We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.