We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates explains in the opening of his essay that he was always aware that there was a struggle between the agents of Black self-love and “the agents of deceit—their religion, their culture, their names” (95). For his mother, the struggle happened on her head: After years of using chemical straighteners to make her hair straight, she finally let her natural texture grow out. For Coates’s father, countering internalized hatred took the form of vegetarianism. Many people in the Baltimore of Coates’s childhood made such choices.

Coates’s parents found their inspiration in Malcolm X, a “champion [...] who delivered us from self-hatred, delivered my mother from burning lye, who was slaughtered high up in Harlem so that colored people could color themselves anew” (95). Malcom X has a complicated aesthetic and political legacy, and the extreme disparity between the kinds of people who claim him as an inspiration reflects this complexity.

For the young Coates, Malcolm X was a man who refashioned himself for the greater good of the Black collective and rejected White gestures of friendship. Coates recognizes now that this notion of Malcolm X was an idealization, and even as a young man, Coates was quite comfortable with cross-racial friendships. Nevertheless, he purchased a “NO SELL OUT” poster of Malcolm X back then to show he endorsed this notion of racial separation. In 2004, Coates moved to Harlem, Malcolm X’s old stomping grounds, and he was living there in 2008 and socializing with a multiracial group of friends on the night Obama won the presidency.

Coates remembers thinking that night that Malcom X had been wrong: Obama’s win proved that it was possible to be both American and Black. Coates was not alone in this thought: An ideologically diverse set of Black cultural observers argued that Obama’s win was the definitive rebuttal to Malcolm X’s argument that America was and would always be a country bound by White supremacy. Coates argues that these critiques of Malcolm X’s vision of American and his influence are reductive. They ignore his significant cultural influence.

Malcolm X made it possible to articulate an unapologetically Black identity in the public square. Figures like Will Smith and even Obama were able to carve out a space because of the work that Malcolm X did. Coates points to episodes from Manning Marable’s biography of Malcolm X as evidence for this argument. The Malcolm X who appears in Marable’s biography is one who adapted as his circumstances and resources changed. He went into prison as a thief but became an agitator and organizer to protest the lack of halal food for Muslim prisoners. Malcolm X embraced the culturally and morally conservative Nation of Islam, but he was a political radical.

When his racial politics shifted too far away from the orthodoxy of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X rejected Black supremacy, despite his continued suspicion of the motives of even the most radical of White liberals. Marable’s work reveals a man still in process at the time of his death, one whose political vision was not quite complete. Free of the censorship of his ideas by the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X called out Black people who victimized members of their own community and—most important—amplified a message of the need for Black people to love and defend themselves.

Marable’s accounts of these later shifts are ones that Coates takes as evidence of the most enduring part of Malcolm X’s legacy. In the 1960s, this message of self-love helped Coates’s mother to embrace her natural hair texture. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop’s early practitioners espoused a Malcom-X-influenced aesthetic, “with its focus on the assertion of self, the freedom to be who you are, and entrepreneurship” (101). The worldview nurtured by hip-hop, in turn, produced the coalition that elected Obama to the presidency.

Like Malcolm X, Obama appeals to the idea of “collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves” (102). Malcom X re-made himself when he went from “amoral wanderer to hyper-moral zealot” (102). Obama’s self-fashioning and representation of himself as a former pot smoker/child of a single mom who transformed himself into a lawyer and political figure is the same kind of move. Both men also went through religious conversions and dedicated themselves to the greater (Black) good. In short, Coates believes that the two men are more similar than different.

Coates closes by noting that the power of Black self-fashioning is what will most likely endure as Malcolm X’s legacy. Coates, his wife, and all Black people live in a world in which no one denies their “right to self-creation” (105). Coates proudly displays his NO SELL OUT poster in recognition of this gift Malcolm X gave to him and all Black people.