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4.43 AVERAGE
4.43 AVERAGE
So much was delivered in this book. Coates’ landing points: “The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of its affairs—the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of its vast system of education, the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” into the national lexicon.” ...”Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and so easily, brought to the brink of fascism. But one needn’t stretch too far to conclude that an eight-year campaign of consistent and open racism aimed at the leader of the free world helped clear the way.”
This book changed the way I think about Black history. I think all Americans should read this in High School.
A wonderful book. A book that makes you think. A book that makes you frustrated. A book that makes me sad. By looking over the eight years of the Obama administration, Ta-Nehisi Coates sees the changes that brought Donald Trump to power. This should be required reading for everyone because "the most powerful country in the world has hand over all of its affairs - the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of its vast system of education, the soundness of its national highways, airways and railways, the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal - to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase 'grab 'em by the pussy' into the national lexicon."
I've been meaning to read Ta-Nehisi Coates for a long time and am so glad to finally have read it now. It was so interesting to hear his perspective around Obama's presidency. I was most struck by the fact that Obama needed to be a white people's president (coming down a long line of white presidents) and a black people's president, for being the first one. To mediate between the two and all races of America, I found it incredible to learn about and can see how much he deserved that Nobel Peace Prize. Along with watching the documentary "13th" this gave an extension of that history detailing stories of slavery up until today. The book got a little long in the 7th chapter, it felt a little redundant but I think it's because he inserted articles he wrote at the time which were written years apart from each other but had similar messages. Overall, an incredible and needed read.
"In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body."
"Like its New York counterparts - Harlem in Manhattan, Jamaica in Queens, and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn - the South Side is a black island in a mostly white city. All told, the sprawling South Side is arguably the country's largest black enclave."
"...the common theory of providential progress, of the inevitable reconciliation between sin of slavery and the democratic ideal, was a myth."
"The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest - $75 billion in today's dollars - and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country's exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the states of large planters loomed."
"Films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the alleged sins perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst."
"In a private moment, the woman warned Livermore that she could 'hear the rumbling of the chariots' and that a day was coming when 'white folks' blood is running on the ground like a river...For blacks, it was not merely the idea of the war that had meaning, but the tangible violence, the actions of black people themselves as the killers and the killed, that mattered."
"And for black people, there is this - the burden of taking ownership of the Civil War as Our War. During my trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has been striking."
"The Civil war confers on us the most terrible burden of all - the burden of moving from protest to production, the burden of summoning our own departed hands, so that they too, may leave a mark."
"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
"Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record and one with a criminal record. ...The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one."
"Hoover [in his pursuit of Martin Luther King] was operating within an American tradition of criminalizing black leadership. In its time, the Underground Railroad was regarded by supporters of slavery as an interstate criminal enterprise devoted to the theft of property. Harriet Tubman, purloiner of many thousands of dollars in human bodies, was considered a bandit of the highest order. "I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber," Fredrick Douglas told his audiences. "I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them."
"In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body."
"Like its New York counterparts - Harlem in Manhattan, Jamaica in Queens, and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn - the South Side is a black island in a mostly white city. All told, the sprawling South Side is arguably the country's largest black enclave."
"...the common theory of providential progress, of the inevitable reconciliation between sin of slavery and the democratic ideal, was a myth."
"The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest - $75 billion in today's dollars - and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country's exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the states of large planters loomed."
"Films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the alleged sins perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst."
"In a private moment, the woman warned Livermore that she could 'hear the rumbling of the chariots' and that a day was coming when 'white folks' blood is running on the ground like a river...For blacks, it was not merely the idea of the war that had meaning, but the tangible violence, the actions of black people themselves as the killers and the killed, that mattered."
"And for black people, there is this - the burden of taking ownership of the Civil War as Our War. During my trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has been striking."
"The Civil war confers on us the most terrible burden of all - the burden of moving from protest to production, the burden of summoning our own departed hands, so that they too, may leave a mark."
"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
"Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record and one with a criminal record. ...The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one."
"Hoover [in his pursuit of Martin Luther King] was operating within an American tradition of criminalizing black leadership. In its time, the Underground Railroad was regarded by supporters of slavery as an interstate criminal enterprise devoted to the theft of property. Harriet Tubman, purloiner of many thousands of dollars in human bodies, was considered a bandit of the highest order. "I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber," Fredrick Douglas told his audiences. "I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them."
This book collects essays that Coates had previously published in the Atlantic, prefaced with a brief introduction to each one. Coates examines black life since the beginning of our nations' history up to the present and he spares nothing and no one in his assessments of how little progress we have made in civil rights and equality. If you are interested in learning more about power and privilege and how we need to understand how it has shaped our history before we will ever be able to move on from it.
This is an excellent collection of some of Coates’ essays over the over the past eight years, along with current commentary from him. I found the essays, like his other work that I’ve read, very well-written, thoughtful, direct, and I appreciate that he pulls no punches in his bleak assessment of white supremacy in the US. Having also read Cornel West’s critique, I think he has some valid points as well. My biggest criticism is that Coates completely ignores the role that sexism and patriarchy played in the 2016 election. I don’t disagree with his assessment of the central role that race played, but I think he misses the relevance of gender as well. My main takeaway is that I need to read more women writers of color.
"The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us."- Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
While it’s incredibly well-written, political analysis is not personally all that interesting to me. It’s something that really requires intense concentration on my part to fully invest myself in. But not feeling like I need to invest in it is inseparable from the privilege I benefit from as a white male. And the grace, lucidity, and thoroughness with which Ta-Nehisi Coates breaks down social and political cause-and-effect, for a “layman” like myself, is valuable beyond measure.
“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.”
I remember reading “The Case for Reparations” when it was first published in The Atlantic in 2014. It was the first time I’d ever heard of Coates. And I knew he was a writer I shouldn’t forget considering how enraptured I was by his storytelling, and how convicted I was by the facts, logic, and arguments he put forth. The education I received before college would have balked at the idea of reparations.
“We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past--at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.”
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve done a complete 180 in almost all of my political views. The more I’ve seen, the more I’ve read and heard from people unlike myself- with backgrounds and lives that always seemed to me, in my conservative days, consequences of their own lack of work ethic (which is, generally speaking, a central right-wing narrative: surely, anyone can make it in America! I did!)- the more I’ve been able to exercise what I’ve called my “empathy muscle.” It has caused me to truly reflect on one of the greatest regrets of my entire life: that is, not having voted for Barack Obama in either of his presidential campaigns.
“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 ghettoes, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, because to actually consider all that was taken, to understand that it was taken systematically, that the taking is essential to America and echoes down through the ages, could make you crazy.”
I’m sometimes tempted to make the usual excuses- I didn’t know any better! These views were all I’d ever known! But that neglects the personal responsibility to engage culture, facts, and the evidences of the truths that would have been so easy for me to engage in, to discover- ironically due to my privilege that I was so reluctant to admit to. I was paralyzed by my evangelical faith that I saw as, heretically, inseparable from the conservatism that I knew. I was still held anchor by the long-standing comfort of the solipsism that, after having been on both sides of the “aisle,” I now identify as being a transgression more inherent to conservatism. Even though I was steadily approaching “left of center” during the 2012 election, my fear of detaching myself from the tribalism and privileged safety of what I knew, rather than engage in truth with my own new convictions, kept me from voting for Obama in his second term as well. There is no excuse- I was an educated adult when I made those decisions.
“Whatever appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics - except the politics of white people, the politics of the blood heirloom.”
It was distressing to see, from these essays, how much casual racism existed on the right during Obama’s campaigns, and his years as president (and now exists in even more open gusto, as we all see). I don’t know if I just wasn’t engaged enough in politics to see it at the time, or if I was also one of its purveyors and encouragers in the ideological bubble I belonged to. Both, I’m sure. But I’m worried it’s more the latter, remembering the way teachers, churchgoers, classmates, friends and I would “joke” about liberalism in our disengaged churches and private schools. I, along with many of my also-privileged relatives and acquaintances, believed and touted the lie that we were taught in our schools. The lie that White America clings to in order to avoid reckoning with itself: that we are living in a post-racial America without systemic inequalities that need correcting.
“When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. 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.”
So these essays, along with Coates’ introductory, contextualizing reflections on them, have served as a convicting reminder and, for me, a lesson of what it truly meant for the nation to have its first black president. It is also interesting to see how he ties this in with an epilogue examining the devastating and (I thought) unthinkable follow-up: the election of a narcissistic, white-supremacist, misogynistic and just generally bigoted demagogue.
“Every Trump voter is certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it was acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”
This collection deserves all accolades, and every American’s attention. Especially if you label yourself “Patriot.”
This book should be recommended reading for all Americans and required reading for white Americans. He weaves information and insights together beautifully-creating a powerful treatise on our nation’s past and present.
I'm not exactly sure how to review this collection -- as least right away -- but would certainly recommend reading.
Oof. I had only previously read three of the eight essays in this collection, and really enjoyed the additional commentary, but it's not easy content to get through. It's especially embarrassing for me to admit that I didn't know a lot of what he covers in The Case for Reparations. Coates is so thoughtful and powerful and these essays are so necessary. I want everyone I know to read this (or at least find the essays online).