Jelani Cobb
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
That's actually what I wanted to talk about, because literally the size of the film. The last time I saw you, we were in the IMAX offices, and they were showing the reels of the film. First off, I had no idea the reels were that big, like 500, 600 pounds to show this film. But you were talking about how significant it was for this film in particular to be shown in those dimensions.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
Uh, and can you talk a little bit about, you know, why you felt like that was important?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
Listen, this has been an incredibly insightful kind of tour of how you think about film and what filmmaking represents to you. Yeah. So I want to say thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. And, you know, good luck with the film.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
I've been interested in talking to Ryan Coogler for years because I thought he had a really kind of nuanced and subtle way of seeing the world and certainly of seeing people.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
On the other side of Black Panther, which was this gigantic movie and, you know, made him the largest grossing black filmmaker of all time. And I believe the youngest filmmaker to ever gross a billion dollars for a film. There was this kind of big picture of him. And I didn't know if all the kind of details of who he actually was as an artist had been filled in.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
And so I thought it would be interesting to write about him and kind of fill out the silhouette a little bit.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
It's always good to see you, bro. Good to see you as well. So I want to talk a little bit about how you approach a film that is simultaneously about... It's about music. It's about the relationship between fathers and sons. It's set in the Jim Crow South in the 1930s in Mississippi, so there's an element of race.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
So, you know, of those themes, you know, how did the vampire element, you know, become part of that story?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
Can I say, I'm interested in this idea of this kind of film representing a culmination, you know, that you've been working. Yes, sir. You know, kind of really well-received independent film, Fruitvale, and then three franchise films that have been well-received artistically and commercially.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
And then being able to spread your wings and do this project, which also made me think about another theme that's so prominent, which is the theme of I would say Christianity, but it's actually more kind of broadly spirituality since there are lots of different kinds of spiritual practices and beliefs that people, you know, foreground in the film. And I hadn't seen that in your previous work.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
And I wondered how that came to you, how it connects to your own beliefs, your own kind of thinking about spirituality and religion and how it made its way into this film.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
So it's like the Baptist thread and the Catholic thread, these two things are not the same.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
The coping part of the film, I think, comes in even on some level to the kind of vampire element of it too. Absolutely. Which is one of the things I thought was really interesting because I've seen my share of vampire films I don't think I'd ever seen the kind of vampire question presented in a spiritual frame in the way that these characters do in some ways.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
It's these ancient... Yeah, it's a reference to the deity Papa Legba, who's common in kinds of African forms of spirituality that came with enslaved black people into the South. Yes, sir. But yeah, sometimes people have that idea that that Johnson is at the crossroads, not talking to the devil. He's talking to this deity figure, Papa Legba.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
One of the things, you know, when I was talking with Zinzi, your wife, and, you know, your frequent collaborator and co-producer on this film, and she compared this with, you know, Black Panther, with the two Black Panther films.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
And, you know, you talked openly about before you made Black Panther going to Africa to actually get a kind of understanding of Black Americans' relationship with the African continent. Yes.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”
And Zinzi pointed out that it was like you were grappling with the questions of distant African ancestry in that film and here grappling with more immediate questions of, you know, ancestry in this country, in Mississippi, where the film is set, you know, even though it's shot in Louisiana, but it's set in Mississippi. And that this is the same sort of kind of ancestral exploration happening here.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So one of the parts of inclusion would be like, if we say that we don't have enough African-American or enough Latino engineers, well, we're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that... have significant numbers of Hispanic or African-American students and say, would you like to be an engineer? Well, this is a voluntary thing and it's giving people access to something.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
It's not giving them any consideration they didn't already have. That would fall very much on the DEI, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action. Is that permissible? people don't know. And what may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And so we're really waiting in an almost case-by-case basis to see how all of this shakes out. And no one has marching orders just yet.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Certainly for mainstream press, It has been notable, the extent to which the reconciliation has happened, or what has been perceived as a reconciliation with Donald Trump and Trumpism. You know, of course, during the campaign, we saw the LA Times and Washington Post both spike editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Subsequently,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
We saw ABC News settle a lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that, you know, many people felt that they had a good chance of winning. And we now have seen reports that Paramount may be in talks with the Trump people about settling a lawsuit over the 60 Minutes case, which Donald Trump felt was defamatory toward him.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Critics on the left of American media have been pointing out the potential for this kind of conflict of interest forever. Even when we think about the old advertisement-supported model of newspapers, which has gone by the wayside, It was at best an imperfect solution that we had what we call the separation of church and state, the separation from the revenue side and the editorial side.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
That was never a great situation. And I think that we're seeing this play out on a much bigger scale. This isn't a new problem anymore.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
I mean, David, I heard this in the past few weeks from people who are themselves very highly placed in the news business.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
It's not encouraging. It seems like a dereliction of duty. It's still true. I think that also there's another part of this, like the parallel to this is, you know, there are many people who feel like they don't want to watch the news or listen to the news. There are journalists who wonder what the point is. And I've had those conversations, too. Like, is anyone listening to us?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Does anyone care if we point out things that are outrageous or disgusting? But don't they need to – I'm sorry, but don't they need to buck up and stand up too? Sure. But I think that we have to at least begin by acknowledging that we have this particular problem. Morale is not great.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And we have people who think that they've done their job to the best of their ability and it hasn't really made the difference that they hoped it might make. The thing that I point out when I'm talking with my students is we should never allow young or emerging journalists to have the idea that there's a one-to-one relationship between our effort and the outcome. Right.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
I quote you, as a matter of fact, in talking about the number of stories that highlighted the misdeeds and misbehavior of powerful men that somehow never generated a Me Too movement. And then all of a sudden, there was one. And we don't know what the ratio is. It's unknowable, unpredictable, completely random.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And my version of encouragement has been that we keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually really, really does make a difference.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
I tend to think of this as a short-term strategy. You know, there was a boxer back in the 80s that you might remember named Frank the Animal Fletcher. I do.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
That's shocking. I find it hard to believe. Yeah. But you recall his strategy was just to overwhelm his opponent, to just crowd him and throw all kinds of punches nonstop and so on. There was a flaw in that strategy, which is that eventually you run out of steam.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
That you can throw up flak and shrapnel and the kinds of things, and you can do this in terms of flooding the zone for a limited period of time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Yeah, exactly. I think that at some point, this becomes a counterproductive exercise in its own right.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
That's true. It also rests upon the presumption that the things that Trump and his people have foregrounded And the past feels like past hundred days. It's actually been the past two weeks. That aligns with the things that people really care about. And that remains to be seen. The culture war things he's used to great profit.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
But as we saw, you know, large reason why he lost the reelection bid in 2020 was the pandemic, which was a national crisis that he mishandled. There are other crises that are going to come up and there are other crises that are emergent even at the moment.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And how they navigate those things, I think, will be at least as important as their ability to flood the zone with all sorts of different distracting, concerning kinds of actions.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
During the Cold War, you could taint anything by just saying that it was communistic or Marxist. And the interesting kind of connection with the civil rights movement is that when I was kind of young, I was kind of like, why were people connecting... racial equality with communism, just saying that if you integrate the schools, it's communism.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And then at some point it became clear to me that their definition of communism was integration. It didn't have anything to do with redistributing the means of production or expropriating wealth. Communism can be anything that you don't like. And so now DEI is the boogeyman for anything. If there's a terrible tragedy,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
something we would normally have processed in a nonpartisan way, we can all grieve people who've died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, particularly people who are parts of the military. Now, all of a sudden, that can be blamed on DEI.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
If there is something going wrong in any part of your life, you can just, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that somehow another DEI is there. Do you think this will fade? I tend to think that these things are like fevers. You know, they break at some point.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And the fact is that you do have to, irrespective of how masterful Trump and those around him have been in playing on particular social anxieties and fears, at some point you do have to actually govern. And that is not easy. And so we'll see.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
You know, it's kind of like a barrage from all directions. And the one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about, you know, what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
In academia, the fears range. So there are people who worry that their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter, anything that the Trump administration looks unfavorably upon, that they won't be able to get funding. And in some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. And so that's a huge fear for people. And then there's the kind of political pressure
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure. or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. So very much connected to career concerns.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Well, I think that there's a question of... whether or not university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not so unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be, you know, a kind of caricature of what you actually are interested in researching.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
One of the things that's really notable is the extent to which people have begun kind of pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. So if they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways of kind of arm-twisting people into compliance.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas. with the same sort of ease that they once did. And that will, of course, have a financial implication.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And then there's the kind of other power of the purse string, which is the ability, coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a kind of anti-white discrimination.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So at its best, DEI represents an effort from companies... institutions, various kind of walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. And recognizing the kind of disparities that are baked into American life it is an attempt to undo them.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So for instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country, but only about 16 to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups. And often those disparities reflect age-old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And sometimes they just represent a kind of inertia of networks, that people hire people who they know, people who they know tend to have similar backgrounds and that kind of thing. And diversity is meant to be a kind of
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
self-aware approach to saying, hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had, let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Well, here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, certainly prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. You know, people felt that it was toothless. It was kind of checking boxes.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-white lawyers in the United States, according to the American Bar Association, went from 11% to 14%. which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States went from 89% down to 86, that steep drop in that timeframe. That kind of progress was seen as really incremental. And in fact, the most cynical views of DEI
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
saw it as a kind of corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So, I mean, I think that there's a kind of skeptical way of looking at this. And certainly, having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling as if I was brimming with new knowledge. Right.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So I think that what's happened around Trump and, you know, we mentioned, you know, the McCarthy era before. And I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy. There are lots of important parallels. But in this one particular case, you know, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened. happened prior to Joseph McCarthy.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. And I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature among other things of the Trump era.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
He understood that there was a set of people, and this is kind of statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged. And what they were seeking was a kind of public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them, too. And so for all of the...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
toothlessness of DEI in some circumstances, it still made a really potent target to say that you're uprooting it or that you're removing it. And then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
to a point that it becomes kind of pretty close to the old race science, you know, the ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those kinds of things. And so the belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
So I think the thing that's interesting, but there are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
The other, however, is that the thing that I think Trump has done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And so for African-American men whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas and the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population. I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters too. And so it is a kind of
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
house of cards in terms of like the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. But Trump is a master salesman. The idea is that you don't really think about what you've bought until you've left the store. And by that point, it's too late.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
You know, if a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
And even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of First Amendment complications at the very least, it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in-person harassment, or they may find pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. And so we've seen this over the course of the years, if you remember,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
The anti-CRT hysteria, critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the Hunger Games, practically, or WWE, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that really were not being taught in elementary and junior high schools in this country.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily, and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country, and everyone is trying to figure this out. So affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court, and there's a significant Venn overlap between affirmative action and DEI, but they're not necessarily the same thing. Explain that.