We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates is equally depressing and inspiring. Depressing because his view is somewhat bleak: there is no easy solution for white supremacy. Inspiring because simply articulating the manner in which people are racialized and taken advantage of over and over again is itself a triumphant act.

I wonder if this is why people of colour appreciate Coates: he can describe the many little and great concessions we make every day without the faux-inspirational rhetoric of a political agenda of progress. For Coates, and frankly many of us, nothing is all that surprising about modern race relations. From the Civil War to Trump, the practice of white supremacy is generally pretty straightforward. From the case for reparations the first white president, Coates keeps pointing out the same things: institutions make it really easy to entrench white power and excuse the disenfranchisement of blacks. The apologetics for the poor white working class that elected Trump are really nothing new or surprising. They're part of tradition and that tradition is one of white supremacy.

What I found unexpectedly interesting in this book is Coates' personal thoughts and development through the eight years of the Obama presidency. It's not just growth but also a realization that expectations and reality are never linear or progressive.

When I read the author's award winning book Between the World and Me, I was completely blown away. And I knew I would have to checkout his other books as well. This one came from the library at an opportune time, I was kind of in a slump and was definitely looking for a nonfiction and I'm glad I picked this up. And all I can say is I'm extremely unqualified to write a review for this one.

I didn't know that this book was a compilation of eight of his essays from the eight years of the Obama presidency. And while I feared that that might make them a bit dated, and maybe a few points in them were, the author also gives a detailed explanation before each essay about his own personal journey during the time of the writing, the decisions he took during the process and is always self-critical about everything that he may have missed or misjudged. This lends so much more context and meaning to the articles themselves, and I loved getting to know both the author and his writings.

While each of the eight articles are important in their own right, my interest in them varied depending on how much I was aware of the topics beforehand or even in the way they were written. The piece on mass incarceration was one I had already read before but it's worth a read again and holds a mirror to the kind of punitive and discriminatory society we live in. His various impressions of President Obama, the joy of seeing the first black president but also being critical of his policies and grappling with these dual emotions, and then not being entirely surprised by the backlash he received which culminated in the disaster that was 2016 - these were fascinating, emotional and even painful to read about, especially his epilogue about the current president and the way white supremacy is the undeniable core of this democracy.

But the two articles that really captured my mind were the one about Civil War and the other about reparations. They both showcase the systemic oppression from slavery to present day incarceration, interspersed in the middle with the civil war, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining and various other policies that have kept black oppression in place - and how the country, the politicians and its policies have striven to erase the people of their collective memory of the atrocity of it all and use platitudes to absolve themselves of the generational trauma caused upon millions of people which lasts till today. And the author rightly asserts that until the country, and particularly its white citizens reflect honestly and accept the truth about their past, there really can't be an effective way forward towards inclusion and healing.

In the end, you might be wondering why my so called review is so disjointed and incoherent, but it's just that the scope of ideas the author talked about in this book are vast and very important and I just don't think I have the right vocabulary or understanding to talk about them. But this has really taught me a lot, and also made me want to read in depth about the subjects. Hope you will too.

The introductions are valuable even if you read some or all of the Atlantic essays when they were written. In particular the reparations and mass incarceration essays merit close reading that is more practical in a book than in a magazine. I think in 2021 Coates' effect on national politics on the basis of these essays may even be underrated. In part because he has consciously stepped back from continuing to make the argument and others have picked up his work and carried it forward. But he got these arguments into one of the biggest megaphones pointed at the liberal elite world. He acknowledges the many debts to the prior work of others and the way that his platform allowed him to amplify and present the observations they had made before, in ways they were not given the same opportunity to do. But from his perch, he made terrific use of it.

I started by skipping the Cosby and Michelle Obama and Malcolm X essays, but then I went back and read it all. Those are not as good as the rest, particularly Cosby (a failure as an essay, he admits, but a success as a first step to more writing at that magazine). It is interesting to track his growth as a writer instead of only having a book of his most refined work.