We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Writing “The Case for Reparations” helped Coates to back up with hard proof his suspicion (and that of a lot of other Black people) that America was founded on the plunder of Black people. Until that moment, plunder had been no more than a myth or a hunch to Coates. Coates had clear in his mind that the essay about the plunder was for himself and a Black audience, and only indirectly for the White people who were benefitting from the plunder.

Coates’s choice of audience and efforts to demythologize America place him in an old lineage of Black writers who have sought to tell the truth about America. This is a Black nationalist tradition, one that has its own blind spots, and it is one that grounds Coates’s sense of his racial and artistic identity. During his short time in college, Coates came to understand the importance of this work in making the American experience meaningful to people like him.

Politics tries to do the same work, especially in the hands of people like Barack Obama, who wishes to open new avenues of inclusion for people long excluded from American democracy. White supremacy is “a crime and a lie, [and] it’s a machine that generates meaning” by creating a White in-group and excluding everyone else (215).