We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ career as a journalist started to take off when he began writing for The Atlantic, and this book,We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, documents much of his time there as a national correspondent. His book Between the World and Me was a #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Award, and that book, along with his journalistic prowess, has cemented him as one of today’s top writers and thinkers. Coates received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his work and his ability to clearly dissect the present political, social, and racial climate with the blade of the past. His writing is unafraid of the truth. It asks the hard questions, and it makes people listen.

We Were Eight Years in Power, published in 2017, is a collection of eight of Coates’ most famous essays from The Atlantic from the years that President Obama was in office. The introduction, “Regarding Good Negro Government,” quotes South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller in 1895, in reference to the eight years of Reconstruction in the South, directly following the Civil War, when newly freed African Americans were allowed to participate in the rebuilding of the South. This was before white fear of “Negro Rule” won out, prompting white supremacists to begin putting in place the system of Jim Crow laws and the continued legal dehumanization of African Americans. Miller wants to prevent one of these early laws. He says, “We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.” Coates says Miller was trying to appeal to the courts on the behalf of all the good African Americans had done when they were allowed to govern, but he was not successful. Coates goes on to explain the context of and reaction to this statement. Coates quotes W.E.B. Dubois’s reaction to this, and this quotation explains what becomes a thread of Coates’ book: “‘If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than Bad Negro government,’ wrote Du Bois, ‘it was good Negro government.’”

The parallels here are clear. The Obama Administration, Coates writes, was a period of “Good Negro Government.” We Were Eight Years in Power refers both to those Reconstruction years and to Obama’s years in office, and the title hints at what this entire book is about: historical, social, and personal context for the current political climate. The “We” is important. This is Coates’s story, too. This collection of essays documents the cultural shifts and historical moments that took place during the Obama years, but it also pushes forward and attempts to pin down for readers why they ended the way they did: with the election of Donald Trump. The repetition of history. The pervasiveness of racism.

The epilogue, “The First White President” delves into the current administration with all the weight of the previous essays and history behind it, but this is not the only broadened, current contextualizing in the book. Each of the main eight essays are accompanied by a 2017 introduction, all written in the first year post-Obama, the first year of Trump’s presidency. These introductions are more personal, and through them we learn of Coates’ journey as a struggling journalist, but we also see him reexamine his own words—turn his journalistic eye on his own previous work—something that many writers would shudder to do. So in these introductions, we learn who Coates was when he was writing each article, where he was in his life, and how he went about narrowing in on topics or gaining or not gaining interviews. We also learn about what he originally wanted for each piece to be, the vision he’d had for it, and where he saw himself as having been successful or as having failed.

Some essays and some introductions are stronger than others, but each “year” is valuable and important to read. With “American Girl,” Coates’ profile of Michelle Obama, learning the behind the scenes of his attempts to interview her and how he changed the goals of the article when he learned he could not, helps us to better critique the article he did end up writing. He writes of Michelle Obama’s past, of how she became who she was, and of what she represents to black people. The article is not perfect, and in his introduction he acknowledges this and discusses his honest motivations for writing it (money). In a time where truth in journalism is constantly being questioned, this level of transparency resonates.

Coates is not only writing about the Obama presidency, but touches on pivotal moments that happened during those eight years. One of the most powerful essays in the book, “Fear of a Black President,” responds to Obama’s comments after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and the criticism he received for them. In others, such as “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” and “The Case for Reparations,” he explores important issues that historically and currently effect the African American community. Throughout everything, Coates’ deep grasp of history, theory, philosophy, and more is clear, as is his sense of curiosity, his need for clarity.

The structure of the book creates a sort of time capsule of the Obama Administration, and some of the articles are, very rightly, incredibly dated. They would not be published as they stand now, today, expect in the context of this book, with the context of this book. The first essay, “‘This is How We Lost to the White Man’: The Audacity of Bill Cosby’s Black Conservatism,” is a very obvious example of this. By including an introduction, Coates is able to admit and discuss what he left out of this piece: a conversation that, so many years ago, was still being ignored, but today cannot be. Coates says: “And there was more to be said than even this that I did not say. There always is when you report and research, when you sit down to write and try to fit all the manifold sentiments you see, hear, and feel into some coherent arrangement of words. That was always the challenge in these years writing for The Atlantic, years that took me, ultimately, out of the unemployment office and into the Oval Office to bear witness to history. For all of that, in every piece in this book there is a story I told and many more I left untold, for better and worse. In the case of Bill Cosby, especially, it was for the worse. That was my shame. That was my failure. And that was how this story began.”

This is the open, analytical, self-critical voice that drives everything in this book and allow us, as readers, to bear witness to history alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates, and thus, to learn from it both context and empathy. Through this book, Coates is challenging us to become better thinkings and critics ourselves by modeling the way forward.