Bill Kerwin's Reviews > We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

In We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me (2015), has given us not only another essential work of African American literature but also a classic example of American prose.

Although it lacks the concentrated power and beauty of Between the World and Me, there is a good reason for this, for it is a collection of eight essays written for The Atlantic Monthly over a period of eight years, the years of the Obama presidency. In the prefatory “notes” to each essay (and year), in which the author provides both the context of each composition and its role in his growth as a writer, Coates admits that, for the first four of these years, He was still learning his craft. Yet even these four essays (shorter than the rest, they comprise the first third of the volume) reveal Coates to be a writer of great promise and penetrating intellect, and the remaining five—including the epilogue—are texts which I hope will be studied in high schools and universities for years to come.

Of the first four essays, I particularly recommend “This is How We Lost to the White Man,” about Bill Cosby’s black activism, and “American Girl,” about Michelle Obama as a child of the middle-class Southside Chicago neighborhoods. In the Cosby essay, although Coates does not agree with Cosby’s “pants on the ground” harangues targeted at black youth, he makes it clear that Cosby is an extension of the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” tradition of black activism, stretching from Booker T. Washington through Marcus Garvey to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In “American Girl,” Coates argues that Mrs. Obama was ideally suited to be the first black first lady because she is the product of a large stable, middle class black enclave (one of the few in the US), and because this background allows her to exude a confidence in herself and her worth which registers (even to white people) as distinctly American.

It is the last essays of the book, however, dealing primarily with the present day consequences of slavery (“The Case For Reparations” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”) and with the presidency of Obama (“The Fear of a Black President” and “My President was Black”) which form the heart of the book. “Reparations” and “The Black Family” are primarily expository, demonstrating how slavery continues to wound the black citizen in the 21st century, plundering him of what little wealth he acquires through red-lining, real estate scams and municipal fines, and marginalizing him through a racially charged definition of family (courtesy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan), all of which makes mass incarceration inevitable, which in turn creates the basis of a new Jim Crow and opens up further opportunities for plunder.

The other two essays, although their content is primarily factual, are highly personal too. They are of course about Barack Obama, about how fear of a black president may have caused him to be too cautious and how racism continually obstructed his presidency's final years, but they are also about Coates himself. Coates, an atheist and pessimist, profoundly doubts the president’s message of hope and change, and yet can’t help but be profoundly moved, not only by the undeniable fact of a black president, but by the character and particular genius of Barack Obama the man.

I must single out for special mention, though, the “epilogue,” an essay entitled “The First White President," in which Coates makes the argument that Trump is the “first white president” because he is “the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president” :

To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. Perhaps more important, Trump is the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtures of sexual assault on tape (“And when you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations for said assaults, becoming immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fradulent business dealings, exhorting his own followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.