We Were Eight Years In Power

Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is the other book I read on the plane rides between Ireland and Denver.  I love Coates.  I think he is the best polemicist currently writing in our country.  He has taken that mantle from James Baldwin and has proved his equal and that is saying a lot.

I didn't check the book out when I bought it, so when I opened it up somewhere while flying west over the Atlantic, I discovered that it was a collection of the pieces he has written for The Atlantic over the past decade.  I had already read them all, especially the Case for Reparations that catapulted him to the fame he currently enjoys.  Except for the reparations piece, which I had already read about five times, I read all of his essays again.  Reading then in the context of a Trump (the first white president, according to Coates) presidency gave the pieces even more urgency.

They held together and offered a powerful indictment of the racist history of this country.  The effect on me after reading this book along with all the other political things I've been pouring through lately has convinced me that White Supremacy has always been and continues to be the dominant story of our republic.  Every great political accomplishment or setback can be seen in the context of our country's uneasy relationship with race.  I mean EVERYTHING.  The biggest stumbling block to universal health care (something Truman tried to accomplish as his contribution to The New Deal) was the realization that people of color would not only get the lion's share of the benefits but such a health care scheme would mean that black and brown people might end up sharing hospital rooms with white folks (insert Gasp).  Evangelical types didn't get involved in politics until Nixon took away the tax exempt status of religious schools that refused to admit black people.  It wasn't the evil of abortion, but the fear of black people in their all white classrooms that drove them over the political brink.  Some 40% of self-identified Republicans still believe that Obama was born in Kenya.  If the football players taking knees during the anthem were mostly white instead of black, no one would be outraged about their supposed lack of patriotism. This list of outrages could go on for pages and pages.

The best thing about this book is that Coates has written a short introduction to each essay talking about the writing process and the difficulties he had conducting some of the interviews.  I found all of that fascinating and, as someone who would kill to get published, quite helpful.

There are three or four quotes from the book that are illustrative of the direction and quality of Coates' work:

"America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered."

"Studying the 2016 election, the political scientist Philip Klinker found that the most predictive question for understanding whether a voter favored Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was 'Is Barack Obama a Muslim?'"

"The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support."

"So when Packer [George Packer] laments the fact that 'Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people--not white ones anyway,' he commits a kind of category error.  The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people--working or otherwise.  White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness."

Obama haters' insistence that their antipathy was not based on race was and continues to be laughable.  It was always about race.  It always has been.