63 pages • 2 hours read
Ta-Nehisi CoatesWe Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2, Section 1 Summary: “Notes from the Second Year”
The year 2008 marked a period of change in Coates’s professional life and in the political scene. Obama’s campaign was in full swing, and no one—not even the political reporters—knew what to make of Obama. The problem was that people were not accustomed to talking about Black people as presidents. Rather than accept the reality that Obama was qualified, reporters and commentators tended to describe Obama as a mixed-race, unicorn-like outlier, despite Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. Seeing this trend, Coates was pleasantly surprised after the Iowa caucuses when Obama managed to get large numbers of white people to vote for him.
Obama was in the ascendant, but things were tricky in the Coates household. Coates was not sure if he would be able to provide the financial support his family needed. Coates received the good news that The Atlantic wanted him to do a profile on Michelle Obama. Coates’s blog was also taking off, especially with financial support from his father and The Atlantic’s decision to take it over. The increase in income from these ventures validated Coates’s belief that he could be a good provider as a writer.
Chapter 2, Section 2 Summary: “American Girl”
Like his journalist peers, Coates didn’t know what to make of Michelle Obama when she gained visibility during her husband’s campaign for the presidency. He thought of her as White at first as he watched her make the rounds of talk shows. Coates recalls the furor when she stated at a campaign event for her husband that she finally felt proud of her country; people accused her of being a stereotypical angry Black woman as a result. When Coates interviewed her, she described herself as a mother and waxed nostalgic about her childhood despite all the very depressing childhoods in Black autobiographies. Mrs. Obama is a complicated figure, in other words.
On interviewing Mrs. Obama, Coates was surprised to discover that she saw her arc as one that reflects the American Dream. Mrs. Obama, even more than Barack Obama, truly had lived the reality of the American Dream as a girl growing up in Chicago. When Coates visited Mrs. Obama’s childhood neighborhood in Chicago, his guides described Chicago as an American and Black success story in which reliance on Black votes, rather than the voter suppression tactics used in so much of the South, allowed some degree of success for people like Mrs. Obama’s parents.
Coates also interviewed Marion Robinson, Mrs. Obama’s mother, who describes a financially difficult but stable family life that provided shelter for Michelle and her siblings. The racial geography of Chicago was certainly shaped by housing and lending discrimination like other cities. What was different is that middle-class Black residents and working-class Black residents stayed in Chicago neighborhoods together rather than following affluent White people who fled the city in 1948 after it desegregated. The neighborhood in which Michelle Obama grew up was thus virtually all-Black, a haven for a Black child of that era. This happenstance explains Mrs. Obama’s nostalgia. She only came to realize the harshness of White supremacy once she left Chicago.
This childhood also explains what makes Mrs. Obama as unusual as her husband. For most Black people, fitting into their own racial communities and functioning in White-dominated spaces requires code switching—adjusting behaviors and speech to fit into norms of people outside one’s racial or ethnic community. Mrs. Obama does not code switch, Coates claims, because she sees her Black identity as a subset of a wider American identity, one that she never has to switch off because there is no assumption on her part of any inherent inferiority in her identity or idiom. Coates sees this assumption of the Americanness of Black identity as a third way to represent Black identity.
This third way is apparent, for example, in movies like Barbershop, which includes archetypes that are simultaneously recognizable in Black communities and in ethnic American communities in general. Hip-hop, including the figures who supported the Obama campaign for president, is another example of this assumption of the Americanness of Black identity.
Coates concludes by arguing that Mrs. Obama’s assumption of her Americanness is a key reason that people have begun to accept the possibility of a Black man as president.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Coates makes a typical move for him in “American Girl”: He offers an argument that runs counter to the commonly accepted narrative. In “American Girl,” Coates makes the argument that it is Michelle Obama—not her husband—who served as “the bridge […] to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America” (48). As is the case with his profile of Cosby, this profile goes beyond the facile representations of Black public figures to offer a nuanced perspective on who these people really are, all in the service of undercutting some American myths.
In the profile of Michelle Obama, Coates undercuts numerous myths. By centering Mrs. Obama, Coates undercuts the idea that first ladies are negligible when it comes to the success of their partners. When Coates explores the significance of Mrs. Obama’s nostalgia for her childhood, he reveals that it is possible to be Black in America and not see life through the veil of DuBoisian double-consciousness—the notion that Black Americans have a divided consciousness that never allows them to feel at ease in their own skins due to racism. Mrs. Obama’s “third road” runs counter to this notion of Black identity. On the other hand, Coates also shows that the idea of Mrs. Obama as some racial radical is also a myth, one advanced by people who misunderstand the lives of a large swath of Black America.
The gist of the profile is that Mrs. Obama and her husband have somehow managed to transcend all those old narratives about what it means to be Black in America. Coates’s tone in making this argument is respectful and has some element of deference in it: There are no harsh critiques of Michelle Obama’s politics, for example. As Coates observes in “Notes from the Second Year,” this early essay of his has not aged well. The hopeful outlook in the essay is in deep contrast to the pessimism in the note that introduces the essay. Coates has the benefit of having seen the Obamas take some hits rooted in old racial myths about Black America, despite their political acumen.
Coates’s continuing focus on providing a dose of reality to the reader is also apparent in what he reveals in “Notes from the Second Year” about the reality of the life of the writer. While there is a class of artists who insist on disconnecting economic concerns from the production of their art, Coates goes on at length to describe the impact of financial concerns on his ability to write and survive.
Pieces like “American Girl,” published in established, respected national publications like The Atlantic, are generally signs that a writer has made it. Despite his success in landing the assignment, Coates uses his autobiography in the note to show that he struggled artistically and financially during this period. He describes his failure to nail the voice he wanted for the piece and his struggles to provide his wife the support she needed to pursue her own dreams. Hiding beneath that finished piece published in The Atlantic is a deep sense of insecurity, both economic and artistic. The older, wiser Coates, with the benefit of hindsight, is now able to see these insecure years as a necessary part of his development as a writer and the hopeful note in his profile as a brief lapse into belief in the possibility of a post-racial America.
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