Book Review: Ta-Nehisi Coates's "We Were Eight Years in Power"

While trying to be more optimistic for our country's future in the spirit of New Years, I nevertheless find myself (as I did in writing my previous review on a book probing the potential mental health problems of our current president and their dire implications) questioning how much effort it will take by all of us to overcome our collective present and historical sins to fully achieve the ideals we enshrine in our Constitution. (Note that I didn't say that we would never overcome such obstacles, just that it will probably take a concerted, no doubt multi-generational effort to make corrections to right these wrongs.) This internalized questioning intensified for me as I considered Ta-Nehisi Coates's 2017 work We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, a collection of eight essays written from 2008-2016 (one for each year that President Barack Obama was in office) in the Atlantic Magazine.

This publication was not a book in a traditional sense, as We Were Eight Years in Power concerns eight loosely connected essays whose common uniting thread was that of the unflinching criticism of a deeply concerned citizen (in the vein of a true, dialogic patriotism as espoused in What Unites Us) of his country over issues connected to race and identity politics. Making up for the sometimes all-over-the-place narrative in the publication, Coates provides a notes section preceding each of the eight essays, providing the reader with helpful context and revealing the writer's own evolution in how he handles his craft and his simultaneous evolution of his views concerning race in America as he is exposed to differing strains of black (and white) intellectualism on the latter topic (including President Obama's own unique synthesis of black and white thought).

Personally, when reading this collection of essays, I found it most helpful to focus not on the different intellectualisms presented against the author's personal experiences, but how the author sought to find a more realistic middle ground for each of these schools of thought that would present potential problem-solving avenues. The opening essay chronicles a form of conservative, pick-one's-self-up-by-the-bootstraps school of thought, espoused by prominent members of the African American community from Bill Cosby to Malcolm X that derided the disproportionate poverty, violence, rampant drug use and single-parent households plaguing the black community in modern America, while ignoring the exploitative history of slavery and a legacy of other structural conditions (e.g. discriminatory housing/lending policies and mass incarceration). Strains of thought like this, that espouse a form of black nationalism in accompaniment with the bootstraps ethos of American thought to Coates allow those of us who are complicit in this awful history of exploitation off the hook to retreat into our various narrative spaces of existence (i.e. echo chambers) while blaming those same victims of a system designed to inhibit their advancement. Coates writes:

"...All of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy." (Coates, 2017, p. 10)

Not only do I find this quote relevant not only in his critique of conservative and nationalist African-American strains of thought, but also in the larger context of the motivating forces Coates sets up throughout the book (i.e. the resistance to a black president) that culminate in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in the 2016 election. One of those forces moving to oppose black intellectual traditions are various strains of white intellectual traditions concerning African Americans, most of which still treat blacks as second-class citizens to Coates from overt racism to more subtle forms of patronization and discrimination based on stereotypes forged by extremely limiting structural conditions. To make this point, he cites the example of former liberal senator and social reformer Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who believed that the solution to the woes of the American city was to design social policies that supported black families (traditional nuclear-heterosexual-families) in the patriarchal mold in the hopes that stable employment by black fathers (instead of by female-headed single-parent households) would reduce both crime rates and serve to lift the African-American community up at the same time.

Coates acknowledges that Moynihan's heart was in somewhat the right place but that his report concerning the plight of black families failed in its aims to promulgate bipartisan social programs because of its "omission of policy recommendations" and "implication that black women were obstacles to black men's assuming their proper station" (p. 229). These strains of thought, in the vein of the liberal tradition of social reform look quaint in comparison with new policies that promoted mass incarceration and continued various forms of housing and employment discrimination that Coates notes is merely the continuation of bondage in a more de facto form by insidious racial forces still at work in the United States today. These same forces were at work under a president whose election simultaneously evoked in some fears of the country moving away from its preordained status as a whites-only nation and also pride among broad swaths of the population who saw the country as capable of overcoming its racially charged past in the extension of constitutional rights to broader segments of the population.

Ultimately, the American tragedy of the subtitle is to Coates that the country has appeared not to have learnt the lessons of the past and attempt to redress the structural conditions (so as to better achieve the egalitarian ideals of its founding charter) that have held back not only African-Americans but also women and other minorities in the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. At the end of the day, Trump's election was an extremely prejudicial answer to the Obama administration (which was already forced to walk a tight-rope between more critical branches of racial justice thought and the more moderate embrace of black conservatism so as not to alienate the white voting bloc) in that it merely revealed the ways in which white supremacy is able to function in a presumably democratic, pluralistic society by making people of one group fear the advancements of another group. Like Coates, I regard the economic components of Trump's election in that the white working class pushed Trump into office because he'd bring back their economic prosperity as marginal at best, allowing one to disavow complicity in continued suffering of many groups of people in favor of retaining "the moral high ground" of a "biological" or "divine" nature (Coates, 2017, p. 366). In consideration of his perspective in We Were Eight Years in Power, I've come to see that America is hurting itself by continuing to embrace such egalitarian national narratives while preserving deep structural and other obstacles to the advancement of minorities.

Feel depressed yet? Coates is blunt about his view that the chances of redress are bleak in the current moment (as he is in the rest of the book with his simultaneously blunt and elegant prose). Yet, he views that the 2016 election outcome wasn't set in stone and that it is not the time to panic about "the end of history" in the Trump administration's destructive tendencies towards governance (p. 366).

All in all, it's going to take a lot of work to set things right and it's better to make progress in the right direction than none at all. See, there's always a light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how dark that tunnel may be. Coates sees that light despite everything, but knows we won't reach it if we don't even try.


Works Cited:

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2017). We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. New York: One World Publishing.