THREE OR MORE IS A RIOT

Incisive reportage on Black life and history by the noted journalist.

Dean of journalism at Columbia, Cobb has a pronounced contrarian bent: He refuses, for one, to capitalize “Black,” writing, “Our existence as a community need not be premised on the canards of charlatans seeking to justify murder and slavery. The bonds of shared history and culture will suffice. In short, black people exist; Black people need not.” For another, he takes a pin to many a thought balloon, as in the idea that Barack Obama represented a post-racial America, noting archly, “Unlike the maligned mulattoes of old, Obama wasn’t passing for white—­he was passing for mixed.” A case in point is Rodney King, savagely beaten by Los Angeles cops; days of rioting followed, police reforms were promised, but in the end nothing substantial changed. Cobb visits various points in American history, more often than not to find them wanting: His assessment of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, squares with historical critics who “undercut the inane idea that the formerly enslaved owed him anything at all, even a thank-you, for his self-interested decision to end a practice that the nation should never have begun in the first place.” The touchstones continue: Colin Kaepernick may have been brave for protesting system violence against Blacks, but he still wanted to play football in a league complicit in that oppression; the 2018 electoral campaign pitting Stacey Abrams against Brian Kemp, marked by extreme voter suppression, is proof by his lights that “most elections are framed as a referendum on the future; Georgia’s race was about how much of the past had been dragged into the present.” Cobb’s remarks on the intertwining of journalism and history are invaluable, while his account of inequalities of health care and its list of victims within the Black cultural community is harrowing.

Provocative, arguable, written with both bravado and great care: an exemplary collection.