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evelikesbooks 's review for:
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I won an ARC of this book from Goodreads!
Not having done much research beforehand, I was unaware that this book is a collection of eight of Coates’s previously published essays, with introductions for each and an epilogue written since the election. From my perspective this didn’t matter much since I hadn’t read them before; some of them are a little dated, especially the one about Bill Cosby.
I had trouble getting through the book, though, because it is rather a tome with dense and smart writing, but it’s all excellent from a self-improvement perspective, especially to me as a white person. I wish I’d had the essay about the Civil War to read when I was studying US history as a high schooler.
Coates and I have a certain fundamental similarity - we both believe that racism in the US is not a bug but a feature. It’s not an unfortunate side effect of our history; it IS our history. To me this has been a recent realization; to Coates and black folks it’s a lifetime of knowledge.
Not having done much research beforehand, I was unaware that this book is a collection of eight of Coates’s previously published essays, with introductions for each and an epilogue written since the election. From my perspective this didn’t matter much since I hadn’t read them before; some of them are a little dated, especially the one about Bill Cosby.
I had trouble getting through the book, though, because it is rather a tome with dense and smart writing, but it’s all excellent from a self-improvement perspective, especially to me as a white person. I wish I’d had the essay about the Civil War to read when I was studying US history as a high schooler.
Coates and I have a certain fundamental similarity - we both believe that racism in the US is not a bug but a feature. It’s not an unfortunate side effect of our history; it IS our history. To me this has been a recent realization; to Coates and black folks it’s a lifetime of knowledge.