We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The maintenance of white honor and whiteness remains at the core of liberal American thinking. Left politics are not exempt. The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly even because of it. Trump removed the questions of racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the realm of the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. It simply could not be that Hillary Clinton was correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a president because of bigotry. The implications—that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics, that the country is susceptible to that bigotry, that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos, that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures—are just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure—yet again—of class unity in the face of racism. Technocrats and centrists would find no solace as their class proved just as susceptible.