A dream deferred
Ta-Nehisi Coates enjoys flourish and provocation. I knew that. And yet as I read his new book, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” I kept racking my brain, trying to figure out who was the “we” who was in power for eight years. I had read enough Coates to know he didn’t believe Barack Obama’s presidency meant black power, notwithstanding the essay he wrote likening Barack Obama to Malcolm X. And it was hard to imagine his “we” referred to Democrats or liberals.
I was asking the wrong question. “We Were Eight Years in Power” is the work of Coates as a fabulist. The frame of the book, though subtle, is that the Obama presidency facilitated the ascent of black journalists, pundits and public intellectuals who suddenly found themselves placed at the center of public conversations. Coates is in that number. Over the course of the book, he shares his journey from a not-even-making-ends-meet blogger to a man widely regarded as the most important contemporary black writer. Their mythical power was to narrate the state of the nation. It was fleeting and in the main symbolic. But, according to Coates, symbols are meaningful, even if not transformative.
Each chapter is a previously published essay from one year of the first black presidency. Coates calls the chapter prefaces “blogs” of a sort, but they are essays unto themselves. Sometimes confident, sometimes self-critical in hindsight, he reflects on the moment in which he wrote them. At first I thought “blog” was a bad designation because they are beautifully composed. But Coates describes how he honed his craft as a blogger. It was his format and venue, part of his path to a celebrated journalistic career. It was yet another sign of the big changes wrought by the 21st century.
Coates goes back to beginnings, from his youth to middle age, and from 2008 to 2017. There’s a jazz cadence, but as a whole the book is elegiac. We are in a past tense of hope, and a present of unabashed vulgarity. We are barreling toward disaster.
Like the Malcolm X analogy, however, Coates’ formulation that Donald Trump is the first white president because his election was a grotesque white reaction to the first black one doesn’t really work. U.S. presidential politics have repeatedly pivoted around the fear of black citizenship. It is a dance as American as cherry pie. While Toni Morrison’s speculative tongue-in-cheek assertion that Bill Clinton was the first black president was an engaging shock to the racial imagination, Coates’ riff on that, that Trump is the first
white president, lets history off the hook. Elsewhere, Coates more convincingly refuses to let American history off the hook. The word he repeats, like a mantra, for how this nation has treated black people is “plunder.” It carries the sense of both theft and drowning. These people, his people, our people, he says, have been held under so long.
The dance of the book, which brings him to seemingly different positions depending on the paragraph, can be hard to reconcile. For example, he describes all African Americans as possessing a “collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self hatred.” And yet, in his essay on Michelle Obama, his depiction of the dignity and elegant self-regard of black Chicagoans is pitchperfect. Likewise, while he seems to attach to President Obama a remarkable uniqueness (a black man who trusts white people because his white family loved him), he also speaks incisively and astutely about the way individual black people who are successful and beloved by white Americans are often used to deride the rest of us. In other words, Obama isn’t the only exceptionalized Negro. That said, I do not think the inconsistencies are accidental. Rather, the book is like an album of standards, or better yet a series of remixes. (After all, Coates is explicit about how much his career as a writer was shaped by hip-hop.) His minuet with contradictions also harkens to the trickster, a storied presence in black letters. They are the marks of a political agnostic, although Coates often reminds us he is an atheist.
This all suits his student persona. While anxieties about dropping out of college haunt the book, Coates’ style is to bring the reader with him on a learning enterprise. He creates collages of conversations with scholars, subjects and books he has read. His curiosity is vivid. And out of that study he places himself in a genealogy of black letters, claiming discipleship to James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston. However, his jeremiads and eschewing of hope (except in the case of Obama) also bring to mind more ominous American voices: ones like Cotton Mather and Richard Wright.
But at times his historical compositions are too facile. For example, Coates’ description of the history of black politics as a binary: liberal integrationism on the one side and socially conservative black nationalism on the other, gives too short a shrift to a long and varied political landscape. He is correct that these poles exist. But something is lost in the depiction of only two. His account of himself also suggests more than he lets on. Coates is admittedly uncomfortable with his role as the arbiter of the race and associated fame. He is just passionately doing his thing. And a charming self-deprecation emerges regarding his meetings with Obama. He describes his many blunders, his awe and his post-facto misgivings and pride. And yet I want to ask him: What do you make of these encounters at an intimate level, as a black man whose professional rise was deeply bound to a president who was, in the fashion of myth, both reviled and reified? And more specifically, what do you make of them in the age of spectacular black death and economic disaster? Or, to riff on W.E.B. Du Bois: How does it feel to be both a problem and an answer?
Perhaps Coates’ response is found in the sharpest and most reverberating question of the entire volume: “How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you?”