Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, we're going to talk to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's brand newly installed, or at least named, because they're not in office yet, First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan. He's going to be really interesting to have a conversation with because he's been at this for a long time. He was a first deputy mayor and a budget director in the de Blasio administration. He was considered central to getting de Blasio's number one expensive priority through Albany back in 2014 that became so popular, universal pre-K, and de Blasio wanted a little tax hike on the wealthy to get that done, just like Mamdani wants a little tax hike on the wealthy now to get universal childcare done.

Maybe the next step in that same arc of taking care of New York City's kids, they wound up being able to do it without a tax hike in 2014. We're going to draw on that history and talk to the incoming First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan about what they might do now and how he might draw on his experience and apply it to the Mamdani/Hochul era from what was the de Blasio/Cuomo era. That's coming up.

Back with us now is Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He's got a new book that's a collection of some of his writings, called Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How He Got Here: 2012-2025. Let's say from Barack Obama's re-election and how he used it to Donald Trump's reelection and how he is using that today, or we could say from the killing of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 to what Jelani calls the volatile white nationalism and reactionary concern with demographics that defines the moment we're in now. The book also gets personal and granular, down to the fate of Jelani's alma mater, Jamaica High School in Queens. Jelani, always good to have you on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you, Brian. Always good to talk with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can I start with some context about you? You note in your article in the book from last year about the re-election of Trump, that your life, like those of many Black people of your generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as your parents lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the 1950s and '60s to uproot it. Can you talk a little about you coming of age at the exact time that you did in the arc of Black history, of American history, and what mindset started out as a journalist with in that context?

Jelani Cobb: Sure. My parents were part of a great migration. My father came to New York from Georgia, a small little town called Hazlehurst. My joke about that would be, if you've heard of it, it means you're my cousin. Then my mother came to New York from Bessemer, Alabama, and they met in Harlem. They had very particular personal reasons for leaving the South. They felt that there was this artificial ceiling on what they could aspire to or what any Black person could aspire to in that time and in that place.

It was very much drilled into me-- In a way, I think that would probably be very familiar to the children of immigrants, and in some way, leaving the south and coming to New York was a kind of immigration narrative. It was very much drilled into me that opportunities were very hard to come by, and if you have them, you have a chance to have a good education, you have a chance to have a good life, you have to be very serious, you have to take school seriously, you have to study, you have to work hard and to make the most of those kinds of opportunities.

I think that was what-- Part of my adulthood commitment to public institutions was my gradual recognition of just how significant quality public institutions were to my parents ambitions and the ambitions of a whole generation of other parents who had those same hopes for their children. That's from the public libraries to public schools to all of the even [unintelligible 00:04:52] the point public hospitals, things that we have pretty much disregarded in many ways since then.

Brian Lehrer: Your first piece for the New Yorker in 2012 was called Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope. In fact, you call the whole first section of the book from 2012 to 2016, the collection of your writings from then, you call that whole first section of the book, The Parameters of Hope. What do you mean by that phrase?

Jelani Cobb: I think, one, just structurally, I thought of the book-- There are a couple of pieces from 2025, but, really, the bulk of the book covers 2012 to 2024. I thought you could think of those three presidential administrations and then the election that subsequently returned Donald Trump to the White House as a three-act play.

The first act was the parameters of hope, where we had this unlikely development, the first African American president in the history of the United States, and he had campaigned on hope and change. In the course of the campaign and right up to the election, it seemed like the parameters of that hope were limitless, anything could happen, anything was possible. The kind of gifted rhetorician that Barack Obama is, he did an excellent job of convincing his audience that there were limitless possibilities.

Then the experience, as is always the case, the actual experience of governance and the day-to-day realities of intransigent opposition and miscalculations or random events that change the stakes that people are operating under, All the things that happen, what we might otherwise call life, began to make it clear that there were parameters to the hope, and that there were limits, political limits or social limits, of what could or would be achieved in a single presidency. That's where that first chapter, that's why that first section has that title, The Parameters of Hope.

Brian Lehrer: In the epilogue of the book, at the very end, you write that you as a person and as a writer who pondered the meaning of Trayvon Martin's death, that killing in 2012, you as a person then were fundamentally more optimistic than the one you were when you wrote about George Floyd nearly a decade later. Can you put that into more words? What were you more optimistic about 13 years ago? Is there more to that than what you just said about Obama?

Jelani Cobb: Yes. In some ways, I don't want to put all of this at Barack Obama's doorstep. I think he was a convenient barometer, in some ways, for that time period. A lot of this was a product of other kind of social dynamics. In 2012, we were still thinking about this heady, really unbelievable pinnacle of social movements that had begun decades earlier, more than a half century earlier, with the hope of furthering multiracial democracy in the United States. We hadn't really seen the contours of the backlash to that yet, which is why I think it was easier to be optimistic.

I should say, I have not abandoned optimism. I just think I was more optimistic in that moment than I was when George Floyd died. Very quickly, you saw a moment of reckoning, as we referred to it, but very quickly, even from the outset of that, you began to see the tides pushing in a different direction, such that we have a society that is far less sympathetic than if [unintelligible 00:09:13] like George Floyd to happen now, we would have a society that is generally far less sympathetic to that kind of incident than it would have been just five years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You wrote that the earliest pieces in the collection were published during the Obama presidency, just to cite that era one more time, when the contours of the backlash to his mere existence, as you put it, were just becoming visible. I wonder, with now 10 years of hindsight, how much of Donald Trump's election in 2016 did you or do you attribute to that kind of racial backlash to the mere existence of somebody like Obama in that office, as opposed to the issues Trump ran on that year, a backlash to illegal immigration from Mexico, a Muslim travel ban at the time of terrorist attacks by ISIS, or how much are all those things demographically-related?

Jelani Cobb: I think those things, there's no real dichotomy between them, because let's remember that the first political act that Donald Trump did or took was that he declared that the president was not actually the president because he wasn't a citizen and he wasn't qualified to even vote in the election that he actually won, and the kind of birtherism lie that he promulgated far and wide. That was directed at Barack Obama specifically, but it was also playing on nativism, and the xenophobic fears that are very common in American history. It was easy to pivot from that and just segue into, we should be fearful of Muslims.

The Muslim ban, by the way, not unrelated to the idea that people had accused Barack Obama of being a covert Muslim, and the idea that we had to renegotiate all of these trade relationships, which had been another barb that was directed at Barack Obama, whom Trump deemed to be utterly incompetent and a product of affirmative action, which, again, has been a target that we've seen come to the foreground in the course of the Trump era. I think that this kind of resentment to Obama was an active ingredient, probably necessary, but not sufficient for the political tides that we saw in 2016.

Brian Lehrer: This actually reminds me of your latest article in The New Yorker from just last week. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, with his new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. It's a collection of his writings for The New Yorker over all that time. From just last week, you single out two landmark laws from exactly 60 years ago in 1965 that you say are the animating forces of Trumpism today. Want to tell everyone which two laws from 1965 and why?

Jelani Cobb: Yes there are two laws that Lyndon B. Johnson signed about seven weeks apart, I believe. The first was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, as you know, transformed the electorate of the United States, particularly in the South, where there were literally millions of African Americans who were prevented from voting through the threat of violence, or other kinds of mechanisms that we use to dissuade Black people from casting ballots.

The other is the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act, which got rid of the old and racist quotas that had prohibited immigration in any significant numbers from the Caribbean, from Latin America, from Africa, from most parts of Asia and so on. It changed American demography. The face of the electorate was changed by the VRA, and the face of the country itself was changed by the Immigration Reform Act.

It's not coincidental that the kind of hot-button issue that we see now is immigration. We're seeing ICE raids and people being targeted and deported, notably, overwhelmingly, people of color being targeted in these ways, at the same time that the administration offers asylum to specifically white South Africans. Not just any South Africans, but specifically white South Africans.

We just saw about, I guess that was a month ago, roughly a month ago, the case heard before the Supreme Court that came out of Louisiana, which, depending upon how it is decided, may eviscerate the Voting Rights Act even further as it relates to the drawing of congressional districts. I think that what this is about, ultimately, is trying to curate the demography of American power.

Brian Lehrer: In that context, I pulled this for this conversation after reading a book. There was a stretch in Trump's address to the United Nations General assembly just this fall in September that I thought said the quiet part out loud about what this assault on immigration may really be about. Here's that stretch.

Donald Trump: What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique, but to stay this way, every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders. You have the right to control your borders, as we do now, and to limit the sheer numbers of migrants entering their countries and paid for by the people of that nation that were there and that built that particular nation at the time. They put their blood, sweat, tears, money into that country, and now they're being ruined. Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before, with different customs, religions, with different everything.

Brian Lehrer: Difference as a threat to all the countries of the world compared to the people who are already living there, even as he encourages white South Africans, as you point out, to emigrate to the United States. Did you hear that, as I did at all, as saying the quiet part out loud about what this is really about, as opposed to, say, violent crime?

Jelani Cobb: Yes, incredibly so. If you recall that this is an arc of this conversation, the initial rhetoric in 2016 was around crime and people who had committed acts of violence and who were in the country without sanction were not sanctioned to be in the country. That had been something that people said, "Oh, well, a person who's here, who's undocumented, certainly shouldn't be committing crime here." That was a beachhead, because the real objection was to the fact that these people were here at all.

Then even in the first Trump term, you began to hear people in the administration saying that they had to target immigration, period, including legal immigration, which is not what they were saying up front, was switching the terms that they were operating under. Then finally, we see the full flowering of their contempt and saying this language, which is utterly nativist, utterly xenophobic and racist, spoken by a person who married two women who were immigrants, and was the son of an immigrant himself, but he's not talking about those kinds of immigrants, he's talking about the kinds of people who have been allowed to enter the country as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, we have a few minutes left. Here's a text from a listener who writes, "I saw Jelani in Brooklyn recently and was fascinated by his description of Queens and how its incredible diversity has been a trigger point for Trump. Can he talk about that?" Let me combine that with a question that I wanted to ask you about Jamaica High School, what it meant to you as a kid from that part of Queens at the time and what happened afterwards that prompted you to write about it?

Jelani Cobb: Oh, sure. I'm a proud alum of Jamaica High School, which no longer exists. It was shut down a little more than 10 years ago and then recreated as small schools within the old building. When I graduated class of 1987, it was this perfectly heterogeneous cross-section of Queens. It reflected the fact that Queens had become the most diverse county in the United States. I think it was 400 or some languages that are spoken in Queens.

The story that I tell about my understanding of my community is best understood through the Jamaica High School baseball team, which I was a right fielder, the center fielder was South Asian, left fielder's family was, I believe, from Puerto Rico. The shortstop's family was from Nicaragua. The third baseman was Jamaican, a first baseman was Jewish. We had this incredible cross-section of people from all kinds of backgrounds, and we were there to play the sport that was the national pastime. That was my version of Queens.

For a person who was born in that time frame, Donald Trump is also famously a Queen's native, but he's a generation older, and he came of age in the years prior to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. I was born after it. At that point, Queens was the second whitest borough of New York City.

Little known facts is that when Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers, purchased a home in Queens and a cross was burned near his property to let him know that he was not welcome there. All of those things were a different version of Queens. Queens went from being that one thing, a highly segregated, mostly white enclave of New York City, to being the polyglot, multilingual, cosmopolitan, most complicated, most diverse county in the United States in just a few years, in the aftermath of the Immigration Reform Act.

For many people, they reacted with the circle the wagons mentality, I think that you see in Trump's rhetoric, "Who are these people? Where are they coming from? What God are they praying to? What is this food that they're eating?" That language that came to the foreground in the 2016 election was really a product of Trump being a Queen's Native in the 1960s and 1970s. That allergic reaction to diversity had become a national issue in the intervening decades.

Brian Lehrer: The book is called Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025 by Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

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