We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations.” 

This quote encapsulates Coates’s critique of Black respectability politics, of which he takes Bill Cosby to be a proponent. As is the case for many of his arguments, especially when they involve criticism of respected Black figures, Coates takes care to ground his argument in history, an approach that enhances his credibility. 

“But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road—being ourselves. Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as disbelief in the ability of a white people to understand us. But if you see black identity [...] as a branch of the American tree, with the roots in the broader experience […] then you understand the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.” 

Coates is commenting on Michelle Obama’s refusal to code switch. His description of the rationale for her approach to Black self-representation shows how her skillful ability to mobilize myths like the American Dream made her central to her husband’s success as a politician. This “third way” accounts for the potency of the Obamas as symbols of Black excellence.

“The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.” 

Coates is here describing Lost Cause mythology, which obscures the economic and White supremacist reality of the Civil War. The use of the word “banditry” is also a precursor concept to Coates’s notion of plunder. Coates’s study of the Civil War is thus an important element in his eventual understanding that plunder is the lens through which to view America’s racial history, including the Civil War.

“The great Ishmael Reed says writing is fighting, and I believe him.”

Ishmael Reed is a respected contemporary writer in that tradition of Black writers who creatively represent the Black experience in America. This quote reflects Coates’s belief that the Black writer has a central role to play in waging war against White supremacy. Casting creative work as inherently political is also a key element of Coates’s aesthetic.

“For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people's terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.” 

Coates shows the negative impact that Lost Cause mythology has on how Americans construct their history. The history that most Americans embrace reinforces the notion that Black people are not central to the American story. As a writer, Coates insists on intervening in such narratives by destroying myths like the Lost Cause. In this essay, he is calling on ordinary Black citizens to do the same in order to claim American history as their own.

“Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world and all its brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.” 

Coates articulates key elements of his aesthetic as a young writer in this passage. The commitment to realism, telling the truth, and refusing to be complicit in White supremacy are all parts of the Black aesthetic he more formally studied in college but first encountered in hip-hop. This vision is not particularly hopeful, but Coates takes that view as no criticism since he believes the Black writer’s role is not necessarily to inspire hope.

“So potent was this hate that even we, the despised, were enlisted into its cause. So we bleached our skin, jobbed our noses, and relaxed our hair. To reject hatred, to awaken to the ugly around us and the original beauty within, to be aware, to be ‘conscious,’ as we dubbed ourselves, was to reject the agents of deceit—their religion, their culture, their names. To be conscious was to celebrate the self, to cast blackness in all its manifestations as a blessing. Kinky hair and full lips were the height of beauty. Their bearers were the progeny, not of slaves, but of kidnapped kings of Africa, cradle of all humanity.” 

Coates situates Black nationalist cultural gestures as inoculation and defense against the White supremacist assumption of Black inferiority. The work of the Black writer and cultural figures like Malcolm X is to root out any internalized racism that may be preventing Black people from engaging in self-love. 

“For those who’d grown up in hardscrabble inner cities, Malcolm X offered the promise of transcending the street. For those who’d been the only black kids in their classes, Malcolm’s early and troubled interactions with his own white classmates provided comfort. For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.” 

Coates explains the personal significance of Malcolm X in his life. Coates’s understanding of the meaning of Malcolm X as a symbol evolves over time, however, a reflection of the maturation of Coates’s understanding of politics, culture, and history. 

“As surely as 2008 was made possible by black people’s long fight to be publicly American, it was also made possible by those same Americans’ long fight to be publicly black. That latter fight belongs especially to one man, as does the sight of a first family bearing an African name. Barack Obama is the president. But it’s Malcolm X’s America.” 

The last significant iteration of Malcolm X for Coates is as the man who embodied the Black ability to endlessly re-create oneself to adapt to shifts in culture and circumstance. This Malcolm X—not the one who distrusted White efforts to be allies—is the one Coates thinks will endure.

“Down there on the ground, my head literally being kicked in, I understood: No one, not my father, not the cops, and certainly not anyone’s God, was coming to save me. The world was brutal—and to eschew that brutality, to indulge all your boyish softness, was to advertise yourself as prey. The message was clear, even if I had trouble accepting it: Might really did make right, and he who swung first swung best.” 

Pragmatism and pessimism color Coates’s perspective on America’s racial politics, and his childhood experiences of abuse from bullies and his parents’ insistence that he must learn to defend himself to survive proved to be formative to his worldview. His pessimism as a writer and sense that the good must be fought for derives from these experiences. 

“The masters could lie to themselves, lie to the world, but they would never force me to lie to myself. I would never forget that they were liars, that they justified rape, child slavery, and lynching by telling themselves and us and the world that there was something benighted in us.” 

An important aspect of Coates’s aesthetic is a commitment to telling the truth. As a writer in the tradition of Baldwin and an artist in the tradition of the members of Public Enemy, Coates believes telling the truth about White supremacy is one of the biggest jobs of the Black writer.

“Chuck [D] insisted on treating the claims of our masters with all the contempt they’d earned. When I heard that line, I felt free. I wanted to scream. I drew on that same freedom for my writing.”

Another important aspect of Coates’s aesthetic is defiance. Coates locates the inspiration for that part of his writing in rap. Lyrics like Chuck D’s allowed Coates to find a counternarrative to the unquestioned White supremacy of the larger American culture of Coates’s childhood.

“He should have feared white innocence.”

“Fear of a Black President” marks the moment in the collection when Coates takes a harsher, more critical perspective on the successes and failures of the Obama presidency. In the note preceding the essay, Coates identifies Obama’s unwillingness to force White Americans to see their implication in White supremacy as a serious but possibly unavoidable oversight.

“The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.” 

Coates’s description of Blackness as “indelible” and radioactive is language that implies White Americans see Blackness as a form of contagion, a perspective that is in turn rooted in White supremacy. Coates’s articulation of Obama’s predicament here implies that the paradox is almost unavoidable. The caveat shows that Coates still holds on to some deference as a writer. He is not yet ready to accuse Obama of moral cowardice as he does in a later essay.

“The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery. On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime and a long tradition of crimes, of plunder even, 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 are very much alive.” 

This passage is one of the first in which Coates articulates the concept of plunder in great detail. From this point on in the collection, plunder becomes the primary lens through which Coates sees America’s racial politics. His acceptance of the idea of plunder is central to the maturation of his vision as a Black writer and public intellectual.

“More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” 

Like many in the lineage of Black writers Coates claims, Coates believes that America can never fulfill its ideals until it makes Black Americans whole by addressing the impact of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing discrimination. His prescription here—reparations—is not without controversy, but Coates makes the point that reparations are the only way to escape from continuing tragedy.

“To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder.”

Coates links plunder and White privilege in this quote. Establishing the link between the two is one of the ways Coates rebuts contemporary White people’s argument that it is unfair to hold them to account for the actions of their slaving ancestors and racial peers.

“To be a black writer was to be drafted into the greatest questions of freedom and democracy. Some black writers, searching for their most individual selves, resisted this draft and fled from this tradition. And others like me, in search of meaning and mission, ran toward it.” 

Coates is finally able to come up with a coherent aesthetic after studying the work of James Baldwin. This description of the tradition to which Baldwin belongs is one that links creative endeavors to political commitments. That tradition is in contrast to a longstanding Western tradition that pits the autonomy of the writer and the needs of society against each other.

“The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today. Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues.” 

Coates articulates the connection between plunder and Black mass incarceration in this quote. He uses mass incarceration as evidence of the ongoing nature of the crimes of White supremacy in America. This perspective on mass incarceration counters Black self-hectoring—the tendency to criticize one’s Black racial peers for actions that reflect the impact of White supremacy—and conservative insistence on ignoring White supremacy and focusing instead on the supposedly inherently criminal nature of Black people.

“Whiteness in America is a different symbol—a badge of advantage. In a country of professed meritocratic competition, this badge has long ensured an unerring privilege, represented in a 220-year monopoly on the highest office in the land. For some not-insubstantial sector of the country, the elevation of Barack Obama communicated that the power of the badge had diminished.” 

Although the Obamas are a potent symbol of the American Dream and Black excellence for White liberals and Black supporters, the Obamas’ power is a threat to the assumption of Black inferiority by White supremacists. Coates’s insight into how much the Obamas threaten White supremacy and privilege allows him to explain the racial panic and disproportionate racial animus directed towards the president and his family.

“Obama writes, ‘I decided to become part of that world.’ This is one of the most incredible sentences ever written in the long, decorated history of black memoir, if only because very few black people have ever enjoyed enough power to write it.” 

Coates is puzzling through the contradiction of Obama as an exemplary Black figure who nevertheless is not like other Black people. In this analysis of Obama’s racial rites of passage, Coates contends that the freedom to choose Blackness is part of Obama’s unusual approach to American racial politics, including his trust in White people.

“Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his correct name and rightful honorific—America's first white president.”

This provocative statement is the thesis of the Epilogue. On its face, it seems a counterfactual statement since we all know that every president before Obama was White. Coates’s statement here serves to buttress his argument that Trump’s politics are an extreme form of the White supremacy that pervades American history. This overstatement is a showy sentence that exemplifies Coates’s mastery of the essay genre.

“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.” 

Coates’s comparison of Trump’s white grievance politics to an amulet with weird powers is rooted in science-fiction/fantasy idiom. The diction here is an instance in which Coates uses rich, beautiful language to represent something ugly—America’s racial politics. This juxtaposition is typical of his writing and reflects the influence of James Baldwin on Coates’s style.