We Were Eight Years in Power—An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Were Eight Years in Power—An American Tragedyby Ta-Nehisi Coates Terrance Dean (bio) "The Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates and President Barack Obama,"A Review of We Were Eight Years in Power—An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (New York: Random House, 2017), 576 pp. T a-N ehisiC oates latest work, "We Were Eight Years In Power—An American Tragedy," is a collection of what the author deems his most seminal and poignant essays during his time at The Atlanticmagazine as a journalist, coinciding with the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama. At first read, I lingered particularly on the word "we." Who was the "we" that was in power, and why were the eight years in power considered an American tragedy? Had "we" failed, meaning "we" as black people? Had President Obama failed? Had "we," black people, failed to ask and get what "we" needed from America's first black president? Or, was the "we" an inclusionary term for all Americans, of all colors, cultures, and creeds? Upon closer inspection, Coates informs the reader that the "we" he is referring to is that of the world of journalists, mainly black journalists, who rose to privilege, particularly as those eight years gave them cachet to cash in and gatecrash the predominantly white world of journalism. President Obama's eight years as the nation's first black president allowed black journalists to cover the narrative, story, life, and history of this critical juncture of our time. It was the opportunity for black journalists to help construct a new narrative, right old wrongs, and cover an administration that would garner black people presence, markers, identity, and cultural capital in what had not been previously acknowledged or credited to them. Yet, according to Coates, "we," or rather, they, black journalists, had failed. [End Page 53] The book has a peculiar trajectory in which Coates uses a tone of quasicondemnation, pointing at the failures of not only black journalists, but also white America. Coates seethes at white America and its inability to atone for its sins and the plundering of black people, not only throughout history, but during President Obama's eight years in office when white Americans could have changed the course of America's dark history. Coates writes, 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 the culture itself being plundered. Coates takes off the gloves of civility in his essay, "The Legacy of Malcolm X," by reminding us, "Barack Obama is the president. But it's Malcolm X's America." On the one hand, Coates dangles in the balance, illustrating the complex legacy and ideology of Malcolm, while simultaneously making sense of his own space and place in America. Coates returns to his hip hop roots, which made him and his career as a writer. He sees himself like Malcolm, a school dropout—Malcolm from high school, and Coates from college—but both intellectually self-taught. Both ferocious readers. Yet, on the other hand, he admires the black intelligentsia, those like President Obama. Coates admonishes his earliest teachers, LL Cool J, Nas, Jay Z, and Ghostface Killer, while flexing his intellectual prowess by citing John Locke, E.L. Doctorow, Beryl Satter, and Ishmael Reed. It is easy to note that the influence of James Baldwin, who hovers in the background of Coates's writing, as he, similar to Baldwin, is interested in taking America to task for its role in the atrocities, the murderous and villainous acts it has committed against anyone who does not fit within the white imaginary or ideology. He leans on stately prose, desirous of the haunting mastery of his idol Baldwin. However, Coates's writing seems more like a Richard Wright tome. Coates reflects on his status as a starving journalist, seeking financial security—all of this happening at the same time Obama announces his candidacy for president. Coates has a hunger, like Wright, in that his hunger for writing and living, and the hopes of finding his footing as a writer, will ultimately pay him accordingly...