We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates introduces two important concepts that shaped his development as a writer and commentator on American culture during this period: plunder and the defiant aesthetic of hip-hop. Even as a boy, Coates was aware of the differences between the lives of White and Black Americans. White Americans are the beneficiaries of the systematic theft of Black labor, land, and culture. American citizenship itself is predicated on this theft. Black rage is the response to this bold, ongoing crime, and White innocence is America’s defense against the ugliness of this truth about America.

Coates’s recognition of this truth is rooted in hip-hop. As a boy, he listened intently to the beauty, power, and anger that artists like Nas articulated in their work. Coates found as a young man and a maturing writer that hip-hop held within it a whole store of archetypes, artistic forms, and notions of the responsibility of the artist to his audience and art to rival anything he ever found in the epics of Western culture. He learned about the importance of being real, of telling the truth, and of being true to himself as an artist by listening to hip-hop. By the fourth year of the Obama presidency, Coates’s aim as a writer was to honor this aesthetic by creating “writing that was not just correct on its merits but, in its form and flow, emotionally engaged the receiver, writing that was felt as much as it was understood” (89).