We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates remembers that the mood among the Obamas and Democrats in the fall of 2015 was light and hopeful. At a star-studded BET (Black Entertainment Television) farewell party for the Obamas, hip-hop artists and Black people dominated. The powerful symbolism of hip-hop, “an art-form birthed in the burning Bronx and now standing full-grown, at the White House, unbroken and unedited" (294), as the soundtrack for this celebration was lost on no one.

Everyone there was aware that the Obamas had pulled it off—they had been exemplary, "an eight-year showcase of a healthy and successful black family spanning three generations," and shown "black people's everyday, extraordinary Americanness" (295-96). The Obamas had done this extraordinary thing in the face of harsh attacks from White people who felt the Obamas’ excellence threatened their racial privilege.

Coates completed a series of interviews with the Obamas in the lead-up to this farewell. During one conversation, Coates told Barack Obama that he thought Trump’s candidacy reflected White fear of Obama’s success. Obama dismissed this idea, and he had to because his presidency was built on "an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people" (299). His politics gained him the presidency, but they made him blind to the appeal of Trump.

Coates was in the White House despite his consistent critiques of Obama’s use of "black self-hectoring" (299)—Obama’s use of his connection with Black people to critique their flaws. Coates’s writing on Obama (including in this collection) includes frequent critiques of Obama’s decision to appeal to hope and change instead of protest in confronting White supremacy and racism. Obama’s appeal was more akin to that of Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, charismatic presidents who tapped America’s more aspirational story instead of acknowledging the tragedy of White supremacy.

Coates argues that Obama “conflat[ed] the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him” (301). Coates concedes that Obama had few other paths to the White House. His unwillingness to label White supremacist attacks on him for what they were hampered his policy agenda, with the result that the president didn’t go as far as he could have on criminal justice reform, for example. Obama’s biggest positive impact is that for eight years, young people came of age in a country in which a Black man was the president, the racially oppressive nature of the government notwithstanding.

Coates argues that Obama was primed to emphasize the more hopeful notes in the American story by his life story, which is far out of the mainstream for most Black Americans according to the details in his memoir Dreams From My Father (1995). Obama had white grandparents. They accepted his Black father with few qualms, and they told Obama that he was Black (not biracial). They loved him and nurtured him, especially after Barack Obama, Sr., left the family. Obama’s mother thought Blackness was good and hip, and Obama internalized this attitude. Obama also had the unusual experience of choosing Blackness as a teen, when basketball allowed him to connect with the Black male figures he lacked.

In most Black autobiographies, Black identity is not a choice, and being Black comes with severe spatial limitations on where one can and cannot go. Recognizing one’s Blackness in these works is usually traumatic. Obama experienced none of this. He saw being bound in Black spaces like Chicago, where he embraced community activism after college, as being rooted, something he lacked as a child. In Chicago, Obama gave himself over fully to the work of securing the freedom of his chosen racial community. This choice, and his decision to marry a Black woman when many successful, high-profile Black male figures choose not to, secured him a great deal of credit with Black Americans during his 2008 run for the presidency. His grandparents’ ready acceptance of him and his father meant that Obama’s attitude towards White people was not one of automatic suspicion, and White people recognized and loved this about him.

Coates next examines what Obama did with the federal power he gained in becoming president. Obama’s record on issues of note to Black Americans is not impressive. Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program, a “quintessentially Obama program—conservative in scope, with impacts that are measurable” (315), ignored the negative impact of White supremacy and poverty on Black Americans. Coates cites Obama’s commencement speech at Morehouse, an elite Historically Black College, to note that Obama, like Cosby, engaged in black self-hectoring by calling out supposedly pathological Black behavior, with no acknowledgement of the documented impact of White supremacy on Black Americans. Obama, like many progressives, instead has chosen to embrace colorblind policies.

Obama opposes reparations, but during one interview with Coates, he expressed a willingness to explore the idea. What America needs instead, Obama believes, is a cultural shift to anti-racism; Obama believes the country is simply not ready to own up to its plunder, however, and also believes that actual reparation programs in places like India have failed.

Coates concludes that Obama’s theory of governance is based on consensus. Obama is thus unwilling to support policies unless he feels the country has reached a consensus on the issue.

Obama’s reticence on these issues led to sharp criticism from Black Lives Matter activists, as Coates documents by including quotes from interviews with these critics. When Coates asked Obama about these critics, Obama seemed hurt and frustrated. He believed that these activists had an inflated sense of his power as a president. When Coates argued that the country must reckon with its plunder to make progress, Obama discounted Coates’s premise. Obama believes the focus must be on concrete results. He even asked Coates to imagine how much better off the country would be in an America in which race-neutral policies benefitted both Black and White people. Coates reminded Obama how such programs inevitably perpetuated racism.

Obama’s belief in the goodness of White people has been his blind spot, according to Coates. Republicans played brutal politics by using racist attacks on him to regain control of Congress, but Obama never labeled the attacks as such or built a governing coalition to overcome it. Coates quotes research to show that racial animus was at work in this inability to build a big enough coalition in Congress, even among Democrats, Obama’s supposed allies. The turn in the Obama presidency came after critics attacked Obama for relatively mild comments on the ridiculousness of Henry Louis Gates’s arrest as he tried to enter his own home after locking himself out.

From then on, Obama’s statements on anything remotely related to race were carefully calibrated and focused on specific policy aims. Far from ending racist attacks, this more conservative approach seemed to embolden his racially motivated critics, culminating in the Tea Party movement and open revolts against federal authority. Racist comments about Obama in the emails of the Ferguson Police Department, Trump’s birther attacks on Obama, and voter suppression followed. Coates quotes research from political scientists to show that racial animus, not White, working-class economic anxiety, is the cause of these attacks.

Coates shifts gears to a more personal perspective on the significance of the Obama presidency and Trump’s election. Coates remembers how hopeful and proud the country felt in 2008 with the election of Obama. Even White people were proud, but that pride seems to have been for the man, not for his racial community. The election of Trump was “the awful price of a black presidency” (335). Hillary Clinton was no Obama and would never have won the nomination if she were a Black candidate with the same flaws. Trump had only “money and white bluster” to recommend him (336). That two such flawed people would be the only options makes obvious how White supremacy was at work: Obama had to be exemplary to gain the same chance at the presidency.

When Trump won, Coates saw that old pattern of America having brief moments of supposed progress followed by White supremacist backlash and reversion to its tragic racial history. America, even during the Obama years, was always that same racist country, a fact brought home to Coates when he became aware, just before his final interview with Obama, that the FBI had kept a file on his father. Coates asked Obama about the dangers posed to Black activists under a Trump administration, which would have powerful and frightening tools at their disposal for the surveillance of these activists.

Obama seemed unconcerned because he believed in checks and balances. Coates was less sanguine as he watched Trump appoint an Islamophobe to his security council and an attorney general with a history of cracking racist jokes. Despite these looming threats, Coates remembers how hopeful he felt as he saw the Obamas succeed against all odds.

Coates’s central thesis is that Donald Trump, as the first president in a post-Obama America, is the first to use explicit appeals to White supremacy to win the presidency. Trump has a long history of explicitly racist acts, yet pundits insisted that there was no ideology behind the racist appeals he used in his campaign. Trump has nothing to recommend him beyond his Whiteness and his wealth, and Coates asks the reader to imagine a Black man with the same lack of qualifications trying to run for president. That anyone would consider him remotely qualified is evidence of the influence of White supremacy on the 2016 election.

Commentators who insist on pointing to working-class economic anxiety as the deciding factor are ignoring the obviousness of racial animus in the election. Trump ran as a Republican, the party that had been cultivating White racial animus for decades. That Black working-class voters did not go in large numbers for Trump is proof of the impact of racial appeals. White supremacy is “the bloody heirloom” that neither liberals nor conservatives want to own in the outcome of the election (347).

The liberals are eager to blame PC (politically correct) culture and Democratic ineptitude in appealing to the working class as causes, but Coates points out that the bargain whereby White working-class voters affiliate with affluent White voters on the basis of race is an old one. From America’s beginnings, the White ruling class used racial alliance to tamp down White working-class agitation over economic inequality. Coates provides numerous examples, including the stark contrast between responses to the crack epidemic and the opioid epidemic, to show that White supremacy across class lines is an enduring and central part of American politics.

The Old South may be gone, but its politics are not. In more modern politics, there is this myth of the virtuous and industrious White working class and the lazy, pathological Black working class. The “raceless anti-racism” of centrists like Hillary Clinton and leftists like Bernie Sanders also has its roots in these myths about the White working class and is an impediment to redressing the impact of White supremacy on Black Americans (354). Hillary Clinton and her surrogates—the men she beat for the nomination—relied upon the myth of the virtuous working class in her appeals to them, but they never got around to extending these appeals to the Black working class.

What Trump got that Hillary did not is how potent a political tool White identity politics rooted in White supremacy is. Coates sees Trump as an existential threat to the United States. His explicitly White supremacist appeals leave the US open to manipulation by hostile foreign powers such as Russia. His ripping away of the restraint of civility in political discourse around race leaves the country vulnerable to any demagogue who wields the same tool.

Everyone, including White people and the rest of the world, is in danger as a result. Trump’s critics are unwilling or unable to name what he is and what he is doing because doing so would require critics to admit that they, too, are beneficiaries of American plunder of Black people. America, including the resistance, can only survive by being willing to engage in a ruthless self-examination of America’s plunder at home and abroad.