OP
OP
We Were Eight Years in Power: Years 1-3
My thoughts...sorry for the length. I've never been great at editing. This book doesn't really lend itself to spoilers, but I'd skip over this post if you haven't finished years 1-3 of the book.
Intro
Through his writing, Coates forces me confront the horror that white supremacy is as interwoven into the fabric of America as the stars and stripes on our flag. I've always believed in Theodore Parker's assertion (more recently attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.) that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Coates repeatedly challenges the belief that we're evolving towards a better version of ourselves, where we recognize the intrinsic value of everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. He instead argues that the same nation created on the backbone of slavery still holds the belief in the superiority of whiteness. I may have been absolutely stunned to see a racist, misogynistic, worthless asshole like Donald Trump become tolerated, then accepted, then elected to highest public office in America, but Coates views it as the natural progression of "us versus them."
A theme woven through these first three essays is that white supremacists cannot witness a black person succeed without feeling threatened. Obama could only be elected after the nation fell into a catastrophic economic depression. The same racists who would later compare him and his wife to monkeys could only accept him apprehensively by pointing out that Obama was mixed race. I personally know two people who said, "Obama isn't black, he's half-white" during the Democratic primaries. As if he could only be "so well spoken" and "so polished" because of the white side of his racial heritage.
Once in office, Obama's early successes brought out the worst in those people. White supremacists thrive off their assumptions about black inferiority. Obama's successes challenge their core belief in white power and white leadership. Coates compares this to the "good Negro government" that came about after the Civil War, where freed blacks proved capable of governing as well as their white predecessors. White southerners couldn't tolerate that, as it destabilized their entire theory of racial superiority.
Trump capitalized on this same belief in 2016. He started his political career by questioning Obama's citizenship, and later convinced white voters that Obama was the "other" they feared. As the urban-rural split in America continues, manufacturing jobs head overseas, and services jobs become concentrated in large metropolitan areas, rural white voters have felt left behind. Instead of being honest about their situation and reflecting on what they can do to improve their lives, they'd rather blame the "other" for their predicament. Personal failings aren't the result of lack of education or job opportunities, but of illegal minorities stealing work. The very fabric of Trumpism is to shift blame away from unsuccessful white people onto blacks and Hispanics. Trump never had any intention to "Make American Great Again." He simply wants to blame America's problems on others. As Trump continues to fail at even the basic tasks of governance, these people merely blame those failures on minorities and liberals. Trump, an individual who takes no personal responsibility for his mistakes, is the perfect embodiment of the blame shifting these voters sought.
---------------
First Year
Reading this essay with my 2017 perspective of Bill Cosby robs this essay of some of its power, and Coates acknowledges as much. But I do recall that brief period in the late 2000s when Cosby began spreading his "bootstraps" mantra. I've met plenty of these people in my life (particularly in my line of work), firm believers in the American dream and a system of upward mobility available to anyone (everyone!) who puts in work. It's far easier to blame generational poverty on lackadaisical work ethic than to study the root causes. Everyone in America has that story of their grandfather, or great-grandfather who built their life from scratch and bettered the life of their progeny. It doesn't matter that these men were almost universally white and they lived in a time before outsourcing and shareholder dividends and $50 million golden parachutes for failing CEOs. It doesn't matter that these men were very likely uneducated or unskilled. They succeeded and so can we.
Cosby pushed his narrative that black Americans need to stop considering themselves victims to a system and instead pull up their pants (literally), stop listening to all that damn hip hop, and embrace more personal responsibility. All this is particularly (and abhorrently) ironic from a man currently on trial for drugging, raping, and sexually assaulting more than 33 women, but Cosby is far from the only prophet for this story line.
Coates doesn't argue that norms, behaviors, and culture are irrelevant to employment opportunities. Instead, he's concerned why this argument overshadows the more important problem of structural inequality: "in 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions."
Wealthy people often spread a self-creation myth to explain their stature in life, and Cosby is no different. These myths ignore the multitude of doors that were opened for them along the way. Inheritance. Family connections. Social networks. Educational opportunities. It's easier to blame "black cultural opposition" for unemployment and criminal records than it is to study the doors that were never opened for those battling poverty.
---------------
Second Year
Michelle Obama stated, "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback," with an honesty I don't expect from a public figure. She spoke the truth of her feelings, and white America crucified her for it. I recall the immediate backlash, fueled by hair-on-fire Fox News rants and jingoistic nationalists who have never lifted a finger for America BUT THEY LOVE THIS PLACE, GOD DAMN IT! We've always had the "if you don't love America then leave!" simpletons, but they really crawled out of the woodwork against Michelle Obama. People didn't just question her loyalty and love for America. They questioned her very humanity. People shared (and still share) memes comparing her to a gorilla. It doesn't matter if those fucktards are Russian trolls or white supremacists within our borders, for they've made equal contributions to our nation: nothing.
Coates describes how segregation in the post-1960s shielded many blacks from feeling different, as they were surrounded by others from a similar cultural background. Coates argues that Michelle Obama was somewhat shielded from systemic racism as a child, and was therefore well suited to serve as a lighthouse for liberal ideals that included everyone. At the same time, she also grew up in the world were Rodney King was beaten on live television and his assailants walked free. The harsh realities of racism dimmed Michelle's lighthouse over the years. When America embraced her family's message of hope with Barack's election, she felt a natural surge in pride about the nation and its future. That flew in the face of white nationalism and identity politics, and Michelle was made to be a monster.
We never deserved her. I have my doubts we'll ever see her equal in office.
---------------
Third Year
My favorite essay of the three, and by far the most challenging. A few years ago I traveled to Germany with my wife and son and we visited a concentration camp. The scenes were horrible, unimaginable. I cried multiple times, not because I have a personal connection with the Jewish culture, but because I'm human. I struggled to wrap my mind around the atrocities that happened on that site.
There was a high school class visiting the camp that day as part of their curriculum. Their presence spoke to the fact that Germans have confronted the unspeakable actions of their ancestors with an honesty and open shame that is refreshing in a world of victim-blaming and whataboutisms.
Americans have done the direct opposite with our revisionist understanding of the Civil War, preferring to focus on "great men" who lost their lives in order to defend their personal freedom and states rights. It's a great lie our history books perpetuate and we pass down to our children. An entire generation of southern whites (including some in my extended family) fly the Confederate flag in defiance of the "other." States rights sounds better when spoken than slavery and white supremacy, but the veil is thin.
The heaviest hitting passage to me was the following: "It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding 'African slavery.' That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day."
The Civil War was fought to preserve an economic system relying on enslaved human labor, but acknowledging that requires us to admit that our nation was built on the backs of others. The narrative of America as a beacon of freedom and hope is incongruous with our origin, so the origin must be revised. Slavery and the slaves themselves become an afterthought to the stories of brave white heroes fighting on both sides. Americans have all heard the narrative of brother fighting brother, but we conveniently ignore they fought over whether or not slavery would continue in America. History books gloss over the root cause in favor of glorified tales of bravery and tactical brilliance.
I've visited several Civil War sites to include Sumter, Manassas, and Gettysburg. The museums there showcased weaponry and featured maps detailing the advances and retreats that occurred there. Mentions of slavery are few and far between, overshadowed by the tales of expert generals maneuvering men to their deaths.
As recently as this past week, White House chief of staff, John Kelly, perpetuated this lie by blaming the Civil War on both sides being unable to compromise. Kelly keep cementing himself as a spineless ideologue, but his statement is particularly damning for two reasons. First, it treats the enslavement of black people by white Americans as a bargaining chip that could have led to a compromise. Secondly, it ignores the many pathetic compromises the northern states in the union made in the time leading up to the war (Coates mentions the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act). The north did make compromises that resulted in the continued enslavement of black people in the south. I'm not shocked the same man who argued in favor of building a physical wall blocking brown people from entering America would spread the lie that the Civil War was just one big misunderstanding.
I'd love to read an updated take on this essay from Coates in light of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and vowing to defend the statues of Confederate leaders. Only in America can the side who defended slavery and lost the war build monuments to the losing side. Revisionist history provides the veil that these statues represent a cultural heritage we must protect, instead of the chains of slavery they actually embody.
My thoughts...sorry for the length. I've never been great at editing. This book doesn't really lend itself to spoilers, but I'd skip over this post if you haven't finished years 1-3 of the book.
Intro
The symbolic power of Barack Obama's presidency—that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle—assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed—the symbols of racism—enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Through his writing, Coates forces me confront the horror that white supremacy is as interwoven into the fabric of America as the stars and stripes on our flag. I've always believed in Theodore Parker's assertion (more recently attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.) that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Coates repeatedly challenges the belief that we're evolving towards a better version of ourselves, where we recognize the intrinsic value of everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender. He instead argues that the same nation created on the backbone of slavery still holds the belief in the superiority of whiteness. I may have been absolutely stunned to see a racist, misogynistic, worthless asshole like Donald Trump become tolerated, then accepted, then elected to highest public office in America, but Coates views it as the natural progression of "us versus them."
A theme woven through these first three essays is that white supremacists cannot witness a black person succeed without feeling threatened. Obama could only be elected after the nation fell into a catastrophic economic depression. The same racists who would later compare him and his wife to monkeys could only accept him apprehensively by pointing out that Obama was mixed race. I personally know two people who said, "Obama isn't black, he's half-white" during the Democratic primaries. As if he could only be "so well spoken" and "so polished" because of the white side of his racial heritage.
Once in office, Obama's early successes brought out the worst in those people. White supremacists thrive off their assumptions about black inferiority. Obama's successes challenge their core belief in white power and white leadership. Coates compares this to the "good Negro government" that came about after the Civil War, where freed blacks proved capable of governing as well as their white predecessors. White southerners couldn't tolerate that, as it destabilized their entire theory of racial superiority.
Trump capitalized on this same belief in 2016. He started his political career by questioning Obama's citizenship, and later convinced white voters that Obama was the "other" they feared. As the urban-rural split in America continues, manufacturing jobs head overseas, and services jobs become concentrated in large metropolitan areas, rural white voters have felt left behind. Instead of being honest about their situation and reflecting on what they can do to improve their lives, they'd rather blame the "other" for their predicament. Personal failings aren't the result of lack of education or job opportunities, but of illegal minorities stealing work. The very fabric of Trumpism is to shift blame away from unsuccessful white people onto blacks and Hispanics. Trump never had any intention to "Make American Great Again." He simply wants to blame America's problems on others. As Trump continues to fail at even the basic tasks of governance, these people merely blame those failures on minorities and liberals. Trump, an individual who takes no personal responsibility for his mistakes, is the perfect embodiment of the blame shifting these voters sought.
---------------
First Year
I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Reading this essay with my 2017 perspective of Bill Cosby robs this essay of some of its power, and Coates acknowledges as much. But I do recall that brief period in the late 2000s when Cosby began spreading his "bootstraps" mantra. I've met plenty of these people in my life (particularly in my line of work), firm believers in the American dream and a system of upward mobility available to anyone (everyone!) who puts in work. It's far easier to blame generational poverty on lackadaisical work ethic than to study the root causes. Everyone in America has that story of their grandfather, or great-grandfather who built their life from scratch and bettered the life of their progeny. It doesn't matter that these men were almost universally white and they lived in a time before outsourcing and shareholder dividends and $50 million golden parachutes for failing CEOs. It doesn't matter that these men were very likely uneducated or unskilled. They succeeded and so can we.
Cosby pushed his narrative that black Americans need to stop considering themselves victims to a system and instead pull up their pants (literally), stop listening to all that damn hip hop, and embrace more personal responsibility. All this is particularly (and abhorrently) ironic from a man currently on trial for drugging, raping, and sexually assaulting more than 33 women, but Cosby is far from the only prophet for this story line.
Coates doesn't argue that norms, behaviors, and culture are irrelevant to employment opportunities. Instead, he's concerned why this argument overshadows the more important problem of structural inequality: "in 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions."
Wealthy people often spread a self-creation myth to explain their stature in life, and Cosby is no different. These myths ignore the multitude of doors that were opened for them along the way. Inheritance. Family connections. Social networks. Educational opportunities. It's easier to blame "black cultural opposition" for unemployment and criminal records than it is to study the doors that were never opened for those battling poverty.
---------------
Second Year
If you're looking for the heralds of a "post-racial" America, if that adjective is ever to be more than a stupid, unlettered flourish, then look to those, like Michelle Obama, with a sense of security in who they are—those, black or white, who hold blackness as more than the losing end of racism.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
I loved this essay. I love Michelle Obama. She's the best first lady our nation has ever known, and we didn't deserve her.- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michelle Obama stated, "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback," with an honesty I don't expect from a public figure. She spoke the truth of her feelings, and white America crucified her for it. I recall the immediate backlash, fueled by hair-on-fire Fox News rants and jingoistic nationalists who have never lifted a finger for America BUT THEY LOVE THIS PLACE, GOD DAMN IT! We've always had the "if you don't love America then leave!" simpletons, but they really crawled out of the woodwork against Michelle Obama. People didn't just question her loyalty and love for America. They questioned her very humanity. People shared (and still share) memes comparing her to a gorilla. It doesn't matter if those fucktards are Russian trolls or white supremacists within our borders, for they've made equal contributions to our nation: nothing.
Coates describes how segregation in the post-1960s shielded many blacks from feeling different, as they were surrounded by others from a similar cultural background. Coates argues that Michelle Obama was somewhat shielded from systemic racism as a child, and was therefore well suited to serve as a lighthouse for liberal ideals that included everyone. At the same time, she also grew up in the world were Rodney King was beaten on live television and his assailants walked free. The harsh realities of racism dimmed Michelle's lighthouse over the years. When America embraced her family's message of hope with Barack's election, she felt a natural surge in pride about the nation and its future. That flew in the face of white nationalism and identity politics, and Michelle was made to be a monster.
We never deserved her. I have my doubts we'll ever see her equal in office.
---------------
Third Year
"Son," my father said of Obama, "you know the country got to be messed up for them folks to give him the job." The economy was on the brink. The blood of untold numbers of Iraqis was on our hands. Katrina had shamed the society. From this other angle, post-racialism and good feeling were taken up not so much out of elevation in consciousness but out of desperation. It all makes so much sense now. The pageantry, the math, the magazines, the essays heralded an end to the old country with all its divisions. We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions but drew power from them.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Ta-Nehisi Coates
My favorite essay of the three, and by far the most challenging. A few years ago I traveled to Germany with my wife and son and we visited a concentration camp. The scenes were horrible, unimaginable. I cried multiple times, not because I have a personal connection with the Jewish culture, but because I'm human. I struggled to wrap my mind around the atrocities that happened on that site.
There was a high school class visiting the camp that day as part of their curriculum. Their presence spoke to the fact that Germans have confronted the unspeakable actions of their ancestors with an honesty and open shame that is refreshing in a world of victim-blaming and whataboutisms.
Americans have done the direct opposite with our revisionist understanding of the Civil War, preferring to focus on "great men" who lost their lives in order to defend their personal freedom and states rights. It's a great lie our history books perpetuate and we pass down to our children. An entire generation of southern whites (including some in my extended family) fly the Confederate flag in defiance of the "other." States rights sounds better when spoken than slavery and white supremacy, but the veil is thin.
The heaviest hitting passage to me was the following: "It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding 'African slavery.' That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry, and so strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day."
The Civil War was fought to preserve an economic system relying on enslaved human labor, but acknowledging that requires us to admit that our nation was built on the backs of others. The narrative of America as a beacon of freedom and hope is incongruous with our origin, so the origin must be revised. Slavery and the slaves themselves become an afterthought to the stories of brave white heroes fighting on both sides. Americans have all heard the narrative of brother fighting brother, but we conveniently ignore they fought over whether or not slavery would continue in America. History books gloss over the root cause in favor of glorified tales of bravery and tactical brilliance.
I've visited several Civil War sites to include Sumter, Manassas, and Gettysburg. The museums there showcased weaponry and featured maps detailing the advances and retreats that occurred there. Mentions of slavery are few and far between, overshadowed by the tales of expert generals maneuvering men to their deaths.
As recently as this past week, White House chief of staff, John Kelly, perpetuated this lie by blaming the Civil War on both sides being unable to compromise. Kelly keep cementing himself as a spineless ideologue, but his statement is particularly damning for two reasons. First, it treats the enslavement of black people by white Americans as a bargaining chip that could have led to a compromise. Secondly, it ignores the many pathetic compromises the northern states in the union made in the time leading up to the war (Coates mentions the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act). The north did make compromises that resulted in the continued enslavement of black people in the south. I'm not shocked the same man who argued in favor of building a physical wall blocking brown people from entering America would spread the lie that the Civil War was just one big misunderstanding.
I'd love to read an updated take on this essay from Coates in light of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville and vowing to defend the statues of Confederate leaders. Only in America can the side who defended slavery and lost the war build monuments to the losing side. Revisionist history provides the veil that these statues represent a cultural heritage we must protect, instead of the chains of slavery they actually embody.
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