Winner of the 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a collection of 8 essays, written between 2008 and 2016 with added contemporary introductions to each, from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, reflecting on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath—including the election of Donald Trump, and his own evolution as a writer.
We Were Eight Years in Power is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s modern book of lamentations — of a nation’s hope in tatters and change stifled by bigotry emboldened ... Coates maps his own career path from unknown blogger to revered journalist invited by Obama 'into the Oval Office to bear witness to history.' His professional ascension, including his National Book Award-winning bestseller, Between the World and Me, coincided with Obama’s presidency, and this was not a coincidence. Too many people who should have known better declared Obama’s election as the Big Bang of a post-racial America, and Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment ... After spending much of this essential book looking backward, Coates stares squarely at our chaotic present in his most recent essay, 'The First White President.' It’s a scorching takedown of Trump, his calamitous presidency, and his open embrace of racism, something in which he was well versed long before he moved into the White House.
These essays are a cross section of Coates’ work that, read with the distance of time, reveal the shifts in his thinking, even as they cover familiar concerns and questions. They also show a broadening of his perspective ... This volume serves to address other criticisms. The charge that Coates is a pessimist, all but disengaged from politics, is belied by his keen interest in compensatory justice, even if he’s doubtful of its ultimate success. The charge that Coates is writing primarily for guilty white liberals becomes laughable on its face: If Coates is writing for anyone besides himself, it is for other black people, a fact you can glean from his subjects and preoccupations ... We Were Eight Years in Power is more than a 'loose memoir'; it’s Coates giving himself a deep read, and inviting us to join him in this look at his intellectual journey. And by showcasing a range of essays—some his strongest work, others deeply flawed—he asks his readers to consider him as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.
Coates is very good at detailing how systems operate, as he proves in his strongest essays, 'The Case for Reparations' and 'The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.' But he’s also proven his disinterest in offering improvements, upgrades or plans for debugging the machinations that produce injustice, structural racism and inequality...I think that Coates’ work explains that the onus for change falls on those who perpetuate, benefit from and shield white supremacy ... As the best critics do, Coates draws us into conversation, into argument, rather than closing off discourse with canned proclamations or static resolutions ... by the end of We Were Eight Years in Power we can hear the Jim Crow South echoing loudly in the Trump administration’s calls for reform, purge and moral order. Here, Coates’ deft historical sampling might also offer us ingredients for crafting our collective rejection of white supremacy.
