Taking Attendance at History’s Breaking Point: Jelani Cobb and the America We Refuse to Forget

Photo Source: News.columbia.edu.

By Llerraj Esuod

Jelani Cobb stands at history’s breaking point, taking attendance. His new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, is less memoir than mirror, forcing America to confront the decade it tried to forget. “The real thread that unites the book is democracy and its challenges,” he says. “And the subtitle of the book is Notes on How We Got Here. And that’s like the perennial question. How did we get here?”

Released in October 2025, the collection gathers Cobb’s most urgent essays and reportage from the past decade, many of which were first published in The New Yorker. He reframes them into a sweeping portrait of America in convulsions.

The idea, he explains, emerged as he reflected on his evolution as a writer. “I started thinking about the work I had done and the way in which I had written in different times and different eras. And I realized that, in doing a collection of that work, I would also be commenting on an era… and that it might be useful for people reading right now and reading in the future.”

His opening essay, “Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope,” traces back to his first national byline. “The story of Trayvon Martin wasn’t really well-known at the time,” he recalls. “And when I started writing about it, it just became a portal to many other things that wound up becoming very significant over the course of time.”

That sense of portals and patterns defines the book’s rhythm. Cobb weaves stories of policing, race, violence, politics, and culture to reveal not isolated events but linked cycles. As he writes, borrowing from a conversation with Stacey Abrams: “We’ve never not been in this situation.” He also quotes civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump: “But they just won’t stop killing Black people.”

Even the title carries allegorical heft. “I remember looking up the civil definition of a riot, and it said it was public mayhem committed by three or more people,” he explains. “It struck me that you needed three people for something to be called a riot technically.” That observation became a metaphor for the volatility of our times, unrest spreading through collective frustration and civic fatigue.

At its heart, Cobb’s work is a story of transformation. He revisits his youth in Queens, his public-school mentors, and the sorrow of watching institutions decline. He chronicles a country shifting, not always for the better. Reflecting on the 2016 election, he writes, “That triumph was a national humiliation,” one that warped some Americans’ sense of “what the United States is, or what it is meant to be.”

Still, within the clamor and indictments, Cobb offers a note of solidarity: “There is strength in togetherness. You are not alone.”

Where questions of race, migration, and identity pulse daily, his message lands with particular force. Cobb’s voice bridges generations and geographies, surveying the America we were handed and asking what America might still become.

Three or More Is a Riot is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived at now—and what may come next.