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akovach 's review for:
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
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."