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In this “urgently relevant”* collection featuring the landmark essay “The Case for Reparations,” the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me “reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath”*—including the election of Donald Trump.

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • USA Today • Time • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Essence • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Week • Kirkus Reviews

*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

One World
Publication date

October 3, 2017
Dimensions

6.47 x 1.26 x 9.54 inches
ISBN-10

0399590560
ISBN-13

978-0399590566
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From the Publisher

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A master class . . . Anyone who wants to know who we are—and where we are now—must sit with [Ta-Nehisi Coates] for a good while. . . . It should inspire us as writers, and as Americans, that he urges us . . . to become better—or at least clearer on why we’re not.”—Kevin Young, The New York Times Book Review

“Ta-Nehisi Coates has published a collection of the major magazine essays he wrote throughout the Obama years. . . . But Coates adds an unexpected element that renders We Were Eight Years in Power both new and revealing. Interspersed among the essays are introductory personal reflections. . . . Together, these introspections are the inside story of a writer at work, with all the fears, insecurities, influences, insights and blind spots that the craft demands. . . . I would have continued reading Coates during a Hillary Clinton administration, hoping in particular that he’d finally write the great Civil War history already scattered throughout his work. Yet reading him now feels more urgent, with the bar set higher.”—Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

“Coates . . . eloquently unfurls blunt truths. . . . Such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.”—USA Today

“There is a fresh clarity to [Coates’s] voice—urgent, outraged, electric—that’s never felt more necessary.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Indispensable . . . bracing . . . compelling . . . A new book from Coates is not merely a literary event. It’s a launch from Cape Canaveral.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“Essential . . . Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment.” —The Boston Globe

“Biting cultural and political analysis from the award-winning journalist . . . [Ta-Nehisi Coates] reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath, and his own evolution as a writer in eight stunningly incisive essays. . . . He contextualizes each piece with candid personal revelations, making the volume a melding of memoir and critique. . . . Emotionally charged, deftly crafted, and urgently relevant.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Coates’s collection of his essays from the past decade examine the recurrence of certain themes in the black community, the need for uplift and self-reliance, the debate between liberals and conservatives about the right approach to racism, and the virulent reaction in some quarters to any signs of racial progress. . . . Coates’s always sharp commentary is particularly insightful as each day brings a new upset to the cultural and political landscape laid during the term of the nation’s first black president. . . . Coates is a crucial voice in the public discussion of race and equality, and readers will be eager for his take on where we stand now and why.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Though the essays are about a particular period, Coates’s themes reflect broader social and political phenomena. It’s this timeless timeliness—reminiscent of the work of George Orwell and James Baldwin—that makes Coates worth reading again and again.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between the World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Coates is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Notes from the First Year

-

This story began, as all writing must, in failure. It was February 2007. I was seated in a state office building on 125th Street, not far from the Jamaican patty joint, not far from the fried fish spot, both of which I put to so much injudicious use in those days of conspicuous failure. I was thirty-one years old. I was living in Harlem with my partner, Kenyatta, and our son, Samori, both named for African anti-colonialists, of consecutive centuries. The names reflected a household ostensibly committed to the dream of pan-Africa, to the notion that black people here and there are united with black people then and now in a grand operatic struggle. This idea was the deep subtext of our lives. It had to be. The visible text was survivalist.

I had just lost my third job in seven years and so I’d come to that state office building for a brief seminar on work, responsibility, and the need to stay off the dole. “The dole” was small, time-limited, and humiliating to access. How anyone could enjoy or accustom themselves to it was beyond me. But the ghost of welfare reform past was strong and haunted the halls of unemployment offices everywhere. There in a classroom, amid a cohort of presumed losers and layabouts, I took my lessons in the great sin of idleness. The venue at least felt appropriate; the classroom had always been the site of my most indelible failures and losses. In the classrooms of my youth, I was forever a “conduct” problem, forever in need of “improvement,” forever failing to “work up to potential.” I wondered then if something was wrong with me, if there was some sort of brain damage that compelled me to color outside the lines. I’d felt like a failure all of my life—stumbling out of middle school, kicked out of high school, dropping out of college. I had learned to tread in this always troubled water. But now I felt myself drowning, and now I knew I would not drown alone.

Kenyatta and I had been together for nine years, and during that time I had never been able to consistently contribute a significant income. I was a writer and felt myself part of a tradition stretching back to a time when reading and writing were, for black people, the marks of rebellion. I believed, somewhat absurdly, that they still were. And so I derived great meaning from the work of writing. But I could not pay rent with “great meaning.” I could not buy groceries with “great meaning.” With “great meaning” I overdrew accounts. With “great meaning” I burned through credit cards and summoned the IRS. Wild and unlikely schemes often appeared before me. Maybe I should go to culinary school. Maybe I should be a bartender. I’d considered driving a cab. Kenyatta had a more linear solution: “I think you should spend more time writing.”

At that moment, in that classroom, going through all the mandated motions, I could not see it. I could not see anything. And like almost every other lesson administered to me in a classroom, I don’t remember a single thing said that day. And as with all the other buried traumas accumulated in the classrooms, I did not allow myself to feel the ache of that failure. Instead, I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare.

I can somehow remember all that I did not allow myself to feel walking away from the unemployment office and through the Harlem streets that day, just as I remember all that I did not let myself feel in those young years trapped between the schools and the street. And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.

Like any myth of self-generated success, there is some truth here. But the greater truth is that the wind around me awakened and shifted to blow my small vessel back to civilization. My curiosity had long been focused on the color line, a phenomenon that, in those mid-aughts, seemed in an odd flux. National energies had shifted in the wake of 9/11. The most crucial questions of justice during the Bush years revolved around spying and torture. The old civil rights generation was aging out, and there was a general fatigue, even among black activists, with the paratrooper model of leadership represented by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The choreography had gotten repetitive. Some outrage would be perpetrated. A march would be held. Predictable positions and platitudes exchanged. And the original offense would fade from memory. The outrage was, most often, crucial and very real—the killing of Sean Bell by the NYPD, for instance. But the lack of any substantive action, and, more, the fact that the tactics seemed to not have changed in some forty years, made many of us feel that we were not witnessing movement politics so much as a kind of cathartic performance. Outside of the activist community, a different idea was ascendant, the notion that we needed to, somehow, “get past” the “distraction” of racism. There were books lamenting the deployment of the so-called race card and articles asserting the need to “look beyond” race in understanding the perils of the black community. No matter how sincere or disingenuous its expression, there was a palpable hunger for something new.

In the same season I found myself in that Harlem unemployment office recounting failures, Barack Obama launched his bid for the presidency.

I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language—as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language. It was not even a language I was much interested in, save to understand how he had come to speak it and its effect on those who heard it. More interesting to me was that he had somehow balanced that language with the language of the South Side. He referred to himself, unambiguously, as a black man. He had married a black woman. It is easy to forget how shocking this was, given the common belief at the time that there was a direct relationship between success and assimilation. The narrative held that successful black men took white wives and crossed over into that arid no-man’s land that was not black, though it could never be white. Blackness for such men was not a thing to root yourself in but something to evade and escape. Barack Obama found a third way—a means of communicating his affection for white America without fawning over it. White people were enchanted by him—and those who worked in newsrooms seemed most enchanted of all. This fact changed my life. It was the wind shifting, without which my curiosity would’ve stayed my own.

My contention is that Barack Obama is directly responsible for the rise of a crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms. These writers were talented—but talent is nothing without a field on which to display its gifts. Obama’s presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he’d awakened about American identity. I was one of those writers. And though I could not see it then, making that doleful trek home from the unemployment office, back from the classroom, back across 125th Street, the wind was waking all around me.

I had, in my last job, taken an interest in Bill Cosby, who also, it seemed, felt the call for something new. He was then touring the country’s inner cities, intent on convincing his people to stop “blaming the white man.” The barnstorming began seemingly on impulse, initiated by the response to Cosby’s infamous Pound Cake speech. In 2004, Cosby rose to the podium to speak, ostensibly to mark the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation, at an event sponsored by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The NAACP LDF made its name by appealing to the courts to hold the country accountable for the myriad ways Jim Crow plundered black life. But when Cosby took the stage, he was set on holding not the plunderer but the plundered accountable. He inveighed against “the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people” for not holding up their end of the civil rights bargain. He attacked black youth for obsessing over “$500 sneakers.” He mocked black parents for giving their children names like “Shaniqua and Mohammed.” He fumed at black women for loose morality.

I objected to this characterization and wrote about it in The Village Voice—another job I’d lose—shortly after he made the speech. But as it happened, some portion of “the lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people” actually agreed with Cosby. I know this because I saw Cosby take the message to them directly. He dubbed these sessions “call-outs.” Typically, Cosby would assemble local officials—school principals, judges, parole officers, heads of community colleges—and put them onstage. He’d invite various “at-risk youth” to the event. The officials would then do their own version of the Pound Cake speech. The audience would cheer wildly. The spirit was one part Uncle Ruckus and one part Les Brown. It was flagellation. It was revival. But most of all it was nostalgia—a hunger for the uncomplicated time when all black men worked hard, all black women were virtuous, and all black parents, collectively, whipped each other’s kids. I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man’s corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. 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.

Cosby’s call-outs also engendered much cheering from white pundits. This was not surprising or interesting—the call-outs made no demands on the white conscience, so there was nothing shocking about white people cheering him on. But the hunger for a noble past, the current of black nostalgia, fascinated me because the black past was, to my mind, not even a useful mine for nostalgia; it was segregation and slavery. And my fascination extended to Cosby himself. He was not a conservative in our binary sense of electoral politics. If Cosby was mostly conflated with the affable “Dr. Huxtable” he played on The Cosby Show, the bourgeois façade of his most famous role obscured Cosby’s sense of himself as a race man. He had supported the anti-apartheid struggle, donated to HBCUs, backed black leaders like Jesse Jackson and organizations like TransAfrica. He seemed to be reviving a race-based black conservatism that had no real home in America’s left-right politics but deep roots in the black community.

I thought I had a story to tell about all of this—a big one. I saw Cosby as emblematic of a strain of black thought that I disagreed with but wanted to understand. I wanted to draw this out with a mix of portraiture, opinion, and memoir. The essay that came from that—“This Is How We Lost to the White Man”—is an attempt to achieve that mix, if an ultimately unsuccessful one. But the attention it garnered and the relationship it began with The Atlantic marked the first period in my life where I was stable enough to make more attempts and thus fulfill my own dream of walking the same path as my heroes, of Baldwin, or Hurston. And like them, I sought with “This Is How We Lost” to find my own way to imagine black people as more than cartoons, as more than photo negatives or shadows.

The tradition of black writing is necessarily dyspeptic, necessarily resistant. That tradition was the house in which I wanted to live, and if my residency must be fixed to a certain point in time, I suppose fixing it here, with the publication of this piece, is as good as anywhere. I characterize this as an “attempt” because I felt myself trying to write a feeling, something dreamlike and intangible that lived in my head, and in my head is where at least half of it remained. And there were other challenges, more tangible, that were not met.

I don’t know if Cosby’s call-outs were a cover for the torrent of rape allegations that swirled around him even then. I knew about the allegations. They’d been written about by other journalists. I also know they deserved more than the one line they ultimately occupied in this piece. I had never actually written a story like “This Is How We Lost to the White Man.” I had never written for such a prestigious national publication. I had my own fears of failure lingering. Better to tell a neater story, I reasoned, than attempt the messier one and have to contend with editors I did not then know. But the messier one was truer—indeed, the messier one might well have lent explanatory power to the simple story I chose to tell. And so it happened that in an attempt to analyze, in Cosby’s movement, the lure of the simplistic, I myself fell prey to it.

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 worse. That was my shame. That was my failure. And that was how this story began.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; Annotated edition (October 3, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399590560
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399590566
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.47 x 1.26 x 9.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #98,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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- #727 in Black & African American Biographies

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

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Barry J.

Mandatory reading for everyone, and particularly so if you're a regular, normal white person.

Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2018

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I became familiar with Mr. Coates when I read the 'reparations' article in "The Atlantic" while visiting my sister's house. This book is a more comprehensive look at the horror and degradation inflicted by white America on those of African (or native American, or . . . ) descent, ie, anybody else of less than totally white background and appearance. As a 70 year old white guy, I'm amazed and ashamed that this oppression continues almost unabated until this day, without ever having become a thing that our alleged 'better natures' would not have overcome. But no, as you read this indictment of the non-unitedness of the United States, it becomes clear that, from the founding fathers on, we have been a nation of, by, and for white people, without any real regard for the way that people of color (you know, any of those non-white ones) are treated. It's enormously sad and shameful that a nation of such high stated principles would allow itself to become the racist place that is in evidence pretty much everywhere you look. I think that everyone should read this book and keep close in memory the realities that it documents. We REALLY should be doing better for our brother and sister citizens. Truth is though, that we're not, and that's a huge part of what this book is about. It's a staggeringly painful and revealing piece of writing.

In some movie, some character asks of some jury "Now, imagine if she was white". You may have seen the movie, and understood the starkness of the contrast between what was being asked and the reality of what was. That's where we are as a nation, and where we all are as citizens. Try to imagine how tolerable those centuries of indignities would be if inflicted on ANY member of your family. If you're white, you really DO have to imagine, if you're not, no imagination is required - it's what you live.

I wish Mr. Coates well in continuing to try to educate the population at large, and hope that his message gets absorbed by people who might otherwise not know what has been and still is, going on. It's much too easy to be white and not really know about the depth and duration of this problem; WAY easier than it should be. Think of this book as the textbook for "Black Studies for White Folks" 1A. Spend some time with this book and get yourself up to speed.

212 people found this helpful

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XReviewer

Love love love this book and Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing and analysis

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2018

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This book is truly exceptional in so many ways. It is a dense read, so prepare for that. All of the essays were published in The Atlantic and I had read some of them. What makes this book particularly remarkable besides Coates' exceptional writing, is what I call the pre-chapters to the essays. Here, Coates' shares what he was reading, thinking, working on in terms of his writing, and how he thinks the essay held up over time. These reflections are especially poignant and help the reader get a glimpse into the inner workings of Coates' thinking and piecing it together. The book really comes together in the last 2-3 chapters and is absolutely resplendent. I recommend this book for anyone exploring the current state of affairs in the U.S. regarding race and racism, white supremacy, and all the ways in which these systems suppress people of color in sometimes the most violent of ways. However, I also recommend this book to people trying to figure out how to reflect on their own work because I think these pre-chapters are an excellent example of the deep dive into meta-cognitive processes and recognizes that we are all a work in progress. Happy reading!

61 people found this helpful

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TheloniusMick

I dare you to read this

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2018

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This is a book every white person needs to read. It will hurt. But that is as it should be. We live in an apartheid state. This man can think. And write. His prose is often pleasingly lyrical, even when weighing heavy matters. I find myself wanting to read it aloud. If I were younger, I might say his prose, when it flows, sounds like hip hop, but since I am older than the author, I’d have to say it sounds like jazz to me. Not John Coltrane. More like Miles Davis.

57 people found this helpful

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Curtis C. III

Racism isn't Just Hatred... It's An Entrenched Skeptiscm For Others

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2020

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Ta-Nehisi Coates did it again! He has become one of my favorite authors of all time and Eight Years of Power did not disappoint. Each letter, each article throughout the book is poignant, and a necessity for all to read regardless your ethnicity. Coates has a way of subtly putting you in the shoes of those that are torn down in our history and present day, but still are unflappably optimistic.

27 people found this helpful

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Liz

Brilliant, relevant, important

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2017

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"We were eight years in power" is a quote from South Carolina state congressman Thomas Miller, an African-American who was elected at the end of Reconstruction. He was highlighting the achievements made during Reconstruction, arguing against the disenfranchisement of black voters. They had built schools, established charities, educated the deaf and dumb, and built infrastructure. But his very argument was a threat to white supremacy. Coates quotes W.E.B. DuBois in his book: "If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government."

This incomplete & halted era of reconstruction is the framework against which Ta-Nehisi Coates sets his book. He pulls eight essays written around the eight years of the Obama presidency, and shows how "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."

The essays chosen for the book tackle a myriad of topics: the erasure of black history, mass incarceration, what it means to be black in the public eye, and, in my opinion the most compelling essay of them all, the case for reparations. Coates provides notes before each essay, explaining the context in which they were written, why they were relevant then, and why they are relevant now. The book shows an evolution, both in Coates' writing and thought, but also in the national conversation surrounding race, swirling towards the final chapter & epilogue, in which Donald Trump, the main force behind birtherism and much of the racist drum-beating, has been elected president.

This book is brilliantly written, incisive, and extremely relevant. Read it with your families, use it in your classrooms, and give copies to your friends.

48 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

belgarionn

Thought provoking - and tragic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2019

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Well written and thought provoking. Leads one to believe that the country's current "leadership" is an inevitable consequence of a country built on a flawed foundation.

One person found this helpful

Sean L.

READ THIS, it is essential for anyone trying to understand or make sense of the USA

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2017

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A simmering but controlled anger... this is a spectacular read, Mr Coates, you make the reader think, then think again. Thank you for your prose

6 people found this helpful

shedgirl

Historical

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2017

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This was a truly appreciated piece of writing; a masterful understanding of how the USA really works and functions.

2 people found this helpful

sas

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 22, 2018

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Excellent

One person found this helpful

Robert John May

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 6, 2018

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No problems!!

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