We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

In many ways "We Were Eight Years In Power" has been a fitting capstone to the year. Two of Coates' essays delved into subjects I had read about this year: Malcolm X and Michelle Obama. To have these people reviewed through another perspective - especially a perspective as intellectually rigourous as Coates - deepened my understanding of both. The other essays in this collection were likewise thought provoking. I had, to some extent, been aware of the way the U.S. structurely disadvantages people of color and black people in specific. The author hammered home the details of this system, and does so with poignancy, that fleshed out my understanding of history and deepened my anger. A couple takeaways:

One of the potential flaws of liberalism is the assumption that taking a color-blind approach to policy will result in a colorblind impact. However, Coates provides ample detail on how policies that we think of as the hallmarks of liberal efforts - the New Deal, the GI Bill and the federal subsidization of suburban housing - were explicitly designed or allowed to come into being only if they excluded blacks from benefiting. Because of this, any government policy that impacts justice, health care, or wealth should explicitly consider race as it is formulized, if only to address the impact of a deepening racial divide.

The argument for reparations to America's black population is not one that I had dedicated significant thought to. It seemed to me that, as Obama and other actors have argued, if the black population was disproportionately impoverished as a result of policies, then policies geared towards addressing poverty at large should be able to lift up blacks as well as whites and other ethnic groups. However, the argument Coates makes here, that the poverty and economic disadvantages faced by blacks is unique, since in many ways it is the product of decades of design, and that it does not emerge from the same structural disadvantage that results in poverty in whites, suggests that a fully color blind approach is not a viable way to address black poverty. There is a danger of suggesting that the roots of white poverty are the roots of all poverty in the U.S., and ignoring the role of the criminal justice system, education system, health care systems, etc, in perpetuating the wealth gap in black america. Therefore, solutions to poverty should consider race and all the elements of justice, health care, education, climate, etc.

This underlines the arguments I'm hearing from people like Rihanna Gunn-Wright. Holisitic approaches are more complicated, but essential if we want to achieve justice.

This book angered me, saddened me, and made me ashamed of the ways I, and the people I support, say things and make decisions that perpetuate inequality. I hope that reading it is helping to deepen my understanding and make me into a better person.

This is a remarkable and powerful book. It consists of 8 long essays, each written and published in the Atlantic during the eight years of Obama administration and all are available for free online (I had read the two of them when they were published). What make them now relevant is that each essay is preceded by a note, a short essay if you like, written at present time, in which Ta-Nehisi Coates set up the context of where America was at that particular time. At the same time he also describes how he was developing as a person and as a writer, during these eight years.

All essays are important but I particularly liked three of them. The first is the “Why do so few blacks study the civil war?” The Civil War ended slavery in America, so why blacks are not interested in studying this conflict, wonders Ta-Nehisi Coates. The American Civil War has been reduced to a dramatised sports game between white men, those from the North that led the Union and those from the South that led the Confederacy. After the war ended, Coates says, the main priority of all governments was to come together as a country and they did so by building a national myth in which the African-Americans left out. Ta-Nehisi Coates is critical in this interpretation. The civil war has shaped the American history, it goes deep in explaining the slavery and the subsequent events the followed. It is time, he says, for black Americans to look at the civil war’s history, to tell their history and to reclaim their role in it.

“The Case For Reparations” is the longest essay in the book. It is a detailed, critical, and devastating analysis of how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and later housing discrimination, and mass incarceration, encouraged by deliberate policy decisions, created enormous disparities in wealth, health, achievement and wellbeing that was passed down generation after generation to the present day. “The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates. “On the contrary, slavery was the initial crime in the long tradition of crimes, of plunder even, that could be traced into the present day. And whereas a claim for reparations for slavery rested in the ancestral past, it was now clear that one could make a claim on behalf of those who were very much alive.”

“My President Was Black” is perhaps the most powerful of the eight essays. “Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere in his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity - race,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in this clitical text. His upbringing, biracial, and raised by a white mother and two white grandparents, shaped Barack Obama and provided him with a different view of the world than that of Coates’ upbringing. He grew up in Hawaii, removed from what most black Americans experience, that is a sort of violence and segregation. He wasn't traumatised.

The respect and indeed the awe that Coates has for Barack Obama is obvious but it doesn’t stop him for criticizing him for his somehow patronizing remarks to African-American communities. African-Americans didn’t quite prospered during his administration and one of the reasons was the limits that existed in the Obama presidency. He couldn't do all that he would like to do as president of the United States but he, nevertheless, accomplished major feats. He remade the nation’s healthcare system. He revitalised a Justice Department and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates. Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, support to marriage equality, and ended the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.

But, his very existence inflamed America’s racist conscience. Obama’s election fueled a backlash that strengthen many of the social and political divisions in America. Race, therefore, should be central if we want to understand Trump’s rise, argues Coates. Trump led a movement that exclusively relied on racism and sexism.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing is beautiful and evocative. His model is James Baldwin and like Baldwin he writes with honesty and clarity. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.