We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

We Were Eight Years in Power is ostensibly an essay collection about issues of note in America’s racial politics from 2008 to 2016, the years during which Barack Obama ran for and served as America’s first Black president. On the other hand, the book, especially the notes, is a writer’s memoir of the influences, historical context, and artistic lineage that shaped his writing. The main influences on Coates’s craft are exemplary Black men—Malcolm X, hip-hop artists like Chuck D, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama. In Malcolm X, Coates found a proclamation of self-love and the right to create new Black identities that shaped multiple generations in his family and community. In hip-hop, Coates found just the right attitude of defiance and commitment to telling the truth that he needed to claim his autonomy as a writer. Hip-hop’s focus on the importance of rhythm in language shaped Coates’s aesthetic, and one can see the strong presence of hip-hop in essay titles and Coates’s evidence (“My President Was Black” is a play on a line from a Young Jeezy song, for example). Equally important to Coates’s aesthetic is the work of James Baldwin, who used well-honed, beautiful language to reveal the ugliness of White supremacy and the power of Black culture.

Looming over all these artistic influences is Barack Obama. Coates repeatedly reminds the reader that his success as a writer came in part because of a sea change in American culture. During the Obama years, people were eager to learn more about the culture that produced Obama. For writers such as Coates, the Obama presidency created market conditions in which their writing was in demand. Coates admits throughout that he was lucky to have been around during this moment. This focus on historical context is one of the ways in which Coates undercuts the notion of meritocracy in politics or art as the surest way to achieve the American Dream. By applying this insight to his own career, Coates forces the reader to question their notions of what it takes to be a successful writer.

Alongside this pragmatic perspective on what allowed him to succeed is a more idealistic notion of the responsibilities of the Black artist. Coates envisions his writing as part of a lineage of Black writers such as Baldwin and of hip-hop produced by artists like Kendrick Lamar. In this aesthetic, the artist’s audience is primarily Black people, and White people are only a secondary audience that may learn some truths about America if they listen. In such a vision of art, the work should most certainly be well-crafted, but the writer’s ultimate responsibility is to serve the good of the community.

The good is not always to provide inspiration or hope. Instead, the writer’s job here is to bear witness to the enduring impact of White supremacy on Black Americans, to call out hypocrisy and White innocence where they see them functioning, and to do so with as much artistic skill as they can muster. Coates’s notion of the responsibilities of the Black writer is one that prioritizes neither the aesthetic nor the political poles of where the focus of the Black writer should be.

Who Coates is as a writer evolves over the course of the selections in the collection. In the first note, Coates is a struggling writer who has not quite found his voice. The early essays in the collection are less prone to include explicit condemnation of the figures he describes. In the second half of the collection, Coates marshals a wide range of sources to support his writing and makes strong, provocative arguments such as in his support for reparations and the notion of the carceral state as reparations gone wrong. The surest signal of his confidence in his voice as a writer is his increasingly critical take on Barack Obama’s racial politics. Coates fully comes into his own as a writer with the embrace of his concept of plunder.