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brizreader 's review for:
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Another great and important book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, though I enjoyed Between the World and Me more. I think what I liked about the latter was how it distilled American racism down to several key insights and repeated them: the fiction of whiteness, the tight coupling between slavery and capitalism, the systemic plunder of African-Americans' bodies and how it continues today. It was singular in focus, and I liked the memoir of Coates's life.
This book is, instead, a collection of essays - and so, while the same, strong, clarifying, enraging themes come up, each essay has a different focus and the energy feels different. I think the brilliance of Ta-Nehisi Coates (or, as he says, the mystery of why white people are so affected by his writing) is that he enrages and enlightens in equal measure: Between the World and Me blew my mind open. I guess: his writing doesn't equivocate or hide behind an academic veneer? It just states, plainly and angrily, the systemic injustice of American racism.
This past year has been a constant, unrelenting loss of my "white innocence". I remember the SNL skit with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, that was basically our election party and featured Chappelle and Rock's bemused spectating at white liberal shock at the reality of racism in America. Coates is likewise incisive, painfully so, about white liberalism's inability to confront the harsh truth: racism elected Trump, Trump is a white supremacist candidate, and so on. By continuing to talk about class as the main issue (even when Trump's base is richer than the received wisdom would have), it ignores - dangerously - the continuation of American racism, and the tension between a country founded on Enlightenment ideals, built by slavery.
Maybe the most dispiriting part of the book is that This Has All Happened Before. The title doesn't (only) refer to Obama's two terms, it's actually a quote by some late 19th century black politicians, as they lamented the crumbling of Reconstruction under Jim Crow. The way that progress - like emancipation, or the civil rights movement, or Obama's presidency - has been consistently, historically, been met with fierce and terrible backlashes. How we're living through one of them now.
Also stinging was Coates's portrayal of Obama's optimism; he is a black man that was raised by well-meaning white liberals, and so he remained as blind to Trump's force as the rest of the left-wing establishment. Similarly, Obama's (necessary?) eliding of most race discussions (and the way white America reacted to his brief moments of acknowledging his blackness; "if I had had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon") is... well, like the rest of it, dispiriting and discouraging.
I would put this next to George Packer's The Unwinding, which also comprehensively explains Trump and also makes me despair.
This book is, instead, a collection of essays - and so, while the same, strong, clarifying, enraging themes come up, each essay has a different focus and the energy feels different. I think the brilliance of Ta-Nehisi Coates (or, as he says, the mystery of why white people are so affected by his writing) is that he enrages and enlightens in equal measure: Between the World and Me blew my mind open. I guess: his writing doesn't equivocate or hide behind an academic veneer? It just states, plainly and angrily, the systemic injustice of American racism.
This past year has been a constant, unrelenting loss of my "white innocence". I remember the SNL skit with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, that was basically our election party and featured Chappelle and Rock's bemused spectating at white liberal shock at the reality of racism in America. Coates is likewise incisive, painfully so, about white liberalism's inability to confront the harsh truth: racism elected Trump, Trump is a white supremacist candidate, and so on. By continuing to talk about class as the main issue (even when Trump's base is richer than the received wisdom would have), it ignores - dangerously - the continuation of American racism, and the tension between a country founded on Enlightenment ideals, built by slavery.
Maybe the most dispiriting part of the book is that This Has All Happened Before. The title doesn't (only) refer to Obama's two terms, it's actually a quote by some late 19th century black politicians, as they lamented the crumbling of Reconstruction under Jim Crow. The way that progress - like emancipation, or the civil rights movement, or Obama's presidency - has been consistently, historically, been met with fierce and terrible backlashes. How we're living through one of them now.
Also stinging was Coates's portrayal of Obama's optimism; he is a black man that was raised by well-meaning white liberals, and so he remained as blind to Trump's force as the rest of the left-wing establishment. Similarly, Obama's (necessary?) eliding of most race discussions (and the way white America reacted to his brief moments of acknowledging his blackness; "if I had had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon") is... well, like the rest of it, dispiriting and discouraging.
I would put this next to George Packer's The Unwinding, which also comprehensively explains Trump and also makes me despair.