Book Review — We Were Eight Years in Power

The 2016 presidential election left millions of Americans in shock and awe of how Donald J. Trump could become president. Millions of Americans are still wondering how Trump has not been impeached and remains in power. The answer to how Trump could follow Obama’s presidency is laid out in critical analysis in a new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent for The Atlantic, winner of the National Book Award, and a fellow of the MacArthur Genius Grant brings audiences his new book, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.”

The book is made up of eight essays he published in The Atlantic during Barack Obama’s administration. Coates provides justified praise for the Obamas, and uses the book to marvel at how seemingly impossible it was for Obama to become a two-term president.

The book approaches the Obama presidency from both a cultural and political standpoint. Coates frames what Obama’s legacy could and could not do for black people. He praises the Obamas for being able to remarkably stretch the imagination of what it means to be black in America: “the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also — biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan,” Coates writes.

Coates reflects on the simple blessing of having a black president because it validated being black at the world’s highest office.

In the book’s final essay, “My President Was Black,” Coates describes the sentiment of the first black president leaving the office. He writes that with the Obamas “represented the best of black people, the ultimate credit to the race.”Although the Obamas both represented and redefined what a black family in America could be during their eight years in the White House, Coates communicates that Obama’s presidency did nothing in truly stopping racism in America.

Obama’s presidency and his status as a highly accomplished black man provoked fear in many white Americans. A large theme throughout this book is how valuable, yet threatening, it can be to be black in America.

There are moments the reader can understand why Coates is so interested in the idea of race and why he doesn’t believe that there is a natural arc of the universe that ultimately bends toward justice. Coates is highly concerned with tragedy. He mentions that Obama’s presidency was in some ways very beneficial and inspiring to black people and other Americans.

The book harps on the strange dichotomy of being black in America being vital to the foundation of the nation’s history, yet hated.

Coates mentions Michelle Obama saying, “I wake up everyday in a house built by slaves.”

Coates makes it poignant that the history of America is largely the history of the black struggle and the general fear among white people of black understanding that worth, or striving to reach for power.

Coates also comments on the Trump presidency’s stark contrast to Obama, although he is not shocked by Trump’s rise. The reader suddenly understands why he subheads the book with “An American Tragedy.”

That tragedy is laid out in the book’s epilogue, “The First White President,” a recent Atlantic article that claims Trump’s ease to reach the presidency is at large due to the election of a black man.

Trump’s political campaign — largely run on white supremacy, Islamophobia, racism and sexism — was responsible, and ultimately passable, in America’s eyes due to Trump’s whiteness.

This book is for any reader interested in understanding what Obama’s impact had in the White House and where we as Americans go from here.