How Perceptions of Race and Sex Impact the 2016 Presidential Election | William Jelani Cobb

How Perceptions of Race and Sex Impact the 2016 Presidential Election

Watch the newest video from Big Think

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How can we chart moral progress? One popular narrative holds that it increases steadily, rising over time. But Jelani Cobb argues it happens in fits and starts, like an EKG line that spikes and falls.The notion of progress has been met differently throughout history. Technological progress has been, with few exceptions, greeted with open arms in western societies. Moral progress, on the other hand, has advanced through social struggle. At times, the two have intersected, such as when the atomic and hydrogen bombs were created. But more often than not, the expansion of civil rights has come at a social cost, with those who oppose social change on the short end of the democratic stick.

Journalist Jelani Cobb chronicles the 2016 presidential election in the context of social progress in America, and notes the divergent paths before the electorate. Down one path, the first female President. Down the other, the most outspoken and controversial presidential candidate in modern political history. The Republic nominee is so controversial that the media, which has positioned itself as objective observes to the political process, was not prepared for a candidate to so flagrantly disregard political etiquette and tradition.

The rise of this blistering brand of conservative politics has not taken place in America against the backdrop of national embarrassment or economic ruin — more traditional paths for nationalist political parties — unless, says Cobb, you count the election of the nation's first black president. Understood in this light, many of America's past sins again come to light.

Ultimately moral progress happens in fits and starts, says Cobb, like an EKG line that spikes and falls, though as an optimist, he believes the line generally trends upwards. Will the 2016 presidential election yield progress or regress?

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JELANI COBB :

William Jelani Cobb writes about the enormous complexity of race in America. In 2015, he received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism for his New Yorker columns, in which he combined "the strengths of an on-the-scene reporter, a public intellectual, a teacher, a vivid writer, a subtle moralist, and an accomplished professional historian."

His articles include "The Anger in Ferguson," "Murders in Charleston," and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations." In awarding him the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the jury wrote, "No one has done a better job of placing [the events in Ferugson, MO]—and similar happenings in other places like Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio and Staten Island, New York—in their broader context than Jelani Cobb." Further: "Cobb met the challenge of describing the turmoil in Ferguson in a way that cut through the frantic chaos of 'breaking news' and deepened readers’ understanding of what they were seeing, hearing, and feeling. Ferguson was not an aberration, he showed, but a microcosm of race relations in the United States—organically connected to the complicated legacy of segregation and the unpaid debts of slavery itself. "

Cobb was formerly associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where he was director of the Africana Studies Institute. He has received Fellowships from the Fulbright and Ford Foundations. He is the author of Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays. His forthcoming book is Antidote to Revolution: African American Anticommunism and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1931.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT :

Jelani Cobb: One of the things that tends to characterize the way Americans think about progress is that we think of it as a kind of straight line, you know. We have like the X-axis and the Y-axis and the kind of line going diagonally upward and that is American progress. As time goes here we get better. And that’s actually a false narrative. That’s not an accurate way of looking at the way the country has progressed. In this country progress has more often looked like kind of like an EKG where we have these moments and then we have these values and then we have these moments. And that may slope upward over time. But it certainly has the kind of peak and valley effect to it.

Read the full transcript at