Jelani Cobb is the Dean of Columbia’s graduate School of Journalism and a long-standing staff writer at The New Yorker. In Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025 (2025), Cobb chronicles, in more than 50 essays, our nation’s descent into authoritarianism as a zealously organized reaction to the election of America’s first black president.
Cobb offers a brilliantly crafted chronological treatise on race in America that begins during President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. And by race, Cobb holds back little while drawing a straight line from the construct of race as dictated by colonizers and slavers directly to today’s increasingly overt displays of white supremacy and white Christian nationalism.
He also adroitly places these more recent events within the context of America’s long history of the white treatment of non-white people because American racism has always been a derivative of whiteness. The most obvious evidence of this, for those suspicious of the claim, is right before our eyes. The very definition of what it means to be “black” in America is often determined by the presence of perhaps only a single black ancestor. In past parlance, a “single drop” of African blood was enough to exclude a human being from the privileges of whiteness.
“The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute ‘black’ identity in the United States,” Cobb writes bluntly, “is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry.”
One of Cobb’s recurring themes is the manner in which history has been white-washed to assuage those who prefer to hide behind a patina of “American exceptionalism.” This is a notion that begins with the casual admission that America has had some flaws but that we have overcome them through the efforts largely of white heroes who have done the work to set the country straight. The result is that many conservative white Americans today celebrate the country’s progress as a moral and just country, and as a model of freedom and liberty to the world.
White conservatives would claim here that my words are un-American. What they fail to understand is that the freedom to write these words is exactly what makes America great; and that any effort to encourage fidelity to our nation’s founding ideals—such as Cobb’s book and my commentary here—is what makes America great.
A prime example of this distortion of history is the idea that Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves.” An arthritic corollary to this flawed thinking is that the sixteenth president believed in racial equality and harmony. The historical record simply does not bear this out. Lincoln’s campaign for president expressed in his First Inaugural Address is that he had no intention of abolishing slavery; he was only opposed to its expansion into the West. Yes, Lincoln eventually saw slavery as an abomination. However, his remedies recognized that whites and blacks would not be likely to live together and that a viable solution to the problem of race would be to return former slaves to Africa. As the war neared its end, Lincoln began speaking of reconciliation with those who had rebelled against their country while planning to deport those who had fought for it.
Yes, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation solidified the idea that the war was being fought to end slavery. Early on, though, Lincoln’s goal was to save the Union, not end slavery; which is what Southern slavers failed to understand. Further, the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure to weaken rebelling states. It did free slaves, but not all of them; because Lincoln feared that the four slave-owning states that did not secede might choose to join the Confederacy if their slaves were freed.
If you really explore the causes to the end of slavery in America, you should look very closely at the enslaved themselves. Over 250 documented slave uprisings attest to the fact that the enslaved were not passive participants in their bondage, as Southerners claimed then and now. As Cobb writes, “slavery was made unsustainable largely through the efforts of those who were enslaved. The record is replete with enslaved blacks—even so-called house slaves—who poisoned slaveholders, destroyed crops, ‘accidentally’ burned down buildings, and ran away in such large numbers that their lost labor crippled the Confederate economy.”
For those today who claim that the South was simply defending state’s rights, there is overwhelming evidence within the eleven bills of secession that the cause to be fought for was the defense of slavery.
Jelani Cobb also writes critically of the two major moments of American history that celebrate the nation’s commitment to equality: the amendments added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War and the Supreme Court decisions and major legislation passed during the post-World War II struggle for civil rights. It is important to note that, as we rightly celebrate an amended Constitution aligned with the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence (on paper, anyway), it was only after a brief period of Reconstruction that Southern whites reclaimed their dominion over former slaves through sharecropping, incarceration and de facto enslavement following conviction, and Jim Crow segregation.
As to the “end” of segregation dictated in Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—hallmarks of the civil rights era—we are right now witnessing the undermining of these written guarantees by organized institutions led by white conservatives. Some things have certainly changed, and for the better, including the efforts of white supremacists to temper overt racist language. However, while the language and policies underscoring the imposition of white supremacy throughout American history has changed in keeping with these amendments to the Constitution and these laws; the sentiment that drives it has not. We need not look far for evidence of this; the MAGA movement betrays itself in its name. Just exactly which period of our history do they wish to re-create? The only answer I can imagine is a world in which they can speak more openly about their racist ways. Of course, the past few years have seen exactly that.
While we can debate over the equality of opportunity in regards to racial differences today—even as conservatives correctly point out examples of black success—there exists a persistent and predictable inequality of outcome based upon race. In nearly every measurement of human prosperity, African Americans come up short; in employment, income, household wealth, education, life expectancy, poverty levels, infant mortality and access to health care, prison incarceration, representation in positions of power within industry and government, relations with law enforcement, exposure to violence, and on and on and on.
White supremacy is more blatantly rearing its ugly head again, and not just for African Americans. While it is through the experiences of African Americans that we often speak of discrimination, the key element to rampant discrimination, as I mentioned above, is the absence of pure whiteness. The most egregious example of this today is, of course, the institutionalized attacks upon Hispanic immigrant communities. These are embarrassingly shameful acts that belie the idea of American exceptionalism trumpeted by the right.
As the long history of American white supremacy explains much of what troubles us today, it is always the current moment that has our attention. So, as Cobb promises in his subtitle, how did we get here? In his most recent commentary, Cobb writes, “Obama, the first black president, represented the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for equality. At the same time, his presidency became a curious barometer of those same inequalities. The febrile Republican stone-walling, the outrageous declarations of the Tea Party movement, the hallucinatory yet widely believed canards about healthcare death panels and secret Muslim affiliation—all of it reflected the allergic reaction that a swath of the nation developed in response to the mere reality of a black man elected to the (heretofore) “White House.” And, why was Obama the only president required to prove his citizenship and eligibility for the White House? Cobb adds that “these dynamics were, along with an ancient and resurgent xenophobia, core elements coalescing into what eventually became Trumpism.”
The country’s divisions today are tied up in contesting visions of Barack Obama and go way beyond any program or policy. As Cobb writes, “We reveled in the small moments of his presidency: the image of a black man standing behind the presidential seal, quietly broadening our frame of reference for black men in this society; his open adoration of his wife, Michelle; the sight of his two daughters flourishing into young womanhood, recognizing along the way that we, a vast, sprawling unwieldy entity, had common affinity for these two African American teens. Trump’s moment seems to be an inversion of this. We now occupy an altogether less honorable place culturally.” (These words, to me, articulately explain that nagging feeling of malaise that now plagues us.)
An essay Cobb wrote on the eve of the 2016 election excoriates Trump and Trumpism but I refuse to further foul these words with what we all already know. Suffice to say that the intrepid journalist saw what was coming. Commenting upon his 2016 essay as Trump won back the White House in 2024, Cobb reflects, “This is an essay I would not write today. Mainly because the point I was trying to make [in 2016] is no longer insightful. It’s painfully, thoroughly, unexceptionally obvious.”
There is much more to be found in this discerning collection of essays, although each serves as tangent to the larger theme of an enduring state of white supremacy: Hollywood’s treatment of slavery; police brutality and the deaths of (mainly) young black men; the sad state of urban education amid continuing de facto segregation; mass murders explicitly motivated by white supremacy; tributes to Harry Belafonte, Nelson Mandela, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; and Amiri Baraka and the role of the arts in civil rights progress.
Cobb writes a beautiful eulogy on the passing of PBS journalist Gwen Ifill (1955-2016). “There is a great deal of work ahead of those of us who take democracy seriously. It’s heartbreaking to consider that we will have to do it without Ifill at our side.”
In closing, I’ll return to the manner in which modern white conservatives manipulate history to promote their white supremacist attitudes because, as Cobb informs, “The unwillingness to confront” our nation’s sordid history is fed by “the reluctance to countenance anything that runs contrary to the habitual optimism and self-anointed sense of the exceptionalism of American life.” He adds that, “[t]he only way to sustain that sort of optimism is by not looking too closely at the past.”
This predilection to American exceptionalism is historically exemplified within the modern debate over Confederate monuments. Cobb writes that “[t]he epic, heroic scale of the monuments that dot the nation’s landscape connotes vast esteem for these men and their ignoble cause—based on calcified lies about history—has gotten in the way of reckoning with the morality of honoring people who fought a war for the right to buy, sell, rape, abuse, and exploit other human beings.”
He adds that this myth of the Lost Cause “allowed Southerners to memorialize the leaders of an armed insurrection without the sticky moral baggage of bondage attached.” Unfortunately, yet, unsurprisingly at this point, we need not look further than the White House in 2026 for evidence that the myth of the Lost Cause continues to thrive following yet another armed insurrection of white supremacists.
Jelani Cobb’s collection of stand-alone essays offers some hope, too, because the first step towards addressing a problem is to unmistakably understand it. And, as uncomfortable as it may be, we all could do with a little of that.
