Jelani Cobb

In a matter of days, Harvey Weinstein went from being heralded as a formidable media titan to being accused as a serial sexual predator. The charges of sexual harassment levelled against him last Thursday in a New York Times report, followed by further allegations in Ronan Farrow’s article published by The New Yorker, five days later, bracketed a period that saw a maelstrom of social-media outrage and Weinstein’s firing from the prestigious film company that he had helped found. There have since…

There was an additional layer of shade visible to those familiar with the school’s history. When Howard—one of the largest of the hundred and two historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, in the United States—was founded, in 1867, it was supported by the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal agency charged with helping emancipated black people navigate the world that awaited them after the Civil War. The author of the spray-painted message was clearly suggesting that the school—and, s…

We have not, in the past half century, had a year freighted with such emotional and historical heft, in part because we have not seen the convergence of so many defining issues—war, civil rights, populism, political realignment—in so short a timespan. Yet the singularity of 1968 does not diminish its pertinence to our present turmoil. This week, two events in particular are worth considering in tandem: one a cataclysm, the other a tragically predictive attempt to understand how such cataclysms o…

Speeches, some of them from associates of King’s, went on all day. James Lawson, who, at eighty-nine, is nearly as dynamic as he was when he helped organize the Freedom Rides of 1961, spoke about the landmark strike of black sanitation workers, called in Memphis in early 1968 to protest unsafe work conditions and unequal pay. It was Lawson who had invited King to Memphis, to lend his support. (A sanitation worker at the commemoration who had travelled with a group from New York City told me that…

Academics are commonly dogged by questions of how their research applies to the real world. Anderson has faced the opposite: a scroll of headlines and social-media posts that, like a mad data set liberated from its spreadsheet, seem intent on confirming the validity of his argument. The most notable recent case in point occurred on April 12th, when a white employee of a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police on two young black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who asked to use the rest…

The substance of Strzok’s testimony—that text messages he had exchanged with his fellow-agent Lisa Page, which expressed disdain for then candidate Trump, did not indicate an anti-Trump conspiracy at the F.B.I.—was almost lost amid the theatre of the hearing. Yet there were substantial points that warrant parsing. In response to Gowdy’s questioning in reference to those texts, Strzok reminded the congressman that he’d written them at a point when the disturbing contours of Trumpism were just bec…

Old jokes have lately been finding renewed salience. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, once the most common mechanisms for disadvantaging minority voters, have been consigned to the history books, but one need look no further than the governor’s race in Georgia to see their modern equivalents in action. The race between the Republican, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, and the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the state House of Representatives—who…

We have seen so many of these atrocities that they can be put into subcategories. The attack in Christchurch exists in the company of other attacks on houses of worship: the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in Charleston, in 2015; the Islamic Cultural Center, in Quebec City, in 2017; the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh. Live like this for long enough and you end up with a sample size sufficient to discern patterns among the…

The issue has become more pressing with the approach of the 2020 Presidential election. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges do not have the power to address partisan gerrymandering, even when it creates results that “reasonably seem unjust.” Last month, President Donald Trump was finally forced to abandon his effort to add, in defiance of another Court ruling, a citizenship question to the census—an idea that Thomas B. Hofeller, the late Republican strategist who promoted it, be…

This school year was met by two particularly contentious reform issues. One began in June of 2018, when, as part of an effort to combat the enduring problem of segregation, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his intention to discontinue the testing requirement for admission to the city’s eight selective “élite” high schools, which have long been the capstones of the system. A bill that would have eliminated the tests failed to pass in the State Legislature, but de Blasio has the authority to remove…

At Gray’s funeral, Cummings reminded the audience that he knew intimately the loss they were experiencing. “Family, there are those who will tell you ‘Don’t cry.’ I’m not gonna say that. I put my nephew in a grave four years ago,” he told them. “Blasted away—still don’t know who did it. I mourn every day.” Cummings’s ability to speak to that moment and its indelible hurt underscores the reason that Baltimore itself began grieving on Thursday morning, as its residents awoke to the news that the c…

Letters respond to Sheelah Kolhatkar’s piece on Patriotic Millionaires, Anthony Lane’s review of “Little Women,” and the Cartoon Takeover Issue.

On Monday evening, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a forty-six-year-old black man named George Floyd died in a way that highlighted the implications that calls such as the one Amy Cooper placed can have; George Floyd is who Christian Cooper might have been. (The police made no arrests and filed no summons in Central Park. Amy Cooper has apologized for her actions; she was also fired from her job.) Police responding to a call from a shopkeeper, about someone trying to pass a potentially counterfeit bi…

Those contrasts were not merely hypothetical. In 2017, when President Trump announced that he would attend the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Lewis said that he would not. The then White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, seemed to accuse Lewis of failing to show proper respect for the movement. Months earlier, Trump had attacked the Fifth District as “crime-infested” and suggested that the blame lay with Lewis. I wrote at the time that Trump’s disdain for Lewis betr…

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

The two tragedies make for easy inferences about the importance of commemoration. But this is not how trauma works.

As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

He has always understood the risk, in riffing on the racial absurdities of American culture, of reinforcing rather than undermining them. The absence of concern of this kind about the impact of “The Closer” is striking.

Were it not for a graphic video and intense pressure from activists, the killers of an unarmed Black man in Georgia might have been acquitted.

Trump recently assured a crowd in Mason City, Iowa, that Haley “doesn’t have what it takes.” He cited her meandering answer to a question about the cause of the Civil War, from an audience member at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she failed to even mention slavery. With typical self-satisfaction, Trump noted, “I’d say ‘slavery’ is sort of the obvious answer, as opposed to about three paragraphs of bullshit.” This particular problem with the past is not a new one for today’s Republicans. Gov…