've seen this really unbelievable incursion and this assault on academic freedom, this campaign to intimidate people for expressing dissent, the utilization of deportation or the threat of deportation to stifle speech, particularly

• 6:23Speaker 01

  dissenting speech, and a incredible and punitive reduction in federal support for institutions of higher education and particularly in the research arena.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  All of that has been happening simultaneously. It's been a hallmark of the new administration. And in the midst of all that, we've been trying to teach classes.

• 6:50Sam Fragoso?

  Part of the complications and tension, as you just referenced, the relationship between the Trump administration and Columbia. In March, Trump threatened to cancel $51 million in federal grants to Columbia. Then, days later, that number ballooned to 400 million, claiming that the school had failed to protect Jewish students from harassment since the beginning of the Gaza War. And what appeared as a kind of ultimatum, the government called for Columbia to formalize its definition of antisemitism, to ban wearing of masks intended to conceal identity or intimidate, and to place the school's Middle Eastern, South Asian,

• 7:31Sam Fragoso?

  and African Studies Department under, quote, "academic receivership." So this spring, did Columbia largely comply with those demands from the Trump administration?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  The first thing is that, you know, it's incredible when you think about the federal government reaching that far into the inner workings of an autonomous, private institution. But we received this set of demands. The university negotiated and then came with a kind of counterproposal that largely incorporated and largely met, you know, what had been requested of it. There were different protocols around masking on campus. There was a provost-level appointment made to oversee the department, as you just mentioned, we generally refer to it as MISAS, you know, on campus. There were, I believe, 36 public safety officers

• 8:29Speaker 01

  who went through, you know, the training and the required courses so that they are now empowered and have the capacity to make arrests, you know, which had been one of the demands that was there, too. There were other things on there, but I don't have a kind of perfect recall of everything that the university agreed to.

• 8:45Sam Fragoso?

  But they largely complied. An ask was made, and they met the demands of the Trump administration. And I'm curious, given that Columbia has had four of its students targeted by the administration. For their political views, including one Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in detention. Did the university believe that the Trump administration was negotiating in good faith?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I'll say certainly people in leadership, a good number of them, believed that we were operating in good faith. I mean, that's in the messaging and the communications that were sent out. I did not believe that the federal government was operating in good faith, you know, because in each turn, you know, each attempt to find some sort of reprimand would generate a higher penalty, you know, so it started with a $51 million penalty being imposed. And then, you know, a few days later, that was increased to 400 million. And then there were the demands to place academic departments in receivership and, you know, all the things. But there was never a thing where the actual penalties got ratcheted down.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  They have only gone up. And, you know, even for Harvard, which sued the administration, but prior to filing the lawsuit, had been engaged in negotiations as well. No matter how many attempts there were to pacify or to mollify the administration, the penalties only moved in one direction. And, you know, that was for them to increase.

• 10:16Sam Fragoso?

  My experience with pacification is that you do it for children.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 10:27Sam Fragoso?

  Even after Columbia complied, and it did, the Trump administration has alleged that the university, as of this week, has violated federal civil rights law by acting with, quote, "deliberate indifference of Jewish students since October 2023." You said recently in a lecture at Oxford that capitulation never resulted in salvation. Indeed, it seemed only to embolden the most zealous antagonists. And so by that logic, has Columbia further emboldened the Trump administration? I mean, the university has an endowment of something like $14.8 billion. The tuition for a single year at Columbia is, on average, $71,000.

• 11:12Sam Fragoso?

  Was the prospect of losing 400 million Worth capitulating over.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  So I think the picture is somewhat more complicated than that. You know, so we've had this conversation about, you know, well, this university has an endowment and the endowment has, you know, X amount of resources in it. And then you're being penalized this number, which on the surface appears to be a much smaller amount. And it doesn't work quite like that, you know. For one, when you're talking about these endowments, even, you know, the multi-billion dollar endowments, the vast majority of that money is restricted, meaning that, you know, they have very particular contractual and legally binding uses to which those resources can be applied. And so if you have money that is allocated specifically for some sort of infrastructure

• 12:01Speaker 01

  need, you can't just move that over into research, which is where the bulk of these federal penalties, you know, landed. And so losing $400 million had a particular kind of ripple effect. If you are a researcher working on, you know, trying to find ways to cure cancer or many of the other terrible diseases that, you know, humans are afflicted with, and then all of a sudden that research grant disappears, you might see two, three, four, five years of work just go down the drain. Very often, these are studies that you can't just pull the plug on and then start them up again from scratch. And so, you know, there were reasons to be very concerned about, you know, how that would land.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  There are other, you know, kinds of downstream effects of this, but there certainly is a kind of disconnect, however, in saying that the university needed to be penalized for allegedly not taking antisemitism seriously enough. I don't think that that's true, but.

• 13:02Sam Fragoso?

  You think the university has taken it seriously?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it has, but even if that were the case, it doesn't quite follow that a reasonable penalty for that would be to impede its ability to fight cancer. I don't see the logic there unless it's being guided by some other kind of logic, in which case it is to disrupt the operations of universities as in the same way that, you know, the administration is antagonistic toward journalism, as a means of preventing accountability, as a means of preventing dissent, as a means of preventing independent analysis. Any place is capable of generating objective fact that might make for narratives that are counter to what the administration wants people to believe. And so that's equally likely as a motivation.

• 13:49Sam Fragoso?

  It is, it is more than equally likely that that is the main thrust.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  You're in good company in that sentiment. But in addition to that, from the outset, you know, from October 7th, you know, there have been attempts to try to make sure that we both maintain our commitment to free speech and we also create an environment in which harassment and bigotry are not tolerated. And so one of the earliest things that the community did, that the leadership did, was to create an antisemitism task force at Columbia and where, you know, other institutions that were under scrutiny created task forces that, you know, fell apart. You know, the one at Columbia actually did stick together, did do the work, did make recommendations.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  The institution took action against people who had committed acts of, you know, physical assault or, you know, had made threatening statements and so on, and attempted to navigate this in real time, you know, in ways that were consistent with, you know, with our values. Was that handled perfectly? I doubt anyone would say that it was perfectly done. But what we're talking about here is legislation that was created in the midst of the civil rights movement, we should be clear. And to say that the level of callousness and outright recalcitrance

• 15:16Speaker 01

  That characterized institutions of higher education that refused to enroll black students in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. To say that that is on par with Columbia University and its contemporary handling of issues of antisemitism, I don't think anyone would say that that was a reasonable comparison.

• 15:37Sam Fragoso?

  All of this comes on the heels of graduating students attending their respective ceremonies this week. And if not for detainment, that would have included Khalil, a graduate student and Palestinian activist who spearheaded protests on campus over the past year and a half. His absence was felt, and it was notably heard during a graduation ceremony in which Acting President Claire Shipman was giving her speech. Here's a little of what that sounded like for people who haven't seen it.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and they should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right. I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  You are lawyers and fine arts and public health. You've been named national scholars, free Mahmoud scholars.

• 16:50Sam Fragoso?

  You were there that day, right?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:53Sam Fragoso?

  What did you make of that?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  You know, so I was on the podium, I was on the dais, rather, along with the other deans and trustees. And when Acting President Shipman started to speak, there was a chorus of boos, you know, that attended when she first started to speak. In all fairness, and you know, wanting to be an accurate reporter, there also was a chorus of cheers that went. So you kind of had these dueling sounds, you know, but there were people who booed. And the boos probably went on for like the first five minutes of that speech. And then kind of maybe intermittently, once or twice after that. But I knew when I, when I first heard it, I was like, this is going to be the discussion of it.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  And I didn't, I don't think that that was quite a fair rendering, if I can say it, if I can say that.

• 17:43Sam Fragoso?

  What would be a fair rendering?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  I think most people just generally didn't want any of that to impede their ability to kind of recognize what they had achieved and to have their family see them in this moment of, you know, tremendous personal and even familial accomplishment.

• 18:03Sam Fragoso?

  In the interest of fairness and offering context, why don't we do that then? It's been reported that both Mahmoud's visa and green card have been revoked under the 1952 Immigration and Security Act, a piece of Cold War legislation that was commonly weaponized against Jewish immigrants during the anti-Semitic purges of alleged subversives. During those protests on campus last spring in Columbia, you were the university-designated negotiator with the encampments. Sitting across the table from Mahmoud, I have two questions. Since his detainment in March, have you been in contact with him?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't believe so, actually. The last time that I recall us speaking was maybe an hour before the NYPD descended upon the campus last spring. We were trying up until the last minute to try to negotiate some sort of conclusion, something that was acceptable to the university that could bring a close to the protests and not warrant the presence of the NYPD on campus. And we couldn't get there, you know? We tried up until, you know, almost literally the last minute.

• 19:20Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about that audio we heard from the graduation that you experienced in real time, how have you come to understand both why he was detained?

• 19:31Sam Fragoso?

  And why students continue to be distressed over his detainment, so much so as to protest at their own graduation?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  No, I don't think that, I don't think that's a fair rendering to say that, you know, that students were offended so much to protest at their own graduation, because that was a very small number of people. But I will say that there are students, faculty, deans, administrators, leadership, people who are not affiliated with the university, alumni, all sorts of people who are disturbed, bothered and outraged by Mahmoud Khalil's detention. And, you know, for what it matters, you know, this is what my doctoral dissertation research was about, you know, the Cold War and the civil rights movement and the suppression of dissent and these, you know, things. I understand that legislation very clearly.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It had been utilized not only to further the, the kind of anti-Semitic ideas of that era, but to suppress dissent, particularly dissent among people who were immigrants or recent immigrants, or people who were green card holders and so on. If we went back a generation before that, we'd find the same thing, you know, in, in around the midst of World War I, where we had the Palmer raids, in which immigrants were being arrested, detained and deported under the presumption that they were Bolshevik sympathizers. And so what we're seeing is really the weaponization of a particular kind of nativism.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, whether you agree with Mr. Khalil or not, the suppression of his ability to speak and to articulate, you know, what he believes is an infringement upon, you know, the First Amendment for all of us on some level. And we also would be naive, I think, to presume that these kind of incursions will remain, you know, segregated to the immigrant population or to the naturalized citizen population. I think that if those rights can be impeded for anyone, they will eventually be impeded for everyone.

• 21:45Sam Fragoso?

  As someone who, who, who knew this student, as someone who sat across the table from this student. How do you render his detainment?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I'm not an attorney, but my sense of this, or a judge, but my sense of it is that it's both illegal and unconstitutional, not consistent with the most basic reading of the First Amendment. I suspect that the objective is to intimidate people into compliance, to make dissent too costly. And there's a reason, when you think about the founders of this country, who were flawed in very many ways, in ways that I've articulated and talked about on a number of occasions. But when you think about the founders of this country and their paranoia about what powerful people were capable of doing, having had to overthrow a monarchy in order to establish

• 22:40Speaker 01

  a country, a nation, there's a reason why the very first thing they do is protect the right to dissent. Literally, the First Amendment in the Constitution.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  And so, no, I don't think that this is consistent with that at all. But I don't think that this administration is particularly concerned with those things either.

• 23:00Sam Fragoso?

  Catherine Frankie, who was formerly a 10-year law professor at Columbia, said in one recent interview, "I hold Columbia responsible as well," as well, also alluding to the Trump administration. Do you believe Columbia bears some responsibility in that?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  For his detention? No, I don't think so.

• 23:21Sam Fragoso?

  You don't think so?

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And the reason I say that is this. There are an array of things that people have been less likely to talk about as it related to Columbia. For one, and I want to be accurate, this is the thing, there are narratives that are on the left, there are narratives on the right, there are all these kinds of things that people hold. I'm going to only respond to the greatest degree of accuracy that I can. One of the things that people don't know, for instance, is that Columbia University refused to give the federal government information about the people they were pursuing and that they were hoping to detain. And that we got directives, we got orders as deans to not do that. We also got orders to not allow

• 24:07Speaker 01

  You know, the federal government onto any private part of Columbia's property unless they had a judicial warrant. And we were forced to do that. And even then, only an officer from the president's office could do that. And so there were prior attempts to arrest Mr. Khalil and other individuals that failed because people at the university refused to give ICE officers access to the campus. So, you know, one thing that people paid no attention to was when, you know, the White House Press Secretary announced that there was, you know, the threat of investigating Columbia University for refusing to cooperate with ICE, with Homeland Security. There was a reason for that.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  But if we're going to talk about, you know, where the university went wrong, then we have to have an entire accounting of everything that happened. And from my vantage point, I did not see the university do anything to abide, you know, the detention of, you know, the students or former students.

• 25:06Sam Fragoso?

  On March 8th, Mahmoud is in the lobby of his apartment building when several ICE agents enter and take him into custody. They then threaten his eight-month-pregnant wife with arrest, even though she is an American citizen.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Uncontrollable.

• 25:21Sam Fragoso?

  And this woman is pregnant, trying to follow them, asking, "Where are you taking him?" These are the kinds of things that we hear about and see in other countries. Now, that night, the AP, wondering whether they had an arrest warrant, reaches out to a Columbia spokesperson, who says on the record, "Law enforcement agents must produce a warrant before entering university property." But the spokesperson declined to say if the school had received one ahead of Khalil's arrest. I'll just let that sit there for a moment. Law says you have to have one.

• 26:02Sam Fragoso?

  The Columbia spokesperson says, "We're not going to say whether they had one." Okay. Then, come April 24th, the AP details that the government, in their initial filing of their arrest report, claimed that there was an arrest warrant when, in fact, there was none. A lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security then claimed that actually, you know what, no warrant was needed because they feared he'd flee and that he could be removed from the country because his presence or activities would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. When you hear that, not just as a human being and a journalist, but also as a historian,

• 26:46Sam Fragoso?

  what parallels come to mind?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  So there's one thing that I think, and I'm not 100% sure of this myself, but my understanding was that these ICE officers essentially let themselves into that lobby, that they kind of, you know, came in as somebody else was coming out and that was how they gained access. It's a question of whether or not someone in an official capacity granted them access to that building or if they just walked into the building and seized him. And I think that that's an important distinction because we're talking about the university's engagement there. That said, I don't think that any of that is any more defensible than, you know, I said at the outset, that it's lawless, that it's unconstitutional, that in my understanding

• 27:30Speaker 01

  it's illegal, that this is reminiscent of the McCarthy era. You know, for me, reminiscent of Jim Crow.

• 27:38Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  That's it. People ask, well, how do I mean? The parallel is exactly, Jim Crow was unconstitutional. You know, the 14th Amendment said very clearly that you had to have equal protection under the law. You can't have laws that affect one part of the population, not another part of the population. But for nearly a century, after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the country, or at least a portion of the country, proceeded to do exactly that, which meant that they didn't give a damn about what the Constitution said or didn't say. They were going to do what they wanted to do. When we think about American lawlessness and infidelity to the Constitution,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  we should begin there because it provides the basis to understand all the kinds of subsequent lapses into unconstitutional behavior that we've witnessed in the country. I mentioned Alan Schrecker, you know, the historian. She is an expert on the impact of McCarthyism in higher education. She's written a number of books. She's amazing. She's an 86-year-old historian. She's very dynamic, you know, doing important work. But 33 years ago, in 1992, she published an article about the history of deportation

• 29:01Speaker 01

  being used as a means of suppressing political dissent in this country in 1992. And she was looking backward at how, you know, all these kinds of convenient or questionable claims of national security were deployed to deport people who had immigrant backgrounds, who were advocating for causes that were unpopular. And so there always has been this nexus between what people with power find convenient and what they claim to be in the interests of national security and the ways in which that has been weaponized against people who are comparatively vulnerable.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I think that Mahmoud Khalil is part of that pattern.

• 29:48Sam Fragoso?

  So let's talk about that nexus. I want to dig into that, like the air of lawlessness that I've certainly felt from afar. I'm sure you have felt being on campus, you know, because one of the motivating factors for the Trump administration, and you've seen this being played out at Harvard, is to make it increasingly difficult for international students to come to this country and to study at our highest institutions. Inside the journalism school at Columbia, which you preside over, I believe roughly 41% of students are international.

• 30:22Sam Fragoso?

  And in a meeting with those students, which the Times reported on back in March, you said, quote, "No one can protect you. These are dangerous times." You subsequently released a statement on Blue Sky, which I have read in full, claiming your words, along with your colleagues, were taken out of context. So let's, let's put him in proper context and clear the air once and for all, so people know what the hell happened here.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  So actually, don't take my word for whether that was an accurate representation of that meeting. You should take the word of the students who were there. Look at their Blue Sky comments and their social media posts. So it wasn't just me trying to say that, oh, this is not what I was trying to say. It was the people who I was talking to felt the same way. And so the most, I think, probably the most salacious and cynical interpretation of my words was published in, you know, the New York Times in a context that made it appear to sound like I was discouraging, you know, my students from reporting on what was going on around them, that, and when in fact I had been making the opposite

• 31:28Speaker 01

  point. And so contextually, we were going to do the work of reporting. You know, we're always going to do the work of reporting. You know, that's what we're here for. That's what we do. At the same time, we have students who are tremendously vulnerable and who were in that moment, you know, really very vulnerable. And what I needed to convey was the necessity of taking those threats seriously, even as we go about the work of reporting. And so when someone said, what are you going to do to protect us? When I said, no one can protect you, I said that in response to the question. I was like, this is journalism.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  These are dangerous times. No one can protect you. The only protection you have is adhering to the protocols that we've talked about. And that, we said, if you're going to report and you are an international student, maybe you should not be the front-facing person. Maybe a student, a domestic student does that. If you're reporting, you know, on campus... You know, we have to make sure people are properly identified as press. You know, one of the people who was speaking there was the attorney, you know, who also said that because, in his estimation, the things that were happening with Mr. Khalil were illegal and unconstitutional, we should not anticipate, you know, this administration operating within the bounds

• 32:53Speaker 01

  of a normal presidential administration. And so we had to convey, we had a responsibility, in the same way that any editor in chief would have a responsibility for his reporters, who he was sending, he or she was sending out into a war zone, to say, "Don't be a hero. We don't want you to do the thing that puts you in unnecessary risk. We're going to continue to do this work." And I also said in there, which wasn't quoted, I said, "No one can protect you." And I said, "I will do all that is within my power to protect your ability to report and your First Amendment freedoms. You should know, however, how limited my power is in this circumstance." I think that was what the overwhelming majority of students took from that conversation.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  That was not what was depicted in The New York Times.

• 33:41Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I want to talk about the work itself, which is journalism, which is something we so desperately need in this moment. When I reached out to both of the journalists, Liam Stack and Katie Rossman, to clarify how or why something seemed to be getting lost in translation, they responded to me saying, "Liam and I stand by our story, both the direct quotes from Mr. Cobb and the context in which they were presented. We reported this story rigorously and with concern for our sources and subjects." This is a good example, I think, of why people are so confused and often distrustful of mainstream media. You're the dean of Journalism at Columbia.

• 34:26Sam Fragoso?

  Rossman and Stack are well regarded journalists at the paper of record. And yet, even among contemporaries, we cannot get on the same page. And so I wonder, as a journalist yourself, why? Why would they stand behind a story that you've said conveys, quote, "the exact opposite sentiment that you were trying to articulate"? That's what you said on Blue Sky. Why would they stand behind that?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I have no idea. I mean, I think that's a question for them. But again, I take myself out of call to verify the quotes. What I said is like, that's technically true, as in that is a quote. Though I did say those words. But if you print them absent the more context, it will sound like I was saying something that I was not in fact saying. I can't get into the game of trying to figure out like their motivations or like how they, you know, perhaps they think that they actually, you know, gave the best rendering of that conversation. I don't know. But I can tell you what my vantage point was. And I can tell you what the vantage point of the students who were in the room was, or very many of them.

• 35:31Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's talk about something we can discuss, which is your work at Columbia Journalism School, and of course, the Columbia Journalism Review. I was thinking, when you took over the job as dean at Columbia, it's my understanding that you reached out to Marty Baron to have lunch and talk about leadership and how to run this school of journalism. Do you remember that lunch?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Well, it was coffee. Yeah.

• 35:58Sam Fragoso?

  By the way, I'm glad we're getting that on the record and fact correct. The difference between it wasn't lunch.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  I'm just telling you, like I said before, I want to be as accurate as possible, even if I'm being pedantic and saying it was like coffee instead of lunch. But I do want to give as accurate a rendering of everything we talk about as I potentially can, so.

• 36:20Sam Fragoso?

  Listeners of the show know that I often run the risk of being pedantic. So welcome to the program. Welcome back.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Right, okay. But, you know, when I talked with Marty, you know, Marty has been at the helm of The Washington Post.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Boston Globe, you know, he has a storied career in journalism. And, you know, what I wanted to know from him was how he approached leadership of those institutions. And what he said to me was something that stayed with me. He said, as leader, he viewed his job as creating a context in which other people could do their best work. And I thought that was a really insightful, really succinct way of summarizing what I was supposed to do with my job. I was like, OK, that's great. I can think, if I ever have confusion about what I should do in any particular moment,

• 37:21Speaker 01

  it's that I am supposed to create the context in which other people can do their best work.

• 37:27Sam Fragoso?

  At the Columbia Journalism Review, there's been turnover between the former editor, Su Will Chan. And I wonder, how would you describe what that context would look like to do your best work? Because I assume, since his firing, there was something he was doing that did not live up to the barren credo.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we're in litigation around that, so I can't talk about it. I have to say this, which is like, it's a thing that I find very interesting, which is that I've been dean for three years. I've made virtually no personnel changes. You know, my deans that preceded me, the two deans that preceded me, made a bunch of them in the course of their term, certainly within their first three years. I made very few for, you know, some particular strategic reasons. As soon as I made one, it has become the source of relentless inquiry, which I just find odd and curious. And so if I could talk about it, I would. But but one of the reasons, one of the other questions that I would have is like, why would I have to?

• 38:31Sam Fragoso?

  I can give you an answer for that, actually.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 38:33Sam Fragoso?

  One of the reasons it's it's of relentless inquiry is because Chan himself has gone online.

• 38:41Sam Fragoso?

  And spoken explicitly and negatively about the Columbia Journalism Review. And not only has he done that, former digital editors on a blog that I can present to you right now that I've read have talked openly about the seriousness and the language and behavior that Chan exhibited in his time there, the shouting and screaming that, quote, "became commonplace in the newsroom." He seemed to have two modes, rage at anyone he felt inferior to him and obsequiness, obsequiousness, towards anyone he considered a superior. These are all public statements. The only thing I'm interested in is, in a newsroom in 2025, what does a context in

• 39:23Sam Fragoso?

  which people can do their best work look like? Chan is known as a very tough editor. Everyone I've spoken to who knows him says that he is, at times, fair-minded but also volatile, but a supremely talented editor who works his reporters hard.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  So I'll say this, I'm not making any comment about that situation, but I'll say two things, which, you know, you can take for what you will. When I became dean, one of the first things I did, I know that when you come into a new organization or you take a new position within an organization, there's a lot of anxiety. People want to know what the new leader is about, you know, how things are going to go, you know, what the rubric for success will be, et cetera. And so I tried to clarify that, you know, from the gate. And, you know, I talked about my priorities, I talked about what we were going to work on, I talked about the need to redefine what a journalism school looks like in the coming

• 40:27Speaker 01

  years, et cetera. And one of the things that I said, as a matter of fact, one of the things that was highest, you know, on my agenda, was that we were going to have a beneficial workplace.

• 40:38Sam Fragoso?

  What does that mean?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I said, "We don't all have to hug each other at the end of the day, but we're going to treat each other with a fundamental level of respect." And we're going to have the kind of workplace in which, you know, people, when they move on, and my objective is for you to move on to the next thing, either the next higher position in this organization, or to a higher position in another organization. You know, we're, we're a teaching hospital. I think the entire institution is supposed to be like that. We're supposed to, to have a net benefit to your time at Columbia Journalism School. And so that was a promise that I made when, you know, I came in. And for every time I've ever had an interview, every job interview I've had, I mean, every time I've

• 41:23Speaker 01

  interviewed a person seeking a position at the institution, we go through their qualifications, we go through, you know, the hypotheticals, we go through their backgrounds, all, all those things. Before that conversation is over, I say, we believe in a beneficial workplace here. And we have particular kinds of protocols, but basically, we treat everyone with respect. And, you know, that's something that I said would be a hallmark of my time as dean. The other thing is that virtually everyone, you know, there, certainly everyone on the faculty side, we've all come through newsrooms. And, you know, newsrooms are generally, especially in the old dispensation, places that required a thick skin. You know, you

• 42:06Speaker 01

  had to have, you know, the ability to take criticism, sometimes bluntly formed criticism. And, you know, I came up in my first job under David Carr, you know, the legendary New York Times editor. And I was at the Washington City Paper, which is, you know, where he started out before he came to the Times. And, you know, David was an incredibly straight shooter. And he'd tell you, like, what you got wrong and hurt your feelings and all that. And I'm-

• 42:33Sam Fragoso?

  While smoking a cigarette.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Right, right. But nonetheless-

• 42:38Speaker 01

  There's still a line, you know, there's still a level, you know, and I don't think that we should necessarily justify all the ways that newsrooms operated in the past either, but those mores are changing and what's tolerable, you know, is changing. And, you know, those are things that I take pride in, that, you know, if we haven't gotten that, you know, perfectly, which I don't think any of us have, but if we haven't gotten that perfect, we are still working at it and trying to make sure that the place operates with a base level of respect for everyone.

• 43:11Sam Fragoso?

  You're around young journalists all day, all the time. There are claims from many people, including older reporters that came of age in the same time you did, that they have seen less tolerance for friction and disagreement from up and coming reporters. Have you found that to be true?

• 43:34Speaker 01

  What I have found is that there's less tolerance for things that probably never should have been tolerated in the first place.

• 43:43Sam Fragoso?

  Like what?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, you know, where do we start? You know, the, the kind of overt, crude sexist behavior, you know, sit down and talk with not just kind of old white male editors from journalism, talk to older women who worked in journalism, or older people of color who worked in journalism, and ask them if they, if they think that everything that they heard was acceptable. I talked with a black photographer who had, you know, kind of legendary news photographer,

• 44:20Speaker 01

  photojournalist, and, you know, he said that if he counted the number of white male reporters who he heard casually using, tossing the N-word around in his career, it would take him a long time to get to the end of that list. That's not acceptable. That should never have been acceptable. And, you know, I was at a gathering for a group of journalists who had been at The Village Voice, and prior, you know, to the gathering, I was around a group of women journalists, you know, who had been at The Voice, you know, during its heyday. And they just started talking about the stuff that they heard and things that people

• 45:03Speaker 01

  said to them and the kinds of ridicule that people were subject to and all those things like, no, none of that should ever have been acceptable. And it shouldn't be that here's, you know, my purple heart for having, you know, skin tough enough to tolerate that. Because what I think also happened, you know, who's not in that conversation? The really talented journalists who thought, fuck this, I don't, I don't even have to put up with this. There are people who could have done great stories, people who could have won Pulitzers, people who could have made amazing contributions to this field, who left because they didn't want to be disrespected. And so I don't think that we should glorify that in any kind of way.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  It was, it was never acceptable. There's a way that you can be tough. Like, I came up around some really tough mentors. There is absolutely a way that you can demand the best of people without disrespecting people.

• 46:03Sam Fragoso?

  To expand this journalism conversation, outside of the newsrooms, earlier this year, you delivered a lecture at Oxford about the role of journalism and how news outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, may go about regaining the trust of the American public. Which, to quote your editor in chief, David Remnick, "Public distrust is at an all time high. Our ratings are a misery." You said in that speech, "Our quest for public trust also highlights a contradiction that should be easily recognizable. Journalists are, by disposition and professional protocol, among the least trusting individuals you'll ever meet. Rather than hope for a return of a more trusting public, we should work for a more equitably

• 46:48Sam Fragoso?

  skeptical one. Do not trust us. In fact, don't easily trust anyone. Let doubt proliferate." I would say we're at no risk of running low on doubt in 2025.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Sure. Except it's not equitable doubt.

• 47:07Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Okay, so, so explain when you say. Do not trust journalists. Unpack that for us and what you think we need to do in this moment under the Trump administration.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it's kind of a quaint idea, like, oh, let's go back to the days when, you know, there was a bottle of milk delivered on your back doorstep and people got up and milked the cows, you know, before they went to school and, you know, whatever, whatever else it was. The fact is, the public doesn't trust us. And the question that I wrestle with is whether or not that's a reasonable outcome. Is it that they don't trust us because they know more about us? Which is also a possibility. Is it that they don't trust us because we don't warrant their trust? Another possibility. And so there's no way to kind of comb through all of that. But what I think is a reasonable thing is that for journalism at our best,

• 48:06Speaker 01

  the thing that we know how to do is report. We know how to research. We know how to find information. You know, we know how to verify information, you know, to the extent that the closest you can get to saying that this is a fact or this is true. You know, that's what we do. You know, those are the coins of our particular realm. The distinction here, when I say we're not equitably skeptical, is that there's a great deal of distrust for, you know, what's been called mainstream media. But people will simultaneously afford trust to complete crackpots or people who have no protocols. I mean, in journalism, we at least have a code of ethics.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  You can debate how much we adhere to it or whether or not, you know, sure. But we, we have a code of ethics and we're competing with people who are literal charlatans, who don't know what they're talking about. And so for me, the response is to say, tell everyone to show their work. Journalists can do that because we can say like, look, here's this document. Here's where we got it. Here's the interview. Here's the entire audio of the person I interviewed. You know, I drove four hours to this little town to find out about, you know, the toxic waste that's being dumped in their sewage system or whatever. And, you know, I can show my receipts. The charlatans can't.

• 49:34Sam Fragoso?

  We actually considered originally calling Talk Easy receipts.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I like Talk Easy better, but.

• 49:40Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, yeah, so did everyone else.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but I think we have to lean into, you know, what distinguishes us and ask the public over time to say, well, this person did get up at five o'clock in the morning and fly to, you know, this war zone. And here are the images and here's the passport and here's this and that. And so put it all out there.

• 50:10Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, but practically, Jelani, how would, how, what do you envision that looks like? The showing the work process?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  So that some of it is simple, you know, some of it is more complicated. Like, one of the things that Frontline now does is that they put the entire video for an interview up on their website. You know, there's that kind of transparency. One of the things that I think is like, you know, for at The New Yorker, we produce basically two documents anytime we do something. So you produce the article, you know, itself, the story. And then you produce a kind of secondary file, which is all of your fact checking information. And that might be the transcripts. It might be links to the audio of people you interviewed. That could be, you know, books, you know, where you got, you know, this.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Uh, statistic on how many children with ADHD are growing up in, uh, you know, or in the California school system, whatever it is, you know? You send all of that in to the fact checkers who then start, uh, just combing through it to make sure that it all adds up. It wouldn't be that much more effort to turn that into a secondary document that the public can click on and see all of the work that you did in order to produce the article that they just read. It's like, uh, when, uh, people who are in the food industry produce a list of ingredients. Here's everything that went into the soup that you just purchased.

• 51:45Sam Fragoso?

  I'm curious, like, if I provided my Google documents and, and my hyperlinks and my 30 hours of research for these episodes, would people find it impressive? Or would they be concerned for my mental health?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  But you know what would happen? You know what would happen?

• 52:04Sam Fragoso?

  Please tell me.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  The overwhelming majority of people would ignore it.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  But that's not what you're going for. You're going for that two to 3% of the public, that 2 to 3% of the public that would comb through all of that. And those people would then be the people who'd be like, oh, you know, that Fragoso guy, man, he really like, really, really went in. And you want that person saying that at a dinner party or saying that on social media? It kind of spreads out asymmetrically in that way. Like, because again, most people don't read the ingredients on whatever snack you just bought, uh, but there's a handful of people who actually will read them and be like, did you know there were carcinogens in this? Or did you know this was in here, right?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Like, and that's kind of what we rely on.

• 52:56Sam Fragoso?

  We're gonna make T-shirts that say, here for the 2 to 3%.

• 53:02Sam Fragoso?

  America's for the 1%. Talk easy. Talk easy's here for the 2 to 3%. Um, after the break, why don't we talk about how this past year at Columbia is in many ways deeply connected to our conversation from five years ago in the aftermath of George Floyd? That's coming up next with Jelani Cobb.

• 53:35Sam Fragoso?

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• 54:18Sam Fragoso?

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• 55:05Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back. Earlier in the conversation, we talked about how, on April 17th of 2024, pro-Palestinian students erected about 50 tents on the East Butler Lawn, declaring a Gaza solidarity encampment and vowing to stay until Colombia agreed to divest from companies complicit in Gaza's devastation. This bold pact that quickly inspired tents across 180 universities worldwide. And the way that proliferated, the way that action and activism inspired others to do the same. It reminded me of the summer of 2020.

• 55:47Sam Fragoso?

  And this episode, as you know, is being released on the five year anniversary of Floyd's passing. And I just want to hold both Floyd's life and the five years that have happened since together. At a congressional hearing, Philanese Floyd said that he hoped his brother, George, would be more than a face on a T-shirt, more than a name on a list that won't stop growing.

• 56:18Sam Fragoso?

  When you think of the last five years, has he? And if so, how do you understand what George has come to represent?

• 56:27Speaker 01

  So I think that George Floyd was a man who became a martyr, who became a metaphor. And he became a metaphor in a very kind of damning way. At first, you know, it appeared that it was a metaphor for all these other kinds of, you know, names that we did not know, a metaphor for the bigger kind of barometer of race in the United States. And that's where I predominantly wrote from in, you know, that spring of 2020. And thinking about all the issues around policing, you know, around disparities, around, you know, everything that we could talk about, that he had become a window into.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  But he also became a metaphor for the reasons that we were in that position in the first place.

• 57:21Sam Fragoso?

  How do you mean?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Which is to say, you know, George Floyd and, you know, what we saw in the spring of 2020 was not the first time that people had taken seriously the racial hierarchy in this country or had sought to remedy it. But what we have is this endless cycle of push and pull, where there are attempts to reform that are eventually met by a backlash and the reassertion of the status quo. And we could see that immediately. One of the key things legislatively is that this had been a moment where there was a push for comprehensive police reform. And that died. That never happened.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Senators Tim Scott and Cory Booker were supposed to work together on something that the activists and policymakers and the police unions and all the other kinds of parties would be able to live with. And that did not happen. And so around the time that that bill died, we also saw this concerted push to demonize critical race theory. And it was promoted by Christopher Ruffo, distorted, may not to be something that it really was not. It became this buzz phrase that could intimidate white parents into thinking that their children

• 58:47Speaker 01

  were being indoctrinated with self hate in the third grade or wherever. And I wrote a piece about the legal scholar Derek Bell, whose work is at the center of what ultimately came to be known as critical race theory. And so the piece about him was called "The Man Behind Critical Race Theory." But that wasn't what people were really engaging with. They were, especially on the right, they were engaged in a campaign to systematically reverse all the interventions that had been made in the name of racial equity.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  We have seen five years ago, a push for there to be more investment in diversifying our institutions and operating equitably and including people. Now, with the weight of the White House kind of backing it, DEI is being uprooted from anywhere it exists. And there's been this counter push.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Such that five years after the death of George Floyd, we now live in a society where something like that is potentially more likely to happen. As opposed to, you know, in the moments of the immediate aftermath, where we were trying to find a way toward finally creating a society where those type of things don't happen anymore.

• 1:00:12Sam Fragoso?

  When I look back on that time, and I know people don't like to look back on that time for a variety of reasons, in large part because of the pandemic. But that year, if you remember the language of that year, and I know you do, there was a lot of talk about this kind of cultural resetting, the racial reckoning, the terms like this. It was a year of public facing solidarity for brands, big and small. And for people who forgot, I just want us to understand the depths in which some of these companies went. Here are some quotes from that time. Gushers, yes, gushers. Gushers wouldn't be gushers without the black community and your voices.

• 1:00:56Sam Fragoso?

  We're working with fruit by the foot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you. Wendy's claimed that its voice would be nothing without black culture and promised to amplify black voices on Twitter. And Burger King adapted its slogan in a tweet that read, "When it comes to people's lives, there's only one way to have it: without discrimination." Now, all of those seem like jokes written in the final season of Succession, but those were tweeted and published in public statements in earnest. And five years later, those companies, I don't know what kind of standing behind or supporting they are doing.

• 1:01:41Sam Fragoso?

  But as this comes back around, and all of this always is cyclical, I wonder where you have landed on public facing solidarity, virtue signaling from both brands and frankly, celebrities that used that moment seemingly for political and social gain.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  So I think there's a way of looking at this as a kind of cynical critique. But I think in order to be cynical about it, or to be disappointed about it, you would have had to have had different expectations, maybe, from what mine were when this first began to happen.

• 1:02:20Sam Fragoso?

  Follow up question. You didn't have high expectations of gushers?

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  I actually don't even know what gushers is. But whoever they are, I certainly was not pinning my hopes on them.

• 1:02:33Sam Fragoso?

  But you've never had a gusher before?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  No, what is a gusher?

• 1:02:36Sam Fragoso?

  It's like a little chewy candy. It's a, it's not a candy. It's a-

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 1:02:42Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, I'm serious. You never had fruit by the foot?

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  No. Is this like a California thing?

• 1:02:47Sam Fragoso?

  No.

• 1:02:50Sam Fragoso?

  No, it's, it is not a California thing. Okay, you are aware of Wendy's, though.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Yes, of course.

• 1:02:56Sam Fragoso?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  But I think that what that said to me was that these institutions are like flags. They blow whichever way the wind dictates. And it's an indicator. And in that regard, you know, it's useful. You can say, oh, okay, you know, we have gained so much momentum that institutions are now rushing to align themselves, you know, with this particular vantage point. But now, if you look within two years, you know, certainly within three years, you know, they were yanking D E I out by the roots. And, you know, deleting those black squares that they posted on their Instagram and, you know, and everything else.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And that's a different kind of indicator. You know, it points to the wind blowing in the opposite direction. And if you've seen this enough, you know, either because you've lived through it or you've studied enough history to recognize it when you see it, you know that this is the pattern. And you take this time, you know, this fallow time to try to plan for, you know, what comes next and for how you get back into a place where you can push, you know, the society in a more equitable direction. As it stands now, everything that we have seen from the Trump administration has been the politics of white resentment in operating on the presumption that the disenfranchised of the world are in fact, white people, which is what's behind the curious contradiction

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  in how he sees most immigrants and his really striking degree of empathy for Afrikaners, you know, white South Africans.

• 1:04:37Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about what comes next with you before we go. And as I was rereading your pieces from 2020, especially one called "An American Spring of Reckoning," you talk about how George Floyd's death occurred in a different country, the traumatized version of America inhabited by black people. Five years removed, how do you see that division between the reality that one part of this country holds and the reality that maybe you hold? Has it gotten worse?

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  I think it has gotten worse, but it also has gotten more complicated. A lot of America was shocked when they saw the death of George Floyd. And for a lot of black people, certainly a lot of black people I knew, it was not shocking. You know, it might have been enraging, but it wasn't a shock. You know, there wasn't a sense of like, how could this happen? Because we were familiar, you know, we had heard stories and we had been in situations. We had seen police behavior that mimicked that or, you know, had been excessive in some way, you know, shape or form. And so in looking at that, you know, I wrote that George Floyd had died in black America and white America saw it because usually they don't see, you know, what happens in black America.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  And the hope was that you could have one country where people recognize the common humanity of everyone that, you know, resides there. In a sense that I think George Floyd and what came out of it is that, you know, we don't have to explain who he was, you know, we don't have to talk about the possibility of excessive force, you know, among police. I think that there are a lot of people. In Black America and beyond Black America, whose consciousness was fundamentally altered by what we witnessed in those weeks and months in the spring of 2020, even if our politics have slid far in the opposite direction.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  When George Floyd's daughter made that incredibly heartbreaking statement, as she said, "My daddy changed the world," and in fact, that is true, not in a way that I think anyone would ever want to change the world, but changed nonetheless.

• 1:06:57Sam Fragoso?

  How do you see that change? I mean, how do you go about describing it now?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  You can measure the success of the civil rights movement in legislation. You can measure it in Supreme Court victories. You can measure it in the number of people who couldn't have voted prior to the movement. Or you can measure it in the most fundamental metric, one that we don't actually have a number for, which is the change in consciousness. And the change of consciousness is the most important of all those things because it had to precede any of those other things. And I think that George Floyd and the way that he died and what came out of that changed

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  the consciousness of this country in ways. And there's usually not a straight line to progress and the backlash that we're witnessing and the attempts to return the status quo ante, all those things. We shouldn't despair over that. We understand the world differently in some ways, and that will abide. It may take years, it may take decades, but what happened in that moment, I think, still matters.

• 1:08:17Sam Fragoso?

  I'm glad you brought it to the civil rights movement because in looking back on that time, I can't help but think of the work of the late John Lewis. He was a congressman from Georgia who had participated in the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, and most importantly, led the Bloody Sunday March in Salma back in 1965. He died in July of 2020, and when he passed, you wrote a lovely obituary for him in The New Yorker, which I thought you could read a passage from.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  The question posed as the news of John Lewis's death broke remains. What exactly does one do when a figure of his stature departs? The answer may be in the last public image we have of Lewis. Last month, weakened by illness, but still standing. His face obscured by a mask, but still unmistakable as himself. He inspected the huge words painted on the street in front of the White House. Black Lives Matter. Terminal cancer could not stop him from paying homage to the movement that was continuing the work to which he devoted his life. The answer, he seems to be telling us, is that you do more of the same.

• 1:09:38Sam Fragoso?

  What does more of the same look like for you, Jelani?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  You know, for me, it means I write more columns, I write more articles, I teach more students, I learn more, I commit myself to more, I ask more questions. You know, I speak more, I try to encourage people, I try to use everything that I've learned to the benefit of someone else.

• 1:10:05Sam Fragoso?

  Thinking about the passing of Lewis and your obituary and now your work that we've been talking about, you know, you quoted that historian who said that this isn't McCarthyism on campuses, it's worse now. How do you think about moving urgently in this moment after the five years that we've seen since George Floyd's passing?

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  You know, I have four children, you know, I look at them and I know what's at stake in their futures. I have a building full of students who are looking to me for leadership and advocacy and support. And, you know, I draw strength from their commitment to journalism and to truth telling and, you know, to informing the public, you know, fending off despair is not.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  High on my list of things to do. And I also benefit from my understanding of history, which is, you know, why I think I use it so much in my work. I'm a descendant of people who made it through Jim Crow and a descendant of people who made it through slavery and people who, despite odds, you know, maintained a sense that something could be better. One of the things that, um, that's interesting about how we think of this country is that, you know, we're the world's oldest constitutional democracy. And, you know, we have this great, amazing democratic tradition. And, you know, that's all we talk about. We don't talk about the fact that we have

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  a very long anti-democratic tradition as well. It's like a family, you know, talking about their lineage and saying, you know, we have a long history of, uh, you know, great achievement and this uncle was a great athlete and this person was an outstanding scholar and so on. But you also have an equally long history of heart disease or some other ailment that can be debilitating. And if you don't talk about both of those things, you're not aware of what your potential vulnerabilities are. And we're in a moment where we actually have to grapple with the lineage and tradition of anti-democracy in this country

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  if we want to ever realistically be in a position to fend up democracy such as it exists in the United States.

• 1:12:31Sam Fragoso?

  My last question for you, since we are talking on the five-year anniversary of George Floyd, what have you made of those murals that have been erased around the country?

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  You mean the murals of George Floyd? Yeah, I mean, in the Black Lives Matter Plaza that was in Washington DC that has been painted over.

• 1:12:52Sam Fragoso?

  The end racism pieces, yes, that have been erased more and more in the last 12 months.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  I think that it's worth noting. You know, who's responsible for these things? And, you know, that we have a movement that is attempting to push this, you know, further in our consciousness and a movement that is attempting to literally erase it. We should ask ourselves, who stands to benefit from that? But even should that succeed? And you paint over all the monuments and the memorials that, you know, were created for George Floyd. The history still exists and the people willing to tell the history still exist. And we've still written it down and we've made the videos and we've made the films and we will continue to tell the story as long as it needs to be told.

• 1:13:43Sam Fragoso?

  Jelani Cobb, thank you for helping tell the story and for the history lesson as always. I hope it's not another five years until you come back on.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have to talk sooner.

• 1:13:54Sam Fragoso?

  As always, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  All right, be good. Thank you.

• 1:14:29Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you're listening to this right now, it means that we've improbably made it to the finish line in releasing this very special and timely talk with Jelani Cobb. If you enjoyed it, and I hope you did, I hope you'll share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. As always, I want to give a special thanks to some folks who made today's episode possible. They include Shrek Greg over at Columbia, Josh Bierman, Nick Thorburn, Coria Tad, Jody Avrigan, Gigi Sagansky, Jacob Weisberg, Sarita Cannon, Sam Baer, and of course, our guest, Jelani Cobb.

• 1:15:11Sam Fragoso?

  To learn more about Jelani and his work, or to listen to either of our past two conversations, visit our website at TalkEasyPod.com.

• 1:15:22Sam Fragoso?

  For more episodes with other great writers, I'd recommend David Remnick, Gia Tolentino, and Tanahashi Coats. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janix Bravo. Today's talk was heroically edited by Adam Jamal and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped at The Relic Room in New York City. Our music is by Dylan Peck.

• 1:16:02Sam Fragoso?

  Our illustrations are by Chris Shannam. Research assistance comes from Sharia Aran Kay. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. We'll see you back here next Sunday with Japanese Breakfast. Until then, stay safe and some.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview."

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G R O U N D N E W S dot com slash R C for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:18:05Speaker 05

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:18:11Speaker 05

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:18:18Speaker 05

  As I said.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast, What It's Like to Be.