Jelani Cobb (Queens, 1969) is a journalist-historian, one of those reporters who has been able to approach current political events, such as the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, thinking about how they connect with the history of slavery, war American civil society or the movement led by Martin Luther King. PhD in history since 2003 and journalist for the magazine The New Yorker Since 2015, Cobb has written books about the hope that Barack Obama was able to mobilize in 2008, the long history of American hip-hop, and co-edited one about the hip-hop movement. Black Lives Matter. Since 2022, Cobb has been dean of the journalism faculty at Columbia University, the most prestigious among reporters in the United States, from where he connects to talk about the elections that will be held on November 5 in the United States. “What worries me most is that people on the right will resort to violence if they don’t like the result,” he says over Zoom. “And, well, there is a high probability that that will happen.”
Ask. In his most recent article for The New Yorker,you talk about how Democrats, the media, and even Trump believe Trump is doing very well among African American voters, particularly black men, when that is not the reality. Why does this distortion occur?
Answer. First, the percentage of black men who have voted for Democratic candidates has decreased, but since 2008. People want to say that this is a phenomenon of black men against Kamala Harris, and that is not true, this has been happening in several electoral cycles. In 2008, 95% of black men voted for Obama, the highest percentage. For his re-election, in 2012, the percentage already dropped to 87%; In 2016, with Hillary Clinton, 84% of black men voted for her. And then the percentage was 82% for Joe Biden in 2020. So the figure has only gone down, and Kamala Harris today has support at 70 and something percent.
Q. Why has that percentage dropped for Harris and the Democrats?
R.Kamala Harris started her campaign in July, many people did not know her, they did not know anything about her, and that is one of the reasons: because of all those undecided people. But another reason is that the Democratic Party hasn’t done as much to engage black men as they have done with women. They talk in general terms about themselves, but not about the issues that matter most to them. When you ask them, according to surveys, their priorities are in some cases the same as those of black women, but not completely. They want more proposals on entrepreneurship, that is a huge issue for them. Or more proposals on how to become homeowners. Topics that can make it easier for them to fulfill a role that society expects of men, such as being providers.
Q.Kamala Harris could be the first black woman to become president and she has wanted to send a message of hope like Barack Obama did in 2008, but it also seems that there is a lot of another emotion in her campaign, which is fear of Trump.
R.I think you tried to balance [las dos emociones]. He did want to appeal to the fact that ‘we can all unite again as a country’, that we do not have to view those who are different with suspicion or antagonism. That things do not have to be, as they have been in the last decade, polarization, anger and conflict. I would say that two-thirds of the campaign is hope, and one-third is fear. Because in the Harris campaign they have done everything possible to distinguish themselves from Donald Trump, because there are people who continue to vote for him because they saw him in The Apprenticebecause they think it’s funny, so they do an exercise of pointing out what’s really at stake with it. Under Trump, abortion rights may be further restricted, for example, or he has talked about mass deportations. Those are facts, he has put those proposals on the table, and they are scary.
Q. Do you see parallels with Obama’s campaign in 2008?
R.Yes, although of course, the circumstance was different, Obama launched when there was a lot of disappointment and discouragement about the war in Iraq. Kamala Harris has that same idea that there is hope on the horizon, but there is no war in Iraq, and the two wars in which the United States is involved, in Gaza and Ukraine, are not topics she talks about. So she constantly tries to make the distinction with Trump, she believes that this contrast will be useful to her. When you see Trump, he is usually hunched over, growling, angry, telling people that everything is bad. She, on the other hand, looks like she’s having the time of her life. Even though the polls are so tied, and the election has immense implications, it does not convey that [preocupación].
Q.In 2016, the media was widely criticized for not seeing Trump’s victory coming, or for having provided biased coverage. Have the media learned from their mistakes?
R. There are mixed results. On the one hand, in 2016, the media was very incredulous and tended to treat Donald Trump only as an entertainment figure, as a show. With what happened on January 6, 2020, [el asalto al Capitolio]there is now a very broad recognition in the media that Trump is a very dangerous figure. But, having said that, there are other topics in which the media still seems to be incredulous, or reluctant to cover topics. To give an example: Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said this week that Trump spoke well of Hitler on a couple of occasions. But that topic is not everywhere, in all the media, and it seems to me that there is something strange there.
Q.Trump has attacked the media like no other president before, and since 2016 introduced the concept of fake news to our language. Are you worried about what he might do against the media in a second presidency?
R. Absolutely. He has already talked about taking away broadcasting licenses from news stations he doesn’t like. It’s not clear to me that he can do that, but he will certainly try. And if you just try it, that’s going to create a new precedent in this country. They also want [Trump y su campaña]overthrow the ‘New York Times v Sullivan’ ruling, [que protege la libertad de expresión frente a funcionarios públicos, restringiendo la posibilidad de que estos demanden a medios por difamación]. That would make it easier to sue newspapers, and make reporting more difficult. And then there is the risk of physical violence. Trump has spoken terribly about the news and called us ‘the enemy of the people’. People forget that a Trump supporter, when the latter was president, mailed bomb packages to the media, because he thought the journalists wanted to hurt Trump.
Q.You are dean of Columbia’s journalism school. Have you seen students discouraged by attacks on the press?
R. Not because of Donald Trump’s attacks on the press. Rather, I have seen people discouraged by how the media operates, period. For example, because of the articles that they do not do, or because of the fact that Trump and Kamala have been covered in the same way, as equals, when one of the two tried to overthrow the elected government [en 2020].
Q.You recently spoke in a PBS documentary about the racial history of the Electoral College, that system that has many critics because not always whoever wins the majority of votes (the popular vote) wins the presidency (whoever obtains 270 electoral votes wins).
R. The Electoral College, which is a relic,[del siglo XVIII]was created to give more power to those who were slaveholders. It is a system that allowed slaveholders to be taken into account, in [el censo electoral] of their states, the bodies of slaves, even if these slaves were denied the right to vote. That is, the number of total votes in the Electoral College is linked to the size of the population in each state. At the time of slavery, almost half of the people living in the southern United States were slaves. This means that the whites who could vote in the south, who were much fewer than those in the north, would always be at a disadvantage. [si no se contaba a la población esclavizada]. In 1860, before the Civil War, there were about nine million people living in the South, four million of whom were slaves. The Electoral College then allowed 60% of the enslaved population to be counted in the census, which meant that southern whites obtained electoral power according to how many they were, plus that additional 60% of the enslaved population. [que no votaba]. So, with the Electoral College formed in this way, those whites who could vote obtained a disproportionate power to elect a president.
Q. Do you think that, if the popular vote goes to Harris again, while the electoral vote goes to Trump, could it be time for the Electoral College to finally be reformed?
R. No, I don’t expect anything to change in the short term. There is already a supposed agreement, an attempt to pass a law so that electoral votes go to whoever wins the popular vote—but not enough states have signed it for it to become a reality. The Electoral College is going to be maintained, and it is very likely that we will once again see a division between who wins the popular vote and who wins the vote of the Electoral Council.
Q. A little more than a year and a half ago, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, fired a good part of the company and handed the account back to Trump, you decided to resign from that social network, even though it is one that is still very used by journalists. Do you miss being there?
R. No, no, no. Now I miss him even less. Since Musk has owned it, that is an incredibly toxic social network, and Musk has been very clear that he is using all his resources to get Donald Trump elected. With that, I don’t want to be even remotely close to that platform.
Q. Finally, what do you think is going to happen on November 5?
R.I think the result is going to be very close. What worries me most is that people on the right will resort to violence if they don’t like the result. And, well, there is a high probability that that will happen.
