Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power

I was initially attracted to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing when I read Between the World and Me (2015). His We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) is a collection of Coates’ Atlantic articles, contextualized within Coates’ reflections of his own experience surrounding each piece. It draws the sad parallels between the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (which was 8 years) and the election of the first African American President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama (who held two 4-year terms = 8 years).

As a privileged white American, it is hard to summarize the depth of despair conveyed in Coates’ Atlantic pieces and narrative that connects them all. I felt disappointment, disillusionment, and the loss of confidence that racial strife in America can change. Yet my life is not impacted in the same way as persons of culture living in the U.S.A. Still, and it may be my privileged perspective that allows me to see hope, Coate’s writing lifts up the resilience, perseverance, and continued resistance that are required to achieve the essential systemic changes necessary to bring about equity and justice in the U.S.A. and elsewhere.

We Were Eight Years in Power is organized in eight chapters and an epilogue. Some of the most stunning realizations from these chapters include:

• What white supremacists fear most is black respectability and good governance – because it proves the narratives of dysfunction to be false.
•  Lauding black Americans as descended from kings of Africa may be uplifting but is generally untrue – most black Americans came to America in slavery and it is their resilience under these circumstances that is most laudable.
• The founding of America used language of “liberty and justice for all” but did not intend this for any more than a privileged few – the journey of black Americans to respectability and forcing the U.S.A. to live its ideology could save us from continued hypocrisy.
• The economic system of the early immigrants to America relied on plunder – the land was exploited and people enslaved and abused while trade was pursued to benefit a select aristocracy.
• Barack Obama was a black American and much more – while clearly seen as exceptional, Barack and Michelle demonstrated that all racial and cultural group members can be so much more than the stereotypes that entrap them.
• The “twice as good” commitment of black Americans who satisfy the expectations of whites is part of the problem – while black families may encourage their children to be twice as good to succeed, it also requires that they harbor no anger toward those who oppress them.
• The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery – the systems and conditions that black Americans face are irreconcilable without the willingness for the U.S.A. to have the difficult conversation about reparations.
• Jim Crow laws and later illegal actions taken by the government and its business entities perpetuated disadvantage – not only must the achievement gap be closed but also the injury gap (i.e. - segregation, red-lining, predatory lending).
• "The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay" – not having the conversation threatens America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. (p. 201)
• The incarceration of black men is an extension of previous wrongs – the number is out of proportion and far more severe; it can only be interpreted as intended to continue to oppress black men and families.

In the concluding chapter, “My President was Black,” Coates wrote, "Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with the same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.” (p. 324)

The resentment of many white Americans over a President who happened to be black, coupled with the trust of that very President in the goodness of American citizens, led to a “white tribe united in demonstration to say, ‘If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president.’” Then they elected him...