We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates **** (of 4)

Coates selects an essay per year from his publications in The Atlantic to correspond to the eight years that Barack Obama served as America's first African American president.  Together the essays serve as a well-researched and devastatingly clear lesson on a country founded upon enslaved African labor and four hundred years of entrenched racism.  The cumulative power of the book is the tiny taste of what it must feel like to awake every morning with what white Americans consider colored skin.  Home ownership the single most common form of wealth accumulation in the U.S., has been systematically denied by banks, governments, and white neighbors.  Schools remain as segregated and unequal as ever.  Imprisonment of blacks, largely a function of mandatory drug sentencing, has removed a disproportionate of black men from society, while the opioid crisis, a scourge among whites, has drawn national hand wringing and lamentation.  Obama, the first black President, argues Coates, had to be twice as good, and run twice as fast, to get half as far as white Americans.  A Republican Congress set their sights on full obstruction of a successful black government.

America's first black President.

Coates does not shy from an argument and as a reader one gets the feeling that at times he is intentionally pushing the boundaries to raise a reaction, but that is OK with him.  His dismissal of black conservatives, for example, who argue that the solution to black empowerment lies with self-policing, dutiful parenting, and strict adherence to sound morays is problematic.  Coates is too insistent that structural racism and historical American bigotry overrides any attempts by black families to behave with greater character.  Where is the harm in working hard, applying oneself to education, and acting with pride and accountability?

Taken in pieces, We Were Eight Years in Power feels like it was thrown together quickly with the intention of a publication date corresponding to Trump's inauguration.  Some of the essays are redundant.  Taken as a whole, however, this book is a must-read for white Americans who have never had the opportunity to read the history of our country written not by its white ruling class, but by a descendent of women and men whose entire lineage can be traced to enslavement, enforced labor, and inescapable inequality imposed by nothing more than the darkness of their skin.

 One need only imagine the reaction of whites had Obama acted in any way like Trump to understand why blacks in America feel they need to be twice as good to get half as far.