Jelani Cobb: The Matter of Black Lives

Since 2012, Jelani Cobb has been contributing his deep knowledge of history and masterful journalism to The New Yorker, bringing nuance and clarity around issues of race, politics, history, and culture. Cobb is the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, specializing in post-Civil War African American history, 20th-century American politics, and the history of the Cold War. Now, with co-editor David Remnick, he’s releasing The Matter of Black Lives, The New Yorker’s groundbreaking anthology on race in America—including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Cobb. Q&A with Marcus Harrison Green.

I knew when I accepted the Seattle Arts & Lectures Super Fan Club position, there would be some overlap with my job working event staff at Town Hall Seattle. Turns out that would happen on my second event ~litfluencing~ While I wasn’t able to attend the lecture itself because we had a particularly busy evening, I can say with authority that both Seattle Arts & Lectures, and everyone associated with them that evening were some of my favorite rental clients I’ve worked for. The folks that tabled at Cobb’s event were: Sankofa Impact, Solid Ground, Urban League, South Seattle Emerald, and African American Writers Alliance. All of whom were considerate to our staff, asking for help or requests while treating us as peers, all trying to make the most of the event that evening. When they all went upstairs to hear Jelani Cobb, the Seattle Arts & Lectures team invited us to eat from the leftovers they had provided Cobb and others at the event before his talk started. SAL certainly doesn’t cut corners providing for their speakers. The vegetables were the freshest I’ve had in some time and all the food was such a high quality, we went back for seconds and thirds before getting to our reset that evening. From one Town Hall Event Staff to the entire SAL team, my deepest thanks, it was the sort of consideration that makes a shift more than just another day making a paycheck.

As for the event itself, like the James Welch Prize, it took me a couple days to watch. I am again grateful that SAL leaves the videos up for a week for you to watch when you can’t make it live. This was not one I wanted to miss. Rebecca Hoogs, the executive director for Seattle Arts & Lectures, introduced the event, and as my partner pointed out, had a wonderful speaking voice. “Her plosives are giving me ASMR” was not something I expected to hear from my partner during the introduction, but it was an excellent way to lead into Jelani Cobb, whose own voice I missed on the monitor of the lobby, but could hear clean and clear in the video recording later. Jelani Cobb held such a presence that even on my computer screen, I was rapt. Marcus Harrison Green would come on later for the Q&A and it went from being a lecture you might see in Cobb’s law class to a conversation you could witness happening at a coffee shop. There was a comfort on the stage that night, the audience and speakers were all on the same wavelength, carrying that energy into the Seattle night.

I cannot stress how interesting of a speech this was, how much I learned from hearing Cobb speak on subjects I knew I agreed with, without yet knowing why. The overwhelming message I interpreted, was that many people outside of those in charge have been warning of things like January 6th, or even Trump’s initial 2016 election, since long before the comfortably wealthy, white, educated classes came across such shocks to their system. In a hilarious introduction to this issue, he mentioned sitting down with an editor for a newspaper he would not name before immediately quoting the slogan of the New York Times. This editor could not understand why a newspaper like the NYT would be criticized for so much leading up to the disaster that was 2020, when they themselves created the environment for Trump to rise to power and moments like George Floyd’s death to be swept aside for the sake of being bipartisan to systems like the police. I’m not doing Cobb’s words justice, but he talked of the Watts riots and Black politicians in Bloomington NC being removed from office decades prior as examples for how these rises in fascism have existed long before now, they’ve just been ignored for the sake of upholding a broken system. Media is supposed to be what calls attention to injustice, but since money flows to those who profit off of propaganda, so much of media as we know it is simply watered down truth, tampered in the name of false patriotism. If you want to know more, or understand more clearly my leftist ramblings, buy The Matter of Black Lives that this lecture was given for. Jelani closed his initial lecture with this quote from the intro to the book, “We put this together in talking about these issues that have come up again and again and again as a single but furtive and hopefully effective effort that this book is less relevant as time goes on”.

After his lecture, Cobb had a Q&A with Marcus Harrison Green, who provided both his own questions and others asked by the audience. When he walked out, Green said, “Now I know what Robin feels like everyday hanging out with Batman” immediately setting the mood of awe for Cobb’s presence while recognizing the voice he was himself bringing to the stage. I am now going to write all of the notes from this section of the evening because Cobb’s words could have their own book and it would need no more of mine: “The absence of self preservation as an ethic is especially perplexing at this moment in time… Our biggest lie is that we are blameless, our biggest truth, that the most exceptional way to be is in the relentless confrontation of your shortcomings… We are the best at forgetting everything and learning nothing… It’s hard to have a land of opportunity full of opportunists… Removing the confederate flag is not enough when there is still a statue of George Washington [in reference to him owning slaves]… We don’t like to talk about how Hitler modeled a lot of his ideas off of America and our systems… Journalism should be a stalwart defender of democracy, not an evenhanded peddler of pablum… My father was a boxer, his father was a boxer, I was a writer. The first thing a boxer does when really getting hurt is smile. You don’t want your opponent to know how much that hurt… Diversity of race is not enough, there needs to be a diversity of class and gender. Columbia is 2/3 female, but when you get out into the field that fraction nosedives. You can be the majority and still not move through a system hostile to you we need a new system”. I don’t believe many of those notes were word-for-word, but they pair nicely with a funny concept he mentioned alongside the “land of opportunity” quote. “I think this was an old preacher trick, but the first time you quote something you say, ‘my friend [friend name] said’, the second time you simply say ‘my friend said’, and the third time you say ‘as I always say’”.

I may not have given an exact recounting of Jelani Cobb’s lecture for The Matter of Black Lives, but I hope I was able to pass the sense of knowledge present in the room. It wasn’t something I could substitute, just as the lecture was not a replacement for the book. You had to be there, and you can be there next time by attending future lecture of this nature, whether in person or online, Seattle Arts & Lectures is a year round cycle of events from some of the greatest speakers and authors this moment has to offer. I feel like an advertisement a lot of the time, but I really am giving my unbiased review. Rather, my review unbiased by the free ticket. Going into this evening I had plenty of bias in support of Black lives, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and Town Hall, but if I had a problem with anything said that evening, I would bring it up. Much like the news, I think a healthy understanding of your bias is important, that you should never get lost in trying to toe the line of fairness, at the cost of honesty. Some don’t deserve fairness, some enter the ring cheating and should be treated accordingly, but I can say with as much truth as I possess that this was a spectacular event, and one that I will be thinking back on for years to come.

I review events for #SAL as part of the #SALSuperFanClub; in exchange for a free ticket, I offer my unbiased review.