Coates touches nerves in ‘Eight Years’
Straight talk, from Obama to Trump
“If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.’’
That quote, from civil rights icon W.E.B. Du Bois on voting barriers South Carolina began to impose in the 1890s to undermine Reconstruction, sets up a key premise in We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy (One World, 367 pp., eeee out of four), the new essay collection from TaNehisi Coates. He confronts the legacy of President Obama, the election of President Trump and what each says about the intractability of race in our country.
Coates, who won the 2015 National Book Award for Between the World and Me, eloquently unfurls blunt truths in his latest book, pointing to how embedded white privilege is in the identity of the United States and how the desire to preserve it constrained, and at times demeaned, the nation’s first black president.
Eight of the book’s essays were first published in The Atlantic and are prefaced by shorter essays in which Coates gives insight into his journey as both a writer and a black man exploring what it is to be an American given the nation’s racial contradictions and complexity.
Coates tackles the topic of reparations for African Americans. He details the impact of mass incarceration on the black family. He contrasts the treatment of longtime civil and farmers’ rights activist Shirley Sherrod — fired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the wake of a doctored video — with that of Sgt. James Crowley. Crowley, a white policeman, was invited to share a beer with Obama and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. after Crowley arrested Gates as the professor tried to enter his own home.
Each chapter is a thesis of sorts, in which Coates melds personal experience and observation with facts plumbed from history. It makes for a work both scholarly and poetic. The more recently written interludes are often poignant, sometimes melancholy but never overwrought.
In all, this is 367 pages of real talk that some readers will certainly disagree with — or simply not want to hear.
But at a time when protests against police killings of black men are lost in debate about whether athletes should kneel during the national anthem, and the woes of the white working class often are elevated above those of black and brown Americans with the same struggles, it is refreshing that Coates does not tiptoe around uncomfortable questions.
There is no sugarcoating, no effort to cloak the nation’s underbelly in order to soothe those who do not want to believe it exists. Some may find Coates’ words validating. Others may pronounce them a bleak sermon or even a eulogy for the dashed possibilities imagined by some when Obama was first elected.
But however you see this collection, there is no disputing that Coates writes what he means and speaks what he feels. To have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.