Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025

by Jelani Cobb

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of the definitive journalists of this era—acclaimed historian, Pulitzer Prize finalist, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism—comes a kaleidoscopic, real-time portrait of the turbulent past decade.

“Gripping . . . a stirring catalog of institutions lost, of other lives cut short . . . Cobb is unfailingly modest about his insight and the power of his work to effect change. But that modesty belies the fact that Cobb’s writing makes us feel the injustice deeply.”—The New York Times Book Review

What just happened?

From the moment that Trayvon Martin’s senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by new social movements—around guns, gender violence, sexual harassment, race, policing, and on and on—and an equally powerful backlash that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In this punchy, powerful collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb pulls the signal from the noise of this chaotic era.

Cobb’s work as a reporter takes readers to the front lines of sometimes violent conflict, and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a stunning mélange of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb’s writing captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era—and helps readers understand what might be coming next.

Cobb has added new material to this collection—retrospective pieces that bring these stories up-to-date and tie them together, shaping these powerful short dispatches into a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential periods in recent American history.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Essays, Race, Audiobook, Sociology

480 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 14, 2025

About the author

Also writes as William Jelani Cobb.

Reviews

[Jessie (Zombie_likes_cake) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The problem is not that certain people among us cannot remember history. The terror has emerged precisely because they do."

Want to stroll down the sad memory lane of the last +decade? Cobb is your guy, this collects political and cultural articles he has written for the New Yorker. It's full of foresight and foreshadowing, so don't give me the whole "that's not the president I voted for". A lot of people knew who he was and where this path was going. This book being another record of that. But this was not simply a book that coddled my "told you so" feelings. This was educational and eye opening for me since it described these years through a black lens.

I read this over the first two months of 2026 and we all know those have been busy months (though it's not unlikely things got a lot worse as the year moved on?) and I can't tell you how many disturbing parallels there were. I mean, reading about Ferguson in conjunction with Minneapolis presents this whole other dimension. Countless times a sentiment or even a direct quote that we expressed here and now was mirrored exactly by something written in these essays, echoing back from 10-ish years ago. In a way that makes it seem that our current time line was inevitable, after all the writing was all over the walls.

His musings on Obama were particularly depressing. The idea that what could have been a triumph for the USA, to finally elect the first black president turned into the ultimate trigger for the rise of hate and racism we are seeing now. Cobb fuses a lot of black and general history into his writing which was educational for me but it also highlighted that blacks and whites have always lived in slightly different realities in this country. So my thought now is if Obama was the ultimate straw for the racists maybe Trump could be the final push for our side to get it together and move into a future we all deserve? Just creating some hope for myself here, who knows. But, as Cobb says in his epilogue, first we got to weather the storm. His last paragraph reads as follows:

"The difficult lesson in that history is that, although further progress is possible, we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. We believed that we had broken with history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact, broken some part of us."

4.5* (I had to cut some off the full 5 because there are a some essays in here that are biographical/ obituary style pieces of important figures but I often found those a bit less relevant to the bigger picture and considering this is a long and challenging read I feel like some of them could've been maybe cut?)

[sierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably the most comprehensive book on the united states’ legacy concerning race that i've read to date. fascinating and educational. will most certainly be recommending this in the future

[Shomeret · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I received a copy of Three or More is a Riot by Jelani Cobb, it was an advance reader copy that was approved by Random House the publisher. The title of this book is the definition of "riot" in the criminal code. It's not a riot unless three or more people are involved in "concerted unlawful actions".

Cobb discusses how mixed race Barack Obama was defined as black by both the black and white communities. Yet he was brought up by his white mother to be culturally white. I imagine that being culturally white allowed Obama to be elected President of the United States.

Author Cobb attended Howard University, one of the big four HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). So he includes discussion of HBCUs in this book. Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison are among those mentioned as graduates of HBCUs. This implies that without HBCUs, it might have been a good deal more difficult for these important black figures to become prominent. I had almost no awareness of HBCUs before reading this book. So I was thoroughly educated in the significance of these institutions by reading Three or More is a Riot.

I gave this book an A- because although this book is excellent and very thorough, I didn't read anything in it that was unexpected.

For my complete review see https://shomeretmasked.blogspot.com/2...

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sure it would have been better if I had eye read it and could take it in more, but even as an audiobook it's pretty easy to follow and understand. It doesn't hurt to have lived through and consumed media relating to the topics covered.

This is a pretty wide-ranging collection. There are pieces on police brutality, the electoral college, critical race theory, Confederate monuments, various movies (Django Unchained, Lincoln, Judas and the Black Messiah), profiles of individuals such as John Lewis, school closures, etc. As a whole, it does do a lot to paint a picture of American culture and how it has evolved to the present.

Many of the articles have postscripts in which Cobb provides updates or reflections on older pieces. I tended to really enjoy those as well as the epilogue, in which Cobb describes the process of revisiting these pieces in order to put the book together.

There's a lot of information I would have highlighted in a physical copy. There's also a lot that just echoes my own experiences (and so many others') of despair, particularly following the 2024 election. It's well written and worth your time.

[Terri Gulyas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three or More Is a Riot is a powerful collection of essays that helped me make sense of the political, racial, and cultural upheavals of the last decade. Jelani Cobb moves between history and lived experience with clarity and urgency, showing how events that felt shocking in the moment—racial violence, mass protests, political backlash—are rooted in much longer patterns in American life. I appreciated how his writing never feels academic or distant; it’s grounded, accessible, and emotionally honest, without sacrificing depth or rigor. Even though the book brings together essays originally written at different moments, it reads as a cohesive story of how we got here, capturing both the exhaustion and the moral stakes of this era. This is a book that doesn’t just document recent history—it challenges the reader to sit with it, reflect on it, and understand its unfinished consequences.

[Kelsey Baguinat · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐

[Fanchen Bao · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to the US in August 2012, so the book covers my entire living experience in this amazing yet frustrating country that I now call home. It calls back a lot of the memories, shocking memories shall I say, about America that I had never learned before. While optimism has always been one of the virtues of Americans to overcome adversity, I find myself losing hope day by day, month by month, year by year. The damages inflicted by two Trump terms might be more long-term, if not permanent, than I can stomach. Sometimes I wonder has America peaked at Obama's election, despite the financial crisis?

What I have learned the most from the book is that the black community's reactions to Barack Obama becoming the President and his policies were far more nuanced than simply we-have-achieved-racial-equality-because-a-black-man-is-president-now. What I have also realized is that my reading level might not have been as advanced as I had expected. Mr. Cobb is a very strong writer and you should buckle up before diving into his many thoughts and arguments (it feels like working on a GRE reading test).

Interesting Quotes (Part I)

Part II can be found on the Medium article.

The pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas had already highlighted the contradictions and outright untruths of the idea that humanity could be neatly divided into distinct typologies, but for men of Du Bois’s era—people who were literally known as “race men”—the battle was not primarily to dispatch the categories of race but to dispute the idea that those categories were arranged hierarchically.

--p1. This is a new piece of information to me. Separate but equal, not from Jim Crow but from W. E. B. Du Bois. On a grand scheme of things, I don't think it would work. If we allow ourselves to be segregated into groups, we turn the society into a zero-sum game -- one group will always want to win over another group due to limited resource.

In etymological terms, we had simply shifted from a word with Romantic origins, “negro,” to a Germanic word, “black,” that carried an identical meaning. True enough, the term “negro,” likely applied by Portuguese-speaking slavers in the sixteenth century, had been corrupted into the radioactive and anglicized nigger, and since “black” had no such parallel, the change represented a kind of lateral progress.

--p2. Sounds like "euphemism treadmill" to me.

So the well-intentioned, rhetorically satisfying language demands of that tumultuous summer represented a step backward. It unwittingly mirrored the demands of resurgent white nationalists for the capitalization of the letter “W” in reference to white people—demands made because they believe in both the categories of race and the aged, invalid hierarchies attached to them.

--p2. This is the argument that the attempt to "uplift" African American as "Black" instead of just "black" actually serves a step backward because it reinforces the segregation of people and brings out the term "White" which has way more hierarchical baggage compared to "Black".

The title, Three or More Is a Riot, is a reference to the frequent criminal code definition holding that a riot is the concerted unlawful actions of “three or more” people. ..., it recalled the South Carolina code that, in the aftermath of the great Stono slave rebellion of 1739, defined a slave revolt as the mere presence of more than two Negroes without the company of a white man.

--p7

The election of a black president and appointment of a black attorney general could not realistically remedy decades of complex relations between African American men and law enforcement.

--p15. No they did not. If anything, they served as a catalyst to energize the Right to further deteriorate the race relations in the country.

Yet the failure of the Sanford Police Department to make an arrest nearly a month after Martin’s death, and the fact that, if it weren’t for half a million petition signatures and national outrage, this shooting would have gone un-investigated, has already confirmed yet another assumption: our worst problem is not cynicism; it’s the frequency with which that cynicism proves accurate.

--p15. This refers to the Trayvon Martin case in 2012.

King, who died Sunday at age forty-seven, was inducted, unwitting and unwilling, into a fraternity of men whose experiences seem like a series of historical paraphrases....a civic violation as lived cliché.

--p16. I didn't know Rodney King passed away in 2012. Or maybe I did but I completely forgot. In a world where the society had indeed learned the lesson would make it much easier to commemorate Rodney King. But that world is not America, where King has simply become one of the ever growing list of "historical paraphrases".

The three levels of bureaucratic self-defense are to deny a problem exists; admit that it exists but say it’s confined to a few rogue individuals; or admit to systemic troubles, create a commission, and then claim that reforms have completely eliminated the problem.

--p18.

At a casual glance it seems contradictory that African American unemployment remains double white unemployment but that the president retains a 90 percent approval rate among black people. But that fails to recognize many of us who remember that blacks were disproportionately unemployed under Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.

--p21. The president under discussion is President Obama.

...the colored section was far more democratic than the ostensibly free segments of America because virtually any tincture of black ancestry was sufficient to gain admission.

--p21. I was shocked by this many years ago when I learned that Mike Bibby was considered black. Some white people's obsession about purity, including that of Hitler, is just absurd. They'd rather inbreed themselves to oblivion than acknowledging that the real progress of human kind has been and will always be inclusivity.

There was nothing tragic about the trajectories of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, or any other biracial black person—aside from the burden of racial inequality they shouldered along with anyone else of African descent. The activist Walter White used his nearly white skin as a kind of camouflage that allowed him to investigate lynchings for the NAACP in the 1920s.

--p22.

“the racial barrier” had not fallen with Obama’s election; it had become a selectively permeable membrane,

--p24.

The joke, however, was on us. Few could conceive that, forty years after King’s death, the nation would elect a black president—an event deeply rooted in the civil rights ethos, a bolder redemption, a stronger immunization against the claims of history. And, as with the claims to have marched with Dr. King, the very fact of Obama’s election has been a disclaimer against the racism that came after it.

--p24. Living through Trump's era, it feels like Obama's election was less of an immunization than a botched attempt of applying antibiotics -- instead of killing racism once and for all, it bred more fierce and resistant strains and backfired almost all the progress America has made since the Progressive Era. But let's face it, racism originates from tribalism, and tribalism is rooted in our very DNA. It can never be killed.

The net result of this awkward act is that Obama’s presidency appears like a type of infidelity: married to America at large but conducting an affair with black people.

--p25. This refers to Obama's policies cannot lean too much to black people, lest people complain that he favors his own race, even though solving problems faced by black people is well warranted as the priority of any president regardless of their skin color.

if he would do something to specifically address high unemployment among blacks and Latinos, Obama responded that “every step we are taking is designed to help all people” and reiterated that “my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats.” But what of those who have no boats to begin with?

--p26.

During the 2008 primaries, I encountered black voters who spoke of voting against Obama because they didn’t believe a black man could be elected president and live through his entire term.

--p27. This was sweet and stupid at the same time.

For black people, the implications of this were clear: if the most powerful man in the world could be played like that because he’s black, what hope was there for the rest of us?

--p27. This refers to the ridiculous birtherism drama fanned by none other than Trump.

If his election validated the ideals of King, what has happened since then lends credence to Malcolm X.

--p29. I am in dire need to read Malcolm X (and I just put a hold on his autobiography!)

But he also appears as the moral vector of his age in ways that don’t square with history. In focusing so directly on Lincoln’s efforts, Spielberg’s film slights abolitionists, radical Republicans, and, crucially, the African Americans—slave and free—who pushed Lincoln to the positions he eventually adopted.

--p33. This is a criticism of Spielberg's Lincoln, who, despite signing the Emancipation Proclamation, could not be regarded as an abolitionist with all honesty. Lincoln being the "Emancipator" was purely political pragmatism.

Given the prominence of the word in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—neither of which remotely touch on slavery—its usage in Django starts to seem like racial ventriloquism, a kind of camouflage that allows Tarantino to use the word without recrimination.

--p34. Y'al want to guess which word is in reference here?

The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution.

--p35. Yes, absolutely. For more details on this, one can check out Daring to Be Free (not an easy read but worthwhile).

On the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s worth recalling that slavery was made unsustainable largely through the efforts of those who were enslaved. The record is replete with enslaved blacks—even so-called house slaves—who poisoned slaveholders, destroyed crops, “accidentally” burned down buildings, and ran away in such large numbers that their lost labor crippled the Confederate economy.

--p36.

By lionizing Lincoln, we are able to concentrate on the death of an evil institution rather than its ongoing legacy. The paradox is that Lincoln’s death enabled later generations to impatiently wonder when black people would cease fixating on slavery and just get over it.

--p41.

Many Americans have reacted to the promise of the Obama era as a threat, as a harbinger of the devaluing currency of whiteness. The problem is not that these people want to take their country back; it’s that they were loath to share it in the first place.

--p42. To these people, hierarchy, not equality, is not the starting point. So when the society slowly moves towards equality, which should be applauded by any sane person as a huge, albeit belated, progress, what they feel is a loss. They want to take back what they used to have, the "good old days", to "make America great again". And Trump, being brass and radical, fit that ignorant desire perfectly.

Lincoln’s death is further evidence that men who are ahead of their times have a tendency to die at the hands of men who are behind them.

--p43.

The symbolic ideal of post-racialism masks a Supreme Court that may undermine affirmative action in higher education and the preclearance clause of the Voting Rights Act.

--p44. Mr. Cobb, be careful what you wished for. This piece was published in 2013. By June 25, 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance clause. By June, 2023, affirmative action was gutted. Ironically, neither of them happened as a sign of "post-racialism" but rather a worsening of endemic racism.

In our own era, the only impediment to realizing the creed of “We Shall Overcome” is the narcotic belief that we already have.

--p45. Racism is a forever fight because prejudice is rooted in our blood and requires education and non-trivial personal efforts to overcome.

Lincoln represents a kind of redemptive escape valve, a salve for Americans who can scarcely countenance that this nation’s origins are entangled in the profound exploitation of the Africans kidnapped and dragged to these shores.

--p46.

James Baldwin once remarked that segregationists weren’t truly driven by the cliché concern of preventing black men from marrying their daughters. Rather, he said, “You don’t want us to marry your wives’ daughters—we’ve been marrying your daughters since the days of slavery.”

--p49. Savage!

And though we think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, many Americans are removed enough from identity-based communities to recoil at the idea that they’d be held accountable for someone else’s crimes. But recent immigrants know that, even in a country founded upon the premise of individual rights, there is no guarantee that a person will be treated as an individual.

--p54.

...the United States and South Africa are products of kindred histories: both founded by settlers, both emerged from wars to overthrow British colonialism, both forged national identities on their respective frontiers. Before the election of Barack Obama allowed this country, albeit briefly, to indulge the idea of post-racialism, Mandela was revered here as a proxy for the American past. His capacity to emerge from twenty-seven years in prison without bitterness broadcast the hope that this country’s own racial trespasses might be forgiven.

--p60. Forgiveness is contingent on the previous mistake not being repeated. How can we let bygone be bygone when racism is still rampant today?

Mandela’s release from prison and the collapse of apartheid were direct consequences of the demise of the Soviet Union; the South African regime could no longer rely upon its anti-communism as a counterbalance to its miserable human rights record.

--p61.

He believed in the redemptive power of forgiveness. But he also recognized that it was the only route that lay between civil war and the mass exodus of the moneyed, educated class of white people who were integral to the economy.

--p62. Forgiveness is a compromise Mandela made to seed the future of the country. It was a tough pill to swallow, but I also understand that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

...it was only in 1862...that it was possible to pass the Compensated Emancipation Act. It was the sole instance in which slavery reparations were authorized—and it compensated slaveholders in Washington, D.C., for the cost of emancipating their human chattel. The enslaved—the cornerstone of the South’s economy, the collateral that allowed Northern lenders to profit from the cotton trade, the involuntary producers of the raw material around which the textile industry was built—were given nothing but a deeply compromised facsimile of freedom.

--p64.

In one version, that history appears as an incremental movement toward equality after a long night of discrimination; in the other, history looks like a balance sheet, and the cumulative debits of sanctioned theft, enforced poverty, and scant opportunity far outweigh the inconsistent credits of goodwill.

--p66.

In the days after 9/11, it was common to hear people say that it was the first time Americans had really experienced terrorism on their own soil. Those sentiments were historically wrong, and willfully put aside acts that were organized on a large scale, had a political goal, and were committed with the specific intention of being nightmarishly memorable. The death cult that was lynching furnished this country with such spectacles for a half century.

--p80. Lynching is terrorism by white people, so it is not considered terrorism. Does this logic sound right?

If black people can exert a valid claim on American democracy, Baraka seemed to be saying, then there’s no reason for their language not to have equally powerful standing in American literature.

--p86. This refers to Amiri Baraka using Ebonics in his poems. Ebonics, or AAVE, is not broken English but its own branch of the language with established rules and idioms. And it sounds pretty damn cool.

The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous.

--p98. These seemed to be white artists who achieved success by performing music rooted in Black culture.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big thanks to Random House, One World, and NetGalley for sending me an advanced copy of Jelani Cobb’s essential and relevant collection of his writing Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here 2012-2025. Cobb, who is not only a skilled and astute writer whose pieces critically examine politics, culture, entertainment, and history, is also the current dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. I was really impressed with how deep and critical he gets with many of the subjects in these pieces, and yet how he is able to make them so accessible and relevant, and so moving and impactful. I found myself challenged with maintaining my composure while recounting the articles that detail some of the most horrific crimes in American history. The essays that recount the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting were emotional and powerful, but not just because of the utter brutality and violence of the act; it’s Cobb’s focus on the victims and their lives that gives the piece it’s emotional punch. It’s been some time since I’ve read about this crime, and yet it’s hard to believe that it happened over 10 years ago. Cobb’s pieces often provide us with this perspective, understanding the impact on those whose narratives are often overshadowed by perpetrators or whose voices have been highjacked by louder, more presumptuous and privileged personalities. Furthermore, his pieces all help to understand that while these events happened in the past, we continue to see these clouds on the horizon, recognizing that “Storms don’t stand still so it’s important to understand what direction they’re headed in.” He presents this storm metaphor in the epilogue, but I think it’s important to reinforce this idea from the beginning, especially since these essays are so informative and educational. I felt like I learned so much from this collection, and even though I lived through and can remember many of the events Cobb analyzes in his writing, I gained new perspectives and understandings from these essays. I feel like so many of these pieces would function well in the classroom since Cobb provides readers with perspectives that are often overlooked, forgotten or beaten down, and it’s this fresh look at recent events (and some older instances of history) that help us better understand our present situation.
The book is organized into 3 sections that ostensibly grapple with the complexities of the first Black president (The Parameters of Hope), the first white president (Winter in America), and some of the unprecedented events that have occurred since (History Lessens- focused on COVID, 1/6/21, Impeachment, George Floyd, Hip Hop at 50, and the recent presidential election). I felt a kinship with Cobb in his use of Gil Scott Heron’s classic album Winter in America. I found myself listening to this album in 2016 and 2017, pulled by Scott Heron’s mournful, yet also hopeful songs, written in the aftermath of Watergate. I found the songs both critical and uplifting at time when things seemed so off kilter. It was interesting to also see Scott Heron’s music also have relevance in 2025 with One Battle After Another, another piece of media that critically examines the times we are in. Nevertheless, Cobb’s use of this title and his reflection on its meaning in 2016 and beyond were completely relevant. Although the book details critical instances in recent history like Michael Brown’s death and the loss of other prominent Black luminaries and leaders like Ruby Dee, Gwen Ifill, Elijah Cummings, and John Lewis, there were many other essays where I learned so much from Cobb’s reporting and analysis. For example, in “Hard Tests,” Cobb examines the complexities of Black leaders in HBCUs in the time of Trump, whose leadership has to walk a fine line between challenging the implicit racism of statements like DeVos’s school choice line to ensuring the future viability of HBCUs’ funding through government support. Cobb mentioned Ellison’s Invisible Man and the DeBois-Washington debate about the Atlanta Compromise, and I could understand the kind of complex ambiguity that writers like Ellison and Wright evoked in their work through characters like Trueblood and Bigger Thomas. The essay about Stacy Abrams was also revealing in how much we need more efforts to resist voter suppression and in general how important it can be to maintain state control of governorships and legislatures. We are witnessing vast efforts to minimize or outright erase gains from the voting initiatives of the past 60 years. I also loved the two essays about hip-hop- “D-Nice’s Club Quarantine is What You Need” and “Hip-Hop at Fifty: An Elegy.” I definitely agree with Cobb’s assessment of “My Name is D-Nice” as a gem, although I wouldn’t call it semi-obscure. I had no idea about this effort during the pandemic; I was probably too wrapped up in discovering some older shows or just trying to navigate having my kids home during the pandemic, but I think that these two essays offer some of the alternating themes of hope and community and forgetting and death in others. The “Hip-Hop at Fifty” brings up important issues about how hip-hop, often viewed as a young person’s game, has struggled with aging. I remember being shocked about the deaths of Guru, who died at 48 from complications related to cancer, and Professor X from X-Clan, who also passed away at 49 from spinal meningitis. I just remember thinking about how these illnesses were not always fatal, and I wondered how these elder statemen of hip-hop took care of their health. Cobb touches on some other more recent deaths, especially Phife Dawg, whose death in 2016 months before the release of their last album (We Got if From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service) and also right before the election was both shocking and preventable. It was also interesting to read this after listening to the latest Public Enemy album Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025 where Chuck D, still hitting hard as hell, reminds listeners that he’s currently a senior citizen. I couldn’t believe Chuck D is eligible for AARP, but if anything, his hard lyrics are a reminder of the indomitable nature of his spirit as much as Cobb’s essay is a reminder of not only the violence and threats to Black men, but also the social determinants of health that often create these disparities in health care and life spans. These essays challenged my thinking, and although they resonated with many of my beliefs and ideas, they also opened me up to new avenues of thought and perspectives that are too often overlooked, dismissed, or pushed aside. Cobb’s writing is clear and accessible, but also incredibly moving, even when he’s dropping science and teaching. Furthermore, even though these essays span the last 12 years, it is so important to revisit the memories of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and George Floyd, as well as the victims of the Emanuel AME Church, the Tree of Life Synagogue, as well as the victims of the Christchurch killings in New Zealand, especially since we continue to witness the continued dehumanization and attempts to denigrate other people of color, minorities, and immigrants, and we see that this current violence is state sanctioned. Voices and perspectives like Cobb help to remind us about the cost of silence in these periods, as well as remind us of the communities and hope that can arise after these storms wreak havoc. I also forgot to mention one of the more powerful and important essays “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory” from September 2021. I loved reading about Derrick Bell, whose concern about the implications of desegregation and his fight for equality was complicated by a long history of violent opposition to equality and inequities in political and systemic power, was fascinating to learn more about. It was also essential reading since Bell’s ideas and concerns have been highjacked by the right whose willful misrepresentations and shameful ignorance about critical race theory have ultimately lumped it into something that it is not. If anything, Cobb’s essay helps to elucidate the complications of inequality, representation, power, and access that Bell was wrestling with, and presents a fuller, more complete picture than is often provided. Toni Morrison once wrote in Beloved that “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined,” and sadly bad actors like Christopher Rufo have plunged the public into willful ignorance about this important topic by rebranding Bell’s ideas as toxic. However, Cobb’s essay paints a more realistic and complete picture not just of the ideas, but also of Bell’s interesting life and continued fight against the system. It was one of the many stand-out essays that I loved reading in this collection and will probably revisit again. Highly recommended and important reading!

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of Cobb's journalism from the last ten years, with an overall arc and focus on race and politics and culture and essentially, how we got to where we are in 2025.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three or More Is a Riot is not a single argument so much as a record of sustained moral attention. The book gathers essays Jelani Cobb wrote over roughly a decade, beginning around the murder of Trayvon Martin and extending through Ferguson, Minneapolis, and the political backlash that followed the racial justice uprisings of the 2010s and early 2020s. Many of the pieces are followed by short postscripts in which Cobb revisits his earlier reporting, noting what he missed, what he misunderstood, or what later events revealed more clearly. That structure alone makes the book unusual. It treats moral and political understanding as something provisional and inchoate.

Although I was already philosophically and theologically inclined toward justice-oriented arguments, I did not fully become what people now shorthand as “woke” until Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson. Cobb’s on-the-ground reporting during that period played a significant role in my own moral and intellectual formation. Reading this book brought much of that back, not nostalgically, but with a renewed sense of how much clarity it took to see what was happening when so many institutions were committed to obscuring it.

One of Cobb’s great strengths is his disciplined skepticism. He is attentive to facts without being naive about sources, and he has a rare ability to cut through official narratives without lapsing into reflexive contrarianism. During Ferguson, that combination mattered. He was reporting in real time, often via Twitter, on events that local and national media either misunderstood or actively misrepresented. One moment that stayed with me, though it does not appear explicitly in this book, was his reporting on a police raid of a church that had been providing food and water to protesters. Cobb described the raid as it was happening. Police later denied it occurred, and local media reinforced that denial by visiting a different church with the same name. Cobb had simply been there and showed what the police and local media were doing by being there.

The book’s later sections, especially Cobb’s reporting from Minneapolis during the trial of the man who murdered George Floyd, are particularly jarring in light of current political rhetoric. Cobb has a way of gaining access to local activists and community members whose voices are usually filtered or flattened by national coverage. Just as important, he reflects openly on the risks of that access. He notes his wariness of people who are too eager to talk, recognizing that eagerness often signals an agenda rather than insight. That kind of methodological self-awareness is uncommon in political journalism, and it builds trust even when one does not agree with every conclusion.

Some of the most intellectually powerful essays in the book are Cobb’s reflections on Derrick Bell, written in the wake of renewed attacks on critical race theory that have since metastasized into broader assaults on anything labeled “DEI.” Cobb does an excellent job explaining that CRT, at least in Bell’s hands, was not primarily a radical cultural project but a critique of the limits of law as a tool for racial justice. Bell’s central insight, as Cobb presents it, is that white supremacy adapts. It finds new forms regardless of legal outcomes.

The story Cobb tells about Bell’s work after Brown v. Board of Education is especially instructive. In Harmony, Mississippi, Black residents wanted adequate funding for their all-Black school. The NAACP’s legal arm, committed to integration as the overriding goal, pursued that strategy instead. The case was won. The result was white flight, segregation academies, and a reconstituted system of inequality that complied with the letter of the law while violating its spirit. Bell’s question was not whether segregation was wrong, but whether legal victories alone were sufficient, or even always strategically wise. Cobb uses this history not to dismiss civil rights law, but to complicate triumphalist narratives about it.

Another standout essay examines the work of civil rights attorney Ben Crump and the role of financial settlements in cases of police violence. Cobb’s portrayal is even-handed and illuminating. He neither romanticizes nor dismisses the strategy, instead tracing how compensation has altered incentives, accountability structures, and public awareness over the past several decades. The piece avoids easy moralism, acknowledging both the limitations and the real effects of this form of justice.

I was also drawn to the chapter on William Barber III and the Poor People’s Campaign. Cobb presents Barber not as a celebrity activist, but as a serious moral thinker rooted in tradition, coalition-building, and sustained organizing. The essay made me want to read Barber directly, which is perhaps the best compliment one can give a piece of criticism or reportage.

What unifies Three or More Is a Riot is not a single thesis but a posture. Cobb writes with moral seriousness without pretense, and with conviction without certainty. The postscripts are especially telling in this regard. They model a kind of intellectual humility that is often absent from political writing, particularly in polarized times. Cobb never sees his work as something frozen in time.

This is not a comforting book, nor is it designed to persuade skeptics through rhetorical tricks. It assumes that facts matter, that history matters, and that attention itself is a moral act. For readers who lived through Ferguson, Minneapolis, and the long decade between, the book will feel less like a revelation than a reckoning. For others, it offers a clear-eyed account of how justice movements are reported, resisted, distorted, and sustained.

For me, it was also a reminder. A reminder of how much clarity it once took simply to say what was happening, and how much it still takes to keep saying it.

[Atlas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012–2025
by Jelani Cobb

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thank you to Random House Group for the gifted copy! 🖤📚

Vibe Check
• Urgent
• Razor-sharp
• Reflective
• Unflinching
• Historically grounded

What I Loved
• Cobb’s ability to weave journalism, history, and moral clarity into a single voice that feels both intimate and monumental.
• Each essay acts as a time capsule: Ferguson, Charleston, MeToo, the Capitol insurrection, but read together, they form a larger story of reckoning and resistance.
• His prose is precise yet poetic, dissecting not only what happened but how language, memory, and media shape our understanding of truth.
• The connective essays between reprinted pieces are brilliant, offering continuity and reflection that make this more than a “greatest hits” collection.
• Cobb never positions himself as detached; he writes from inside the storm, balancing critical distance with emotional honesty.

What Didn’t Work for Me
• Some of the reprinted essays feel familiar if you’ve followed his work closely, though the added commentary reframes them beautifully.
• The heaviness of the subject matter makes this a book best read in intervals; it demands attention, not skimming.

Why You Should Read It
• You want to understand the moral and political fault lines that defined the last decade.
• You appreciate writers who can turn reporting into literature with purpose.
• You value journalism that refuses neutrality in the face of injustice.

Favorite Line

“We are living in the aftermath of every era that claimed it was past the problem it refused to solve.”

Final Word
Three or More Is a Riot is an unflinching chronicle of America’s last decade, a mosaic of rage, resilience, and reflection. Jelani Cobb doesn’t just document history; he dissects its anatomy, showing how culture, politics, and conscience collide. This collection cements him as one of the essential voices of our time, a writer who refuses to let us forget or look away. 🖋️🔥

[Carey Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the ATX at the vaunted Black Pearl Books to celebrate the release of THREE OR MORE IS A RIOT: NOTES ON HOW WE GOT HERE: 2012-2025, I got to chop it up with the one and only Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, staff writer at The New Yorker, historian and author, and most importantly (to me), Jamaica High School alum, Jelani Cobb.

I discovered Dr. Cobb’s writing in 2015 based on his New Yorker article, Class Notes, in which Dr. Cobb so eloquently writes of the rise and fall of Jamaica High School, in Queens, NYC, once the largest high school in the United States.

THREE OR MORE IS A RIOT is a “gripping anthology” of Dr. Cobb’s writings on race and culture for The New Yorker and Class Notes is included!!

Of THREE OR MORE IS A RIOT, which represents Cobb’s evolution as a thinker and reporter across a decade and a half, “it is foremost a stirring catalog of institutions lost, of other lives cut short.”

In his October New York Times review of the book Michael P. Jeffries, Dean of Academic Affairs, and a professor of American studies at Wellesley, writes “on the rare occasions when (Cobb) inserts his personal experience into his journalism, the result is a rich and satisfying creation. Nowhere is this more clear than in a piece about the 2014 closing of Jamaica High School, Cobb’s alma mater in Queens. In a book that often exposes evident bigotry, Cobb’s nuanced and careful treatment of Jamaica High considers the most essential questions we can ask about racism and poverty.”

All respect to my fellow JHS alum!

[Yvette Sapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House / One World for the advanced reader’s copy of Three or More is a Riot.
Dr. Cobb’s excellent insight of the last ten years is defined by his coverage of the personal and political, weaving in current topics that impact the country as a whole, and as individual who can find parts of themselves within the essays published in the book. Cobb’s writing on topics as vast as Trayvon Martin and the Trump administration’s assault on democracy have proven to be profound and prescient.
My favorite essays included the story of Ruby Dee, Gwen Ifill, and Harry Belafonte, all who made marks in their field, and Class Notes. As a native New Yorker who currently resides in Atlanta, I could see family members and friends who have been impacted by their connections to both the King family and the closing of Jamaica High School.
Many of the writings I have looked at from where we are today, and how this journey began, The columns are a reminder of exactly “how we got here,” a moving compilation of essays.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cobb's thought provoking essays in this collection connect recent events to the past and future. Until I read Cobb I didn't fully understand the claim: Confederates didn't lose the Civil War. To end it they simply pretended to cooperate, a faux compromise. Within 10 years most mandates and efforts toward reconstruction were abandoned, ignoring Lincoln's conditions for ending the war in the first place.

Cobb introduces the phrase "racially immature" to sum up those who maintain ancient, unenlightened ideas about race. Furthermore, the facts of the Civil War have been distorted by white "forever victims" (my term, not Cobbs) to justify hateful behavior over and over again.

A question I have, though, when Cobb writes about past atrocities: why doesn't he mention those committed against indigenous peoples and immigrants, along with those committed against the enslaved and black communities? The myth of "American Exceptionalism" hides or is cover for a whole lot of less than exceptional behavior.

[Micheal D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012–2025 by Jelani Cobb is a masterclass in clarity, courage, and cultural reflection. Cobb captures the pulse of America’s most turbulent decade with the precision of a historian and the empathy of a storyteller.

From Ferguson to MeToo, from the rise of new movements to the weight of backlash, every essay feels like both a time capsule and a mirror. Cobb doesn’t just recount the chaos, he dissects it, giving readers context, conscience, and a hard look at who we’ve become. His writing moves seamlessly between journalism and moral inquiry, urging us to reckon with not just what happened, but why.

This collection isn’t just a record of history, it’s a reckoning, a map, and a moral compass. Three or More Is a Riot belongs on the shelf beside Baldwin, Coates, and Orwell an essential chronicle of truth in a time of noise.

[Alex Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book #13 of 2026

This book of essays is frontloaded with more offerings from 2012-2020 than from 2020-2025, so there's less reaction to how drastically things have changed in just a few years. It's an interesting, and said journey back through good times when Obama was president and white supremacy going mainstream was a distant possibility to the bad times of today when that's precisely what has happened. Cobb does a good job adding context with post-scripts to his essays from many years ago from the perspective of today. I wish I'd seen a little more of that. Nevertheless, Cobb is a great writer and observer and these essays nicely contextualize everything that's happened to bring us to the bad place of 2026.

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

“And though we think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, many Americans are removed enough from identity-based communities to recoil at the idea that they’d be held accountable for someone else’s crimes. But recent immigrants know that, even in a country founded upon the premise of individual rights, there is no guarantee that a person will be treated as an individual.”

This was great. I’d recommend this for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Eric Foner’s recent essay collection, Our Fragile Freedoms.

[Annie’s Daddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays does capture the time and place of America between 2012-25. Especially from an African American perspective. They are well written and researched. My only fault with the book was that i was hoping the writing would have a bit more sizzle. I am not asking for Hunter S Thompson or something but there is a rather dry tone to this that just caused me to zone out. The book definitely will be a tool in years to come when people want to know the political/social headspace of America from 2012-25

[Megan Denny · Rating 5 out of 5]

As somebody who came of age in the time period covered by this collection, the perspective Cobb offers is an invaluable and steady resource in attempting to answer the question: How did we get here? It balances the professional and personal beautifully. The result is an elegant plea to be heard and understood as a black journalist attempting to describe the failure of democracy to cover for this country’s deep and abiding white supremacy.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well curated series of articles Cobb wrote from 2012-25, the book a commendable job of explaining "how we got here". The context helps, the prognosis not so encouraging. However, the resiliency and agency that shows up from the community through the articles make it clear were gonna be alright, just more trials, with more racists, more calls to coalesce around good ideas/organizing and ways of liberatory living to navigate this wicked system of privilege.

[Cassie Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Our worst problem is not cynicism, it's the frequency with which that cynicism proves accurate."

4.5/A great collection of essays and look at how we got where we are. Great work of scholarship. Sobering read that more reminds me why I feel so cynical and heartbroken by the state of our nation than gives me hope that it will get better.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible collection of journalism that tells the story of how we ended up here. Feels like required reading this year, and I think everyone who reads Three or More Is A Riot will be better off for it. Jelani Cobb's writing captivates as it breaks your heart and urges you to do something instead of watching on the sidelines.

[Carol Gray-adler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn’t familiar with Jelani Cobb before reading his book. I enjoyed several of his essays and learned new things. The only difficulty was that things have changed even more since he wrote the book. These times make drawing conclusions from events and seeing the impact they have caused nearly impossible.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Thirteen years of essays the author has written about the perils of being black while living in America - especially considering George Floyd, Travis, Travon Martin, and many others whose names will be familiar to anyone who pays attention to the news.
Thought priovoking.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the essays in "Three or More is a Riot" were very interesting and gave me insight into the experiences of the people involved. Some of the essays didn't grab me and I found myself "skimming." Overall, I am glad I read this book.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grim and insightful.

[Anjie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is ultimately a collection of reprinted essays (often with some updates and after-the-fact reflections), and makes for a good review of what happened in this country in the last 13 years.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking series of essays written over the last decade or so that brilliantly capture not just the mood of that moment but also its deeper meaning for today.

[Rafael Suleiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book on our current political situation.