We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention: We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.

But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And this is because, at its core, those American myths have never been colorless. They cannot be extricated from the “whole theory of slavery,” which holds that an entire class of people carry peonage in their blood. That peon class provided the foundation on which all those myths and conceptions were built.

Tacitus would agree.

It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly “symbolic,” a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change it.

There is a basic assumption in this country, one black people are not immune to, which holds that if blacks comport themselves in a way that accords with middle-class values, if they are polite, educated, and virtuous, then all the fruits of America will be open to them. In its most vulgar form, this theory of personal Good Negro Government denies the existence of racism and white supremacy as meaningful forces in American life. In its more nuanced and reputable form, the theory pitches itself as an equal complement to anti-racism. But the argument made in much of this book is that Good Negro Government—personal and political—often augments the very white supremacy it seeks to combat. That is what happened to Thomas Miller and his colleagues in 1895. It is what happened to black people all through South Carolina during Redemption. It is what happened to black people on the South Side of Chicago during the postwar implementation of the New Deal. And it is what, I contend, is right now happening to the legacy of the country’s first black president.

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 knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.

Truer words.

I now know that the sense we had that summer, the sense that we were approaching an end-of-history moment, proved to be wrong.

There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettos, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born.

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.

To understand that the most costly war in this country’s history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war,

Had not looked at it from that far, makes sense

the common theory of providential progress, of the inevitable reconciliation between the sin of slavery and the democratic ideal, was myth. Marking the moment of awakening is like marking the moment one fell in love. If forced I would say I took my tumble with the dark vision of historian Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom. Certainly slavery was contrary to America’s stated democratic precepts, conceded Morgan, but in fact, it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place.

Enslavement provided not merely the foundation of white economic prosperity but the foundation of white social equality and thus the foundation of American democracy. But that was 150 years ago. And the slave South lost the war, after all. Was it not the America of Frederick Douglass that had prevailed and the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis that had been banished? Were we not a new country exalting in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream? I was never quite that far gone. But I had been wrong about the possibility of Barack Obama. And it seemed fair to consider that I might be wrong about a good deal more.

I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie.

And the music—the music in one’s head—is always changing. And that music went beyond hip-hop. I saw it in all the reading I was doing—even now the sentences come back to me, haunting me as sure as any MC. I think of Ulysses S. Grant speaking of poor Southern whites—“They too needed emancipation”; Edith Wharton sighing at the naïveté of her hero—“Oh my dear—Where is that country?”; E. L. Doctorow expressing the motivating desires of his protagonist’s occupation—“I report, that is my profession, I report as a loud noise testifies to a gun”; George Eliot on the storyteller’s mission—“All the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web”; C. V. Wedgwood’s summary of the mercenary Ernst von Mansfeld—“The world was his oyster, and the sword the best tool to open it.”

All I know is that even now, with outrages compiling daily, with the suicidal wish of whiteness on full display, with its impulse to burn down the country if the country can’t dream itself white, I am hoping that I am wrong, that I am somehow unnecessarily bleak.

He hopes! Even he hopes!

A question—from other black writers and readers and a voice inside me now began to hover over my work—Why do white people like what I write? The question would eventually overshadow the work, or maybe it would just feel like it did. Either way, there was a lesson in this: God might not save me, but neither would defiance. How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you? What does the story you tell matter, if the world is set upon hearing a different one?

Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential. It is often said that Obama’s presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama’s election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves—an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.

That a country that once took whiteness as the foundation of citizenship would elect a black president is a victory. But to view this victory as racism’s defeat is to forget the precise terms on which it was secured, and to ignore the quaking ground beneath Obama’s feet.

This article definitely marks the beginning of Coates in his current stage (October 2017).

The final thing that got me was the vaguely insulting way that “rising tide” rhetoric addressed the masses of whites. The presumption that they had, for centuries, acted “against their interests” struck me as saying that these whites had been, for generations, so gullible as to be fooled by a prejudice that paid no dividends. When rich Hollywood actors supported higher taxes, no one criticized them for “acting against their interests,” presumably because paying higher taxes aligns with those wealthy actors’ vision of the world as they would like it to be. Could it also be true that the masses of poorer whites might support lowering those same taxes for the rich in response to a different vision of the world? What if it was true that the masses of white Americans had not been fooled at all but that a critical mass of them had simply identified with a set of “interests” that were not purely economic and so powerful they overawed the class interests that liberals and leftists presumed should be broadly shared?

By the seventh year, I felt like I’d figured something out. “The Case for Reparations” was, for me, the settling of an internal argument, the final unraveling of an existential mystery. The American story, which was my story, was not the tale of triumph but a majestic tragedy. Pilgrims and revolutionaries fled oppression and dreamed of a world where they might be free. And to pull the dream out of their imaginings, to bring the theory into reality, they broke our backs, taking up the very cudgel of oppression that had first sent them to flight. And I now knew that the line dividing black and white America was neither phenotypical, nor cultural, nor even genetic. In fact, there was no line at all, no necessary division of any kind. We were not two sides of a coin. We were not the photonegative of each other. To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder. No national conversation, no invocations to love, no moral appeals, no pleas for “sensitivity” and “diversity,” no lamenting of “race relations” could make this right. Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.

I came to feel that nationalism was, ultimately, its own kind of dream.

To be a black writer was to be drafted into the greatest questions of freedom and democracy.

The specific ancestry of black literature appealed to me not because of racial affinity but because it thrust me directly into the muck of the deepest questions of our age and my age particularly.

I know of that other literary tradition where one writes, as they say Baldwin did, to break traditions, to kill your elders and displace your ancestors. But I had been raised to honor tradition, to believe that I stood on the shoulders of elders, not against them. And more than I wanted to write something original and new, I wanted to write something that black people would recognize as original and old, something both classic and radical.

Before coming to mass incarceration, I’d read his Johnson-era report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” and a lot about the subsequent reaction. In reading more about Moynihan, both as a liberal wonk and his turn under Nixon, I thought I sensed many of the biases and preconceptions that made mass incarceration seem a plausible answer to the social problems that beset black communities. It was not, to my mind, so simple as racist conservatives; it was self-professed liberals too who embraced solutions for black people that I was convinced they would not embrace for white ones.

Black people face this tangle of perils at its densest. In a recent study, Sampson and a co-author looked at two types of deprivation—being individually poor, and living in a poor neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, they found that blacks tend to be individually poor and to live in poor neighborhoods. But even blacks who are not themselves individually poor are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than whites and Latinos who are individually poor. For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping a poor neighborhood. And blacks are much more likely than all other groups to fall into compounded deprivation later in life,*20 even if they managed to avoid it when they were young.

That early-twentieth-century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass incarceration did it in the North. After the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics of the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass incarceration became the national model of social control. Indeed, while the Gray Wastes have expanded their population, their most significant characteristic remains unchanged: In 1900, the black-white incarceration disparity in the North was seven to one—roughly the same disparity that exists today on a national scale.*25

Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without significantly disturbing the other aspects of our lives, that one can extract the thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American policy.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew better. His 1965 report on “The Negro Family” was explosive for what it claimed about black mothers and black fathers—but if it had contained all of Moynihan’s thinking on the subject, including his policy recommendations, it likely would have been politically nuclear. “Now comes the proposition that the Negro is entitled to damages as to unequal favored treatment—in order to compensate for past unequal treatment of an opposite kind,” Moynihan wrote in 1964.*27 His point was simple, if impolitic: Blacks were suffering from the effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of white society. Ending that ill treatment would not be enough; the country would have to make amends for it. “It may be that without unequal treatment in the immediate future there is no way for [African Americans] to achieve anything like equal status in the long run,” Moynihan wrote.

Indeed, the experience of mass incarceration, the warehousing and deprivation of whole swaths of our country, the transformation of that deprivation into wealth transmitted through government jobs and private investment, the pursuit of the War on Drugs on nakedly racist grounds, have only intensified the ancient American dilemma’s white-hot core—the problem of “past unequal treatment,” the difficulty of “damages,” the question of reparations.

Nice way to tie it back, but my god what a run-on sentence!

When people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the twentieth century. I found David F. Musto’s The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control to be extremely helpful on the subject. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every instance that Musto looks at there is some fear of an outsider—blacks and cocaine, Mexican Americans and marijuana, Chinese Americans and opium. I feel compelled to also mention Kathleen J. Frydl’s book The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973. It was on my list, but unfortunately I didn’t get to it. At any rate, I have great respect for Frydl’s work and look forward to reading it in the future.

One of my great irritants is how so much of our discussions on race and racism proceed from the notion that American history begins in the 1960s. The discussions around Detroit are the obvious example. There is a popular narrative that holds that Detroit was a glorious city and the riots ruined it. Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins Of the Urban Crisis does a great job at dialing back this idea and pointing to the long arc of the city’s decline.

him. His hero was Abraham Lincoln, a man who rose out of the Illinois backwater to become, if not an implacable foe of white supremacy, one worthy of being shot in the head over its defense.

As much I loved the culture of France, and I did, I knew that I was lucky not to have been born there. Their particular philosophy of merit, the intense focus on grades and tests, the rigid class stratification, would have made my story impossible. It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper. I could come to New York and declare myself a writer, and while a degree from Harvard might have helped, it was not essential. The chaos of America, and perhaps more aptly the chaos of New York, made it seem that anything could happen. Often that meant the worst. But sometimes it meant the best. I suspect, though I do not know, that the lack of both ceilings and safety nets is how we got a black president. I suspect it is how, at least for these eight years, I came to thrive.

I had started in an unemployment office. I had started with the refuse of failure—a reporter’s pad half-filled with notes on some soon-to-be-disgraced entertainer—had graduated to a blog written for the amusement of my father and myself, had assembled a horde of post-docs, nerds, and feminists to enlighten me, and on their wisdom had been throttled into this odd world of awards, fellowships, and praise. I do not mean to sound so passive. But my struggle is to remain conscious, to remember the gifts of so many out there, treading, drowning. And the praise will make you forget all that, will convince you of your own special nature, instead of reminding you that you had the great fortune of living and writing in the most incredible of eras—the era of a black president.

There had always been two facets to my identity as a writer: an essayist and a features writer. In the first style I impose myself on the work—I drive the narrative. In the second, I follow the narrative through my subject. But features work best when you have access. Without it, I tended to float into the realm of essay. I thought I was at my best when I could combine the reporting and the essay. “The Case for Reparations” is, for that reason, the best piece in this volume to my mind. But the second-best piece, to me, is the article that follows—“My President Was Black”—because of the access the president eventually agreed to grant.

Obama agreed to be interviewed for “My President Was Black,” a piece that felt to me not just like the end of an era for the president but also the end of one for me. Between the World and Me had made my personal invitation to the White House possible and thus made “My President Was Black” possible. The challenge here was not in the interviewing but in finding that quiet space I’d occupied to write all of my previous pieces. I needed to find some way to withdraw from the world, to ignore every critique of my writing I’d (mistakenly) read, and to not forget my own voice. This was very different from my days as a blogger, when I thrived amid the noise, when the interactions I’d had sharpened me. This was the first piece I’d written that was not crafted as a student in the crowd. It was not that I ended the process of criticism and conversation; I simply shrank that interaction down to people I directly knew and respected. Likely, I lost something in that shift. But I was coming to understand that losing things, too, was part of the journey.

I believed that the answer to the question of the color line was right in front of us. Rob a people generationally and there will be effects. I also understood why that answer, barring extreme external events, would never be accepted and reckoned with. It simply broke too much of America’s sense of its own identity.

subtext. There’s something inherently beautiful about a story, in its ability to make more powerful arguments than an explicit polemic. And there is something demeaning about repeatedly yelling “I am a human” in a world premised on denying that fact.

I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.

smile.” The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. “Drop the beat,” Obama said, inaugurating the session. At fifty-five, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama’s enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country’s first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop’s foundational generation.

This would not happen again, and everyone knew it. It was not just that there might never be another African American president of the United States. It was the feeling that this particular black family, the Obamas, represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race, incomparable in elegance and bearing. “There are no more,” the comedian Sinbad joked back in 2010. “There are no black men raised in Kansas and Hawaii. That’s the last one. Y’all better treat this one right. The next one gonna be from Cleveland. He gonna wear a perm. Then you gonna see what it’s really like.” Throughout their residency, the Obamas had refrained from showing America “what it’s really like,” and had instead followed the first lady’s motto, “When they go low, we go high.” This was the ideal—black and graceful under fire—saluted that evening. The president was lionized as “our crown jewel.” The first lady was praised as the woman “who put the O in Obama.” Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap.

Yet despite this entrenched racial resentment, and in the face of complete resistance by congressional Republicans, overtly launched from the moment Obama arrived in the White House, the president accomplished major feats. He remade the nation’s healthcare system. He revitalized a Justice Department that vigorously investigated police brutality and discrimination, and he began dismantling the private-prison system for federal inmates. Obama nominated the first Latina justice to the Supreme Court, gave presidential support to marriage equality, and ended the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, thus honoring the civil rights tradition that had inspired him. And if his very existence inflamed America’s racist conscience, it also expanded the country’s anti-racist imagination. Millions of young people now know their only president to have been an African American.

Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb once noted that “until there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one.” This is just as true of the possibilities.

Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.

Basketball was a link for Obama, a medium for downloading black culture from the mainland that birthed the Fabulous Five. Assessing his own thought process at the time, Obama writes, “I decided to become part of that world.” This is one of the most incredible sentences ever written in the long, decorated history of black memoir, if only because very few black people have ever enjoyed enough power to write it.

“I always felt as if being black was cool,” Obama told me while traveling to a campaign event. He was sitting on Air Force One, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. “[Being black] was not something to run away from but something to embrace. Why that is, I think, is complicated. Part of it is I think that my mother thought black folks were cool, and if your mother loves you and is praising you—and says you look good, are smart—as you are, then you don’t kind of think in terms of How can I avoid this? You feel pretty good about it.”

He describes integration as a “one-way street” on which black people are asked to abandon themselves to fully experience America’s benefits. Confronted with a woman named Joyce, a mixed-race, green-eyed college classmate who insists that she is not “black” but “multiracial,” Obama is scornful. “That was the problem with people like Joyce,” he writes. “They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people.” Later in the memoir, Obama tells the story of falling in love with a white woman. During a visit to her family’s country house, he found himself in the library, which was filled with pictures of the woman’s illustrious relations. But instead of being in awe, Obama realized that he and the woman lived in different worlds. “And I knew that if we stayed together, I’d eventually live in hers,” he writes. “Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

The South Side of Chicago, where Obama began his political career, is home to arguably the most prominent and storied black political establishment in the country. In addition to Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century, the South Side produced the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington; Jesse Jackson, who twice ran for president; and Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman to win a Senate race. These victories helped give rise to Obama’s own. Harold Washington served as an inspiration to Obama and looms heavily over the Chicago section of Dreams from My Father.

What Obama was able to offer white America is something very few African Americans could—trust.