We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

4.5/5 stars

I’m not the kind of person that normally goes out of their way to read essays on politics but Coates makes me wish I was. Sometimes I forget that I love to read, and texts like these remind me of how writing can be an art that is a privilege to be able to partake in.

The introductions are valuable even if you read some or all of the Atlantic essays when they were written. In particular the reparations and mass incarceration essays merit close reading that is more practical in a book than in a magazine. I think in 2021 Coates' effect on national politics on the basis of these essays may even be underrated. In part because he has consciously stepped back from continuing to make the argument and others have picked up his work and carried it forward. But he got these arguments into one of the biggest megaphones pointed at the liberal elite world. He acknowledges the many debts to the prior work of others and the way that his platform allowed him to amplify and present the observations they had made before, in ways they were not given the same opportunity to do. But from his perch, he made terrific use of it.

I started by skipping the Cosby and Michelle Obama and Malcolm X essays, but then I went back and read it all. Those are not as good as the rest, particularly Cosby (a failure as an essay, he admits, but a success as a first step to more writing at that magazine). It is interesting to track his growth as a writer instead of only having a book of his most refined work.

A must read for every person

I don't think this was bad writing, or a subject unworthy of reading, but because it was several essays written about basically the same subject it was just too repetitive. At times I just wanted to skip ahead because I was so frustrated with reading, what felt like, the same points over and over again.

When I read the author's award winning book Between the World and Me, I was completely blown away. And I knew I would have to checkout his other books as well. This one came from the library at an opportune time, I was kind of in a slump and was definitely looking for a nonfiction and I'm glad I picked this up. And all I can say is I'm extremely unqualified to write a review for this one.

I didn't know that this book was a compilation of eight of his essays from the eight years of the Obama presidency. And while I feared that that might make them a bit dated, and maybe a few points in them were, the author also gives a detailed explanation before each essay about his own personal journey during the time of the writing, the decisions he took during the process and is always self-critical about everything that he may have missed or misjudged. This lends so much more context and meaning to the articles themselves, and I loved getting to know both the author and his writings.

While each of the eight articles are important in their own right, my interest in them varied depending on how much I was aware of the topics beforehand or even in the way they were written. The piece on mass incarceration was one I had already read before but it's worth a read again and holds a mirror to the kind of punitive and discriminatory society we live in. His various impressions of President Obama, the joy of seeing the first black president but also being critical of his policies and grappling with these dual emotions, and then not being entirely surprised by the backlash he received which culminated in the disaster that was 2016 - these were fascinating, emotional and even painful to read about, especially his epilogue about the current president and the way white supremacy is the undeniable core of this democracy.

But the two articles that really captured my mind were the one about Civil War and the other about reparations. They both showcase the systemic oppression from slavery to present day incarceration, interspersed in the middle with the civil war, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining and various other policies that have kept black oppression in place - and how the country, the politicians and its policies have striven to erase the people of their collective memory of the atrocity of it all and use platitudes to absolve themselves of the generational trauma caused upon millions of people which lasts till today. And the author rightly asserts that until the country, and particularly its white citizens reflect honestly and accept the truth about their past, there really can't be an effective way forward towards inclusion and healing.

In the end, you might be wondering why my so called review is so disjointed and incoherent, but it's just that the scope of ideas the author talked about in this book are vast and very important and I just don't think I have the right vocabulary or understanding to talk about them. But this has really taught me a lot, and also made me want to read in depth about the subjects. Hope you will too.

This is in the top half of my 5 star rated books.

Phenomenal on multiple levels:

1. I learned a ton. Ta-Nehisi combines shocking, brutal, harrowing storytelling with incredibly well researched data and explanations of systems of discrimination.
2. He comes across as deeply passionate, highly knowledgeable, direct, sensitive, introspective and driven. His attitude is an inspiring example of someone committed to passionate, powerful work.
3. The writing in this book is sublime. It's evident that he's invested a lot of effort researching and honing his writing style, influenced by rap and poetry. There are some breathtaking chapter ending sentences with words carefully selected to hit home powerfully.
4. Surprisingly, the abnormal structure of this book worked really well. There are 8 long-form articles (I think one per year that he wrote for The Atlantic?) deep diving into topics like Reparations, and President Obama. Each article is prefaced with ~10 pages where he gives a quite personal feeling retrospective on where his life was at when he wrote the article, and additional context around it. It provided a nice rhythm and contrast between the carefully written articles and the more personal tone of the retrospectives. Broke the book up nicely into chunks, too.

I preferred this to Between The World And Me. The topics of the articles were super interesting and content was fantastic.

P.S. The paperback copy is of very high production quality, lovely feel. And it's set in a beautiful typeface—the fancy custom Qu is cool!

Essays aren't really my thing, and political essays are definitely not, so this wasn't the best choice for me.

We Were Eight Years in Power is collection of essays Coates wrote, one from each year of the Obama presidency, a time which paralleled Coates's own rise from novice columnist to acclaimed and authoritative author. Not every essay in this collection is political, but many of them are. Coates is a tremendous writer regardless of the topic he tackles, but he best holds my attention when the subject is more societal or historical.

As a complete collection, We Were Eight Years in Power is a bit too wandering and repetitive. This is like an album which purports to be a collection of the artists “most loved songs,” but leaves out some of the true “greatest hits.” A thoughtful collection overall, but one best suited for lovers of government.

What can you say? What is wrong with people? How is Coates so solidly good at writing the things that are so bad? How do you fix this kind of fuck'dupness if you can't rely on the compassion of other human people in general.

Coates is equally depressing and inspiring. Depressing because his view is somewhat bleak: there is no easy solution for white supremacy. Inspiring because simply articulating the manner in which people are racialized and taken advantage of over and over again is itself a triumphant act.

I wonder if this is why people of colour appreciate Coates: he can describe the many little and great concessions we make every day without the faux-inspirational rhetoric of a political agenda of progress. For Coates, and frankly many of us, nothing is all that surprising about modern race relations. From the Civil War to Trump, the practice of white supremacy is generally pretty straightforward. From the case for reparations the first white president, Coates keeps pointing out the same things: institutions make it really easy to entrench white power and excuse the disenfranchisement of blacks. The apologetics for the poor white working class that elected Trump are really nothing new or surprising. They're part of tradition and that tradition is one of white supremacy.

What I found unexpectedly interesting in this book is Coates' personal thoughts and development through the eight years of the Obama presidency. It's not just growth but also a realization that expectations and reality are never linear or progressive.

Short Review: This is a re-packaged version of 8 years of Atlantic Essays, most of them cover stories. I had read most of them previously to reading them here. If you have previously read many of these you may not want to pick up the books. But I am glad that I did because I was interested in Coates' introductions to each of the essays as much as the essays themselves. The introductions were occasionally personal, sometimes historical, but usually also evaluative of the essays. Coates is self-reflective and can see where he has grown and changed. That self reflectiveness is helpful in an author.

The main theme of the book is the ongoing power of white supremacy in the US. The last essay on Donald Trump's rise is probably the most reflective of that point. But essentially all of the essays are about that. Starting with Bill Cosby's lectures toward the black community and the profile of Michelle Obama to the more famous reparations article and mass incarceration articles these are all articles written by a black man in the United States, a place where personal and systemic racism still is very present.

Coates' is conscious of his relationship to James Baldwin. (And there is a discussion of his decision to write Between the World and Me as modern edition of The Fire Next Time.) But I think of Baldwin's quote in his Notes of a Native Son about how he cannot help but think about his being a Black man because it impacts his every day life.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/we-were-eight-years-in-power/

Thanks to NetGalley, I was able to read and review this book prior to publication date. It has not impacted my thoughts or opinions about the book.

4.5 stars. This book is a hard, necessary read, and I hope people pick it up. If you're new to Coates', his writing style can be a bit difficult to get into a groove with and he makes statements that are meant to rouse critical thinking and instant impact.

I started this book without much knowledge of the layout or format. While I might say this is a good introductory volume to Coates' work, I think it helps if you've read either Between the World and Me or The Beautiful Struggle. This memoir is laid out as an essay collection that attempts to span black American history from slavery until modern day, but in the lens of President Obama's eight-year tenure.

At first I was a little disappointed. I've read most of Coates' work in The Atlantic before, and the book is roughly 35 percent new content and 65 percent articles either directly from The Atlantic or adapted from the publication itself. I shouldn't have been; Coates offered insight and new content prefacing each of these older articles, giving context and a bit of hindsight knowledge. It was also great to revisit some of Coates' journalistic work, since I find that reading in print (or on Kindle) is a very different experience than reading in a Web browser.

Those who have been living blind to their privilege may feel threatened or attacked by his words. Coates doesn't soften the blow, and he is pretty highly critical of Obama's race-blind policies.

I would suggest reading this section by section - read the new material, then the essay or article from The Atlantic - but take breaks between sections. It's a lot to read if you plow through it all at once like I did, and since it's not a truly narrative volume, breaking it into sections is a good way to ponder the material. I also think this work would make a great book club pick.