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A review by sharonrosenbergscholl
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates
5.0
Amazing. Wise. Heartbreaking. Important.
“I don’t ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the lifespan of the resistors, almost always fails. I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that believe does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief is destiny. And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proved right. No one - not our fathers, not our police and not our gods - is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves - just as my ancestors did.” Pg 289-90
“In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with s criminal record chad about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.” Pg 28
“What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism - rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best picking of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama’s presidency, a stranger to American politics might concluded that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly...Obama talked less about race then any other Democratic president since 1961.” Pg 134-5
“In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a county so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.” Pg 147
“With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.” Pg 174
“The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by sales. Prudent James K. Polk traded sales from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not it’s nurturer but its destroyer.” Pg 201
“Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as - if not more than - the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asked what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence and into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” Pg 207
“Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.” Pg 258
“Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and the could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition's resolve the destroy him.” Pg 324
“That movement [the rise of the so called “Tea Party”] came in to full bloom in the summer of 2015 with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who’d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American. It was birthirism - not trade, not jobs, not isolationism - that launched Trump’s foray into electoral policies. Having risen unexpectedly on this basis into the stratosphere of Republican Policies, Trump spent the campaign freely and liberally trafficking in misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. And on November 8, 2016, he won election to the presidency. Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and 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.” Pg 332
“To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its elderitch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. Perhaps more important, Trump is the first president to have publicly affirmed that is daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (‘And when you're a star, they let you do it’), fending off multiple accusations of said assaults, becoming immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy - to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive - work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.” Pg 343
“ ...voters in their study who supported Trump generally had higher mean household incomes...than those who did not. Those who approved of Trump were ‘less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time’ than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: ‘The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” Pg 346
“‘I could strand in the middle of FIfth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,’ Trump once bragged. This statement should be met with only a modicum of doubt. Trump mocked the disabled, bragged of sexual assault, endured multiple accusations of sexual assault, fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed that lie by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction in the White House to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump - to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president, or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than an other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.” Pg 364
“I don’t ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the lifespan of the resistors, almost always fails. I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that believe does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief is destiny. And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proved right. No one - not our fathers, not our police and not our gods - is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves - just as my ancestors did.” Pg 289-90
“In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with s criminal record chad about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.” Pg 28
“What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism - rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best picking of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama’s presidency, a stranger to American politics might concluded that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly...Obama talked less about race then any other Democratic president since 1961.” Pg 134-5
“In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a county so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.” Pg 147
“With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.” Pg 174
“The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by sales. Prudent James K. Polk traded sales from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not it’s nurturer but its destroyer.” Pg 201
“Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as - if not more than - the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asked what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence and into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” Pg 207
“Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.” Pg 258
“Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and the could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition's resolve the destroy him.” Pg 324
“That movement [the rise of the so called “Tea Party”] came in to full bloom in the summer of 2015 with the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who’d risen to political prominence by peddling the racist myth that the president was not American. It was birthirism - not trade, not jobs, not isolationism - that launched Trump’s foray into electoral policies. Having risen unexpectedly on this basis into the stratosphere of Republican Policies, Trump spent the campaign freely and liberally trafficking in misogyny, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. And on November 8, 2016, he won election to the presidency. Historians will spend the next century analyzing how a country with such allegedly grand democratic traditions was, so swiftly and 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.” Pg 332
“To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its elderitch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. Perhaps more important, Trump is the first president to have publicly affirmed that is daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (‘And when you're a star, they let you do it’), fending off multiple accusations of said assaults, becoming immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy - to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that in working twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive - work half as hard as black people and even more is possible.” Pg 343
“ ...voters in their study who supported Trump generally had higher mean household incomes...than those who did not. Those who approved of Trump were ‘less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time’ than those who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: ‘The racial and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” Pg 346
“‘I could strand in the middle of FIfth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,’ Trump once bragged. This statement should be met with only a modicum of doubt. Trump mocked the disabled, bragged of sexual assault, endured multiple accusations of sexual assault, fired an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, personally exposed that lie by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into his possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstruction in the White House to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a black facsimile of Donald Trump - to imagine Obama, say, implicating an opponent’s father in the assassination of an American president, or comparing his physical endowment with that of another candidate and successfully capturing the presidency. Trump, more than an other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.” Pg 364