By Conscience Alone
We are here today to present the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year award to Jelani Cobb. The award was established in 1953 to recognize a person of national or international reputation who, through the application of humanist values, has made a significant contribution to the improvement of the human condition. Selection of the awardee is based on research derived from biographical data, writings, studies, and contributions to humanity. Nominations are accepted from members, so keep that in mind, and considered by the Board Awards Committee.
Dr. Cobb clearly exemplifies the values of the Humanist of the Year award. He is a journalist, a scholar, an educator, and a filmmaker. He has been described as a clear voice in the fight for a better America, who explores the enormous complexities of race and inequality while offering guidance and hope for the future. A fellow New Yorker writer said that Dr. Cobb combines the rigor and depth of a professional historian with the alertness of a reporter, the liberal passion of an engaged public intellectual, and the literary flair of a fine writer.
Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016, and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film, “Whose Vote Counts,” and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2018. Yeah. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.
Dr. Cobb is the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress,” and “To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle in the Hip Hop Aesthetic.” He’s the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including “The Matter of Black Lives: A Collection of The New Yorker’s Writings on Race,” and “The Essential Kerner Commission Report.” And he is the producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries, including “Lincoln’s Dilemma,” “Obama: A More Perfect Union,” “Policing the Police, and The Riot Report.”
Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY; Howard University, where he earned his bachelor’s in English; and Rutgers University, where he completed his master’s and doctorate in American history in 2003. He’s also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. He received an honorary doctorate for the Advancement of Science and Art from Cooper Union in 2022, and an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Rutgers University in 2024. York College, CUNY, and Teachers College have honored Dr. Cobb with medals. In 2023, Dr. Cobb was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Cobb’s journalism, scholarship, and activism exemplifies the best of humanist values: compassion, ethical development, critical thinking, working for peace, and social justice. His work calls us to better ourselves and our democracy, and we are so proud to call him one of us. I’ve heard some oohs and aahs from the audience that tells me you guys recognize how amazing he is. And so we are here to present that award to him, and we are going to have him remotely.
JELANI COBB: One, I really, really regret that I can’t be there with you. Some of you may know I had a flight that was delayed and delayed until 2 a.m. and then finally canceled. And so that’s the only reason that I’m not there with you this morning to accept this honor in person. And, you know, I’m deeply humbled and I deeply respect the work of the American Humanist Association, and the tradition that it represents.
When I was thinking about this recognition and this particular moment for me, it was inextricable from the bigger, broader concerns that we’re trying to navigate, both for us in New York locally, for us as a nation nationally, and then globally. And that we have seen, despite the historical precedent, and all that the past should have taught us, we’ve seen the resurrection of dangerous ideas and a kind of belligerent nationalism. And we have seen the effacement of democratic traditions, the violation of democratic norms — we actually exist in a moment where people are being subject to ideological screening at the borders of the United States. We are led by a person whose sense of himself is so fragile that we cannot even allow anyone into the country who has a critical or dissenting view of his policies, his actions, or his character.
We have seen our institutions of higher education assailed, and attacked, and undermined, impacting our ability to do the fundamental research that will one day alleviate the curses of cancer and the plagues that continue to affect humanity, and to move us into a better, more enjoyable, healthier, and more livable future. This could be what we bequeath to subsequent generations, should we not act. And should we not pursue this, as people of conscience? Not come together in ways that are constructive and beneficial? We could bequeath this legacy of these kinds of conditions to subsequent generations.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that we experience this in a moment in which we’ve seen a kind of belligerent, nationalistic, hyper-aggressive form of Christian Nationalism that has taken root, that has taken the worst traditions of Americanism and combined it with a religious justification. This is not a novel development. We’ve seen this. We understand the history of this nation and how this has occurred time and again. But we have seen this with renewed fervor sweep across the country.
And I find it ironic that in this moment, that we continually associate theism with morality, that nationally we make a kind of tacit or simple presumption that the only way in which we can live moral, decent, compassionate lives is to subscribe to one form of theism or another. And given the dynamics of our politics, now there’s really only one form of acceptable theism. And so, as we telegraph out, we see that the crisis of humanity, the crisis of democracy, the crisis of equality, and really, fundamentally, the crisis of human empathy, is directly connected to the ascendance of these types of theologies that have been with us across the span of this nation’s history.
And so it’s important for people of conscience, for people who have a rational vantage point on this, people who are not afraid to ask difficult questions and find the answers, that we step up in this moment.
Earlier this week, I had an interesting experience. I had lunch with the priest who christened me in 1969, and I had not seen him in many years or decades. In fact, I had not seen him since I was about 16 years old, so that’s roughly 40 years ago. And through an odd set of happenstances we found ourselves back in connection, and I invited him to lunch, and we sat down and we talked. And, you know, we went through all of the things that I had learned in my time as a young Catholic and had learned specifically in his tutelage and in the Catholic youth groups.
My instinct was to say, “Oh, my mother would be so proud of me.” In fact, she would not, because as a child, very many of us had mothers who told you you can grow up and be anything that you want. And so my mother told me that I could be anything in life that I wanted to be, except a non-believer. And so, I suspect that she would have some words for me. But in the same circumstance, I think I’ve been guided by my conscience. And I think that we’d be better off fundamentally if more of us were guided by our consciences.
That if we were able to turn our backs on charlatans in religious garb, if we were able to turn our backs on people who sought to divide us and people who have injected such vitriol and such contempt for our neighbors that we find ourselves at the brink of social disruption in this country, and at the brink of wars, potentially catastrophic, even more catastrophic wars abroad over these same sorts of theological abstractions that are rooted in these questions. And so, in that regard, I am deeply humbled and deeply appreciative. And I will use this honor to further inspire me to continue working even harder at the causes of equality, freedom, and justice. Thank you.
Q: Could you share if there was a pivotal time in your life when you went from that believer-time with your mom to where you are now?
JC: I think there are a few moments, one of which was, interestingly enough, as my mother was transitioning toward the end of her life. And this was a point at which there was a great deal of family prayer, hope that there would be a miracle, that there would be some way, that there’d be divine intervention that would stop her cancer from progressing. And I had to confront the fact that I could not participate. Now, I knew what my beliefs were, but they were mostly quietly held, and that was a point at which I had to confront my inability to, I suppose, continue to lie about who I was and what I thought.
There have been other points in life prior to that. I remember as a younger person I was in a relationship with a woman who was very religious. And when I confessed to her my doubts and suspicions about the theologies that I’d been exposed to and taught, she ended the relationship. And the irony that I took from that experience was that there was a constraint on who religious believers could love. But in freeing myself of religion, I was now eligible to love anyone in humanity with no conditions or no preconditions or ideological presumptions. And so I thought to myself, that was an ironic kind of validation that that relationship ended. But it also affirmed to me that I wanted to be on the side of being able to connect to humanity. Now, of course, I’d also read about the critiques of religion and the histories of, you know, the kinds of contradictory histories of Christianity and so on, going all the way back to college. And so none of this was a kind of new development, but it was a more gradual development over the course of my adulthood.
Q: For those of us who are wrestling with a commitment to truth that legacy journalism provided, but also frustrated sometimes by its willingness to shrink back from the human rights values that humanists hold in balance, is there a way for us to hold it accountable? And also, is there a way for us to look elsewhere without falling into the trap of misinformation that is circling the drain on the internet?
JC: To answer that as succinctly as possible, no. I just mean it’s a really good question, that there are lots of things and implications to it. One of the first things that I think is important that we sometimes miss is when I’ve been in conversations with other nonbelievers, and there’s an obstacle to my critique of religion, or the belief that there are no gods that we should subscribe our loyalty to and our fealty to, but at the same time being opposed to things like Islamophobia and being opposed to things like antisemitism. We can hold both of those truths simultaneously. And I think it’s really important that we articulate that. And when I see the kind of language that has been directed at Zohran Mamdani, you know, I don’t have to be a believer. What I believe in is democracy. You know, I’m a believer in democracy. And I find what’s happening with him to be antagonistic to democracy.
On the issue of the media, I don’t know if this makes this better or worse, but our media has been owned, by and large, by rich people for a really long time. And so the kinds of contradictory things that we saw with Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post or Patrick Soon-Shiong and the LA Times, or we can go through the whole list, you know, ABC News, Paramount, and so on. Those are not new problems. When you go back and read the kind of media critics of the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, there’s always been this question about the commercial interests and the commercial allegiances. I could say the same thing for Joseph Pulitzer, who founded Columbia Journalism School, where I’m Dean. And he had to navigate those kinds of pressures and contradictions himself. And so that shouldn’t make us necessarily okay with it, but I think that it’s not a new problem.
And one of the things that I’ve been saying, you know, loudly and quietly, in any tone that I think people will be able to hear it when I’m in the room with other media people is that we have to sit with the very real possibility that the declining trust in media is a product of the fact that people know more about media than they did previously. Had they known some of the problems and concerns with our media, they might not have trusted us 30 years ago or 50 years ago. And what we have to do is adapt to new methodologies, a radical level of transparency about how we go about our work, and to foreground the ethical concerns that have sometimes gone by the wayside. And that’s the only way that we have any chance of winning back the trust or even deserving the trust of the public.
Q: You’ve clearly been successful in your life, and in your work, and what you’re doing now. I was wondering if you could share some secrets or treasures of how you have thrived and flourished? And many people often think of these awards, like, “Oh, now you’re at the pinnacle and you have everything you need,” but often it’s the beginning of new responsibilities. And so what could we as a community do to help support your thriving and flourishing more going forward? And finally, you have this platform. We would love to know how you think we as a movement might thrive and flourish with one or two directions for what you hope to see us act on.
JC: So I think that community is really important. And actually, I’ll answer the second question and then I’ll go to the third and then the first. I told my students something once which I think both kind of surprised and maybe frightened them. I said, “Here’s a rule. Whenever there’s a ceremony in life, people are about to ask you to do something difficult.” It’s like, if you have graduation and you think that this is the culmination. But really, it’s like, “No, it’s always the stuff that comes after graduation that’s more difficult and complicated.” You’ve learned whatever this is, whether it’s elementary school or high school or a master’s degree, and now we’re asking you to take on the relatively more difficult task of applying what you have learned out in the world and in life. If you have a marriage ceremony, marriage is hard work. Anyone can tell you, after the marriage is when the difficulty comes.
The only slight asterisk is to funerals. For funerals, there’s nothing, there’s nothing difficult that they’re asking of you, but the difficulty is shifted on to the burden of people who loved you and knew you. And a ceremony has requirements, it means that you’re being set up for something more, more difficult than what you’ve done prior to this. And so I’m aware that this award is a ceremony.
But I think that the more difficult thing actually connects to the third thing that you were saying, which is that community is important. That maybe it’s less difficult if you have people who affirm you. It really means a lot to me when I have conversations with people who affirm that it is possible to be moral and to live a good life and to be guided by a simple desire for human betterment or empathy toward human suffering. And, you know, we need not be condemned to meaninglessness outside of this. And so for me, as a younger person, that was a tremendous weight being lifted from my shoulders. And so I think that we should not underestimate the value of community.
I have a really wonderful network and I’ve been the beneficiary of people, and I say this all the time. I have been the beneficiary of people who saw things in me before I ever even conceived that, you know, these things could be possibilities for me. And I have a great family and a really wonderful set of friends and colleagues. And I’ve been fortunate to engage with people who disagree with me, people whom I disagree with, in ways that have generally been beneficial for me. And so I try my best to try to pass that on. And also for any human being, I’m not 100 percent successful at this, but I really try to take the negative experiences I’ve had in life as a roadmap.
And so, “Well, if I got through this experience, it was terrible, it was unfortunate, but now I have a roadmap of what not to do.” Or something that I don’t want to replicate. It took me a long time to kind of understand that, that that was what you could take away from difficult circumstances or unfair circumstances. But that’s how I try to live my life now.
Q: I’m interested in your perspective on how DEI is pragmatic and, frankly, for the betterment of all of us, not just this weak notion towards altruism that, again, comes at the expense of organization.
JC: Yeah, I think that my understanding and my perspective on DEI has always been that we have institutions that were engineered to be exclusive. And those practices, the social practices and the presumptions that went along with that engineering had a really long shelf life, that even if you removed the legal barriers from women or Black people or people in the LGBTQ community or any of the things, if we removed the explicit barriers that prevented us from having full participation in American institutions, whether it be educational or occupational or whatever they are, that the inertia would continue and that those institutions would still function the way that they had, and they would still look the way they did previously. And they would still operate on very many of the same defaults.
And so DEI was meant to be a counterbalance, a mechanism by which we would say, “We want to break with the past.” I don’t buy the idea that this always required doing so at the expense of merit. And when I went to graduate school in the 1990s, which, you know, for people who are old enough, will remember that there were these intense debates around affirmative action then. And I was very clear that I had been the beneficiary of diversity initiatives, meaning that people had made the extra effort to find students who otherwise might not have been in the pool, who might not have been considered, who might have been overlooked. But once I was there, DEI did not read any of the gargantuan assignments that I had. DEI did not write any of the very many historical papers that I had to write. It did not write my doctoral dissertation. It did not take my qualifying exams for me.
And so that is, in the best sense, what we would hope for. And I always say to people, I pay a lot more in taxes than I would have had I never been the beneficiary of these kinds of programs. And so I think we both made out well on this proposition. I think about that every April 15th, but, you know, in the bigger sense, we’re not really dealing with practical realities. What we’re actually dealing with is the resurgence of a kind of racial entitlement, and that operates in the belief that to the extent that our institutions are diverse, they are denying possibilities to the typically white men who previously would have overwhelmingly made up those positions. We still live in a country where all people of color represent about 40 percent of the population, but represent about 10 percent of the people who hold elected office. If we went through corporate boards, if we went through CEO positions, if we went through academia and those who are professors, we would find that that kind of disproportionality is alive and well. And what we are really fighting about is diminished overrepresentation, not any kind of underrepresentation.
Q: In your analysis of historical and contemporary struggles for justice, particularly around race and democracy, what examples do you find most compelling where human collective effort has led to significant progress and affirmed our shared humanity, and what made it a success?
JC: So here’s the thing. One of the good things, I think, is that we have such an incredible array of examples. One that rolls off the tip of the tongue is the labor movement in the United States, and the eradication of things like child labor. The abolitionist movement in the United States. The suffrage movement in the United States. And going all the way back, to the American Revolution and the whole array of subsequent struggles and movements that have come out of that.
Here’s the thing, all of those movements were flawed, and all of those movements failed to achieve some significant portion of what they set out to do. Some of them were flawed in the sense of what they set out to do was only partially moral. And so, we talked about the American Revolution. We’d have to confront its contradictions there. But I think that I’m a big advocate for not keeping things under glass, for not being too precious about things that we may have some investment in. It’s more useful for us to talk about and to study and analyze the shortcomings of the women’s rights movements, to understand the shortcomings of the civil rights movement, the shortcomings of all these things than it is for us to laud the people who led those movements.
I think that we recognize people who’ve sacrificed, often people who lost their lives in pursuit of these moral ideals. I don’t mean that we just dismiss any in that way, but as historical examples, it’s like, I talk often to my students about the utility of history. Teams watch their game tape to see what they got wrong, not what they got right. You’re never going to go into a locker room and see a coach going, “Look at that reception. Just beautiful. And look at that defense. Perfect.” And so on. You watch that footage in order to pick apart the things, no matter how well you did, you want to understand how you could have gotten better. And I think that that’s how we should engage with these movements.
Now there are global versions of this. If we’re dealing with climate change and the need for a global coordinated response to it, we would do well to understand, you know, what have been the shortcomings of previous environmental movements? If we’re looking at the ways in which democracy movements have been thwarted, in which we’ve seen democratic backsliding around the world, it’d be useful to understand what were the shortcomings of those societies in the first place.
And one other thing that I’ll say, since we’re on the democracy subject, is that I think it’s really useful for us to study, like we’ve talked about, particularly in the United States where we’re inclined to think of ourselves as the oldest constitutional democracy in the world, which we are. But in some ways, I always make the comparison, “New York has the oldest subway system in the United States.” You know, having the oldest system doesn’t necessarily mean you have the best one. And we should be observant, and we should be analyzing societies like Chile and Portugal that have made a much more recent transition to democracy. South Africa, you know, even though South Africa is navigating its own problems, it navigated the path from a racial autocracy into a multi-party democracy. And Brazil, which has had to do this twice since the 1970s, in the wake of the Bolsonaro government. And so what do people do individually that affirms democracy in their own lives? And how do people create a democratic culture to shake off the allure of autocracy? I think those answers are not confined to any one place.
Q: A few years ago, I wrote a book profiling the stories of black women leaving religion. And so I’m just curious about your personal story. You don’t have to go into a long story, but I’m curious about what it was like for you as a Black man coming out as a non-religious person.
JC: Well, it was very difficult, and I think Anthony Pinn, African American religion professor, has written a lot about this as well.
But I think it’s particularly difficult because for a lot of people, their kind of personal, family stories and narratives and people are bound up in some kind of religious ideas for one way or for one reason or another. And, you know, that is individual. But I think one of the things that happens with Black people is that there is this default presumption that God and God’s church are the only thing that account for us surviving slavery, and the only thing that account for us surviving Jim Crow and the terrorism that came after slavery. And so for me, in saying that I don’t subscribe to those ideas, it also came with a kind of presumption that I turned my back on the things that have sustained us, that have gotten us through the difficult times and so on. And then there’s all the other stuff, you know. “Are you going to be an immoral person?” Which is a very weird thing, because there are so many acts any given day that are committed by people who profess to actually believe in God, acts of violence and things that harm other people. But we don’t keep tabs on that. We don’t have an accounting of that. And so the presumption is that if you don’t believe in gods, then you are lacking in empathy. And so that was a very difficult thing.
And, just being honest, it was difficult dating because that’s a deal breaker for lots of Black women. When I was dating Black women this came up again and again and again where they would say, “Oh, okay, well, if you don’t believe, then there’s no future in this.” And so, fortunately, when I met my wife, we were compatible in that way. And we found very similar outlooks on that subject. But I know that that is another area in which that becomes a more complicated undertaking. And I tell people also, from time to time, I still pop into a church for familiarity reasons that there are rituals and songs and things that are comforting to me, even if I don’t subscribe to the underlying ideology. You know, I’m not a regular church goer, but, from time to time, I’ll say, “I think I just want to have that experience again.” And I appreciate the art form and the culture that’s associated with it, more so than the theology.