Our Political Situation explained by Prof. Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia Journalism School

David A. Brown recently shared on LinkedIn:

Cobb kept coming back to one year: 1965.

If you want to understand why our politics feel so volatile now, he said, you have to start there.

In a short stretch of that year, Lyndon Johnson signed two laws:

The Voting Rights Act, which finally gave the federal government real teeth to protect Black voting rights in the South.

The Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act, which scrapped the old racist quota system and reopened doors to immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

One law changed who could reliably get a ballot.
The other changed who could realistically get a visa.

Together, they reshaped who lives here and who gets a voice. We’re still living in the world those laws created — and in the backlash to that world.