We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Chicago is the childhood home of Michelle Obama and the site of Barack Obama’s initiation into American politics. The Chicago of Michelle Obama’s childhood is the Black, working-class South Shore neighborhood; in “American Girl,” Coates uses this neighborhood as a symbol of nostalgic representations of childhood in all-Black neighborhoods.

In “The Case for Reparations,” Coates complicates his representation of these Chicago neighborhoods by showing that their creation is the direct result of discriminatory housing policy perpetuated by local, state, and federal entities. This Chicago is thus a symbol of plunder as a contemporary phenomenon. Finally, Chicago is a symbol of Black Americans’ role in American politics. Barack Obama’s career as a politician is founded in large part on the machine politics and coalition building he learned as a Chicago community organizer and from observing people like Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black Mayor, put together a winning coalition.

Coates uses a Malcolm X poster that reads “NO SELL OUT” in “The Legacy of Malcolm X” to represent his evolving understanding of the meaning of Malcolm X’s legacy. Malcolm X gained pop culture currency when Coates was a teen, and his image and slogans were available on mass-produced items like posters and caps; “No Sell Out” is the name of a 1983 hip-hop track that samples a Malcolm X speech. Coates uses the contrast between the unwavering message of the poster and the reality that Coates had racially diverse friends to represent how Black people embrace Malcolm X as a symbol of racial pride but reject the more conservative parts of his politics—namely, his notion of racial separation. Coates put away the poster for a time as he gained a more diverse set of friends but placed it on his wall once again after the election of Obama. This decision to give the poster pride of place represents his more nuanced understanding of Malcolm X as a cultural symbol.

Harlem, New York, is an important symbol of Black cultural excellence and political agitation. In We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates associates Harlem with Malcolm X, who served in a temple of the Nation of Islam in Harlem and engaged in political organizing in Harlem. Harlem’s role as an important location in the life of Malcolm X makes the neighborhood a symbol of the Black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. In “The Legacy of Malcolm X,” Coates recounts moving to a Harlem that was more racially diverse, cultured, and vibrant than the places he had been living. This Harlem is a symbol of Coates’s upward mobility and more racially diverse social network after leaving West Baltimore.

Located in Pennsylvania, Gettysburg National Park is the site of an 1863 Civil War battle. Coates uses his engagement with the park as a seventh grader to represent Black Americans’ alienation from American history, especially that of the Civil War, as a result of the way Lost Cause mythology conceals the role of plunder in the causes of the war.

As an adult, Coates becomes a Civil War buff; his trip to the park then becomes a symbol of the urgency of Black intervention in telling a truer story about America, while the National Park Service’s integration of details about slavery and the role of Black Americans in the war represents the contemporary pushback against Lost Cause mythology by public historians.

The Gray Wastes symbolize of the carceral state in America and its cascading impacts on Black families. The Gray Wastes is a rich symbol that has its origins in several science fiction/fantasy/table-top gaming universes in which they are essentially hell, a place from which no player/character can escape. In “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Coates uses the idea of the Gray Wastes to capture the many ways in which the carceral state replicates systemic racism in American society and dooms ex-offenders and their dependents to unemployment, lack of access to housing, and ongoing trauma.

In “The Legacy of Malcolm X,” Coates uses his mother’s decision to discontinue chemically straightening her hair and let its natural texture grow out as a symbol of Black Americans’ commitment to Black self-love in the 1960s. Mrs. Coates and many Black Americans were inspired to embrace such acts by figures like Malcom X, who believed in self-fashioning and a rejection of White supremacist notions of Black inferiority. As such, Mrs. Coates’s Afro also serves as a symbol of the cultural influence of Malcom X and Black nationalism.

These are two of the figures Coates uses to describe White privilege and White supremacy in the collection’s Epilogue. A talisman is an object of power that protects the user from harm or allows him or her to exercise power over others. Coates represents White privilege as a talisman that allows Donald Trump to violate norms around civility and qualifications to be president. An heirloom is a prized possession that represents one’s heritage. For Trump, the heirloom is his White privilege, while the bloodiness of the heirloom represents the explicit violence from which White supremacy derives its symbolic power.