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babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 10/10

Where to even start. This book has been on my bookshelf for a year or two, but considering the state of the country for the last couple of months, I decided it was high time I stopped putting it off and read this book. I'm sure that if it hasn't happened already, many a dissertation will be written someday including the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He received the most attention from his book "Between the World and Me," published before this book, but it was the essays collected here that built up to and refined the direction he wanted to take and what he wanted to say. Written over the eight years of former-President Obama's two terms, I could see the evolution and improvement of his writing from these essays originally published at "The Atlantic." Fact-filled and gut-punching in turns, the height of these essays were those written in years 6 and 7, "The Case for Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration." I tried and failed to make it through the former without weeping. While I usually dislike dog-earing, there was a lot of that in this book at many a good point made throughout the book.<br/><br/>Time and again the essays make points which he neatly summarizes in the epilogue, the oft-discomfiting truths around racism and time and again the betraying behavior of white people. From the founding of the country to the cessation of the Civil War to the undoing of everything gained in Reconstruction to the pandering of the last 30 years towards POC while doing the same old same old. It's always about not making white people feel bad about themselves, to have others essentially be below them as punching bags or at the very least not be allowed to feel too uncomfortable because there's others worse off - even if it's not ever acknowledged by even supposed allies. When the rubber hit the road, always POC have been thrown under the bus, excuses made villifying POC and blaming their problems on them. When something happens to POC, well, that's just natural, Coates argues. But heaven forbid it happens to a white person, now it's a horror, a tragedy, something must be done! "Black workers suffer - if it can be called that - because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels that, for blacks, society simply accepts as normal. White slavery is sin. N[-----] slavery is natural."<br/><br/>Finally, I think another sad thing for me was the insight Coates brought to the view of the world by Obama. He kind of talked around a point I've often made in that while so many refer to Obama as the first Black president, he's really an acceptably biracial man, raised by and completely surrounded by white people, bubble-wrapped from the worst behaviors towards Black people in his formative years by family who never saw him or treated him as less-than. That made his personality into someone palatable to just enough of the majority and reinforced his view that (white) people aren't that bad. It's why, despite evidence to the contrary, once he got into the halls of power he just kept trying to work with a bunch of old white men who had zero desire to view him that way and were always going to act in bad faith towards anything and everything Obama had to say or wanted to do. And then when it came down to the wire before the election of Trump, still he believed that there was no way Trump would win. His eternal optimism that surely what Coates refers to as "the blood heirloom" of white politics wasn't going to turn into the usual backlash that's followed any time POC have made progress. I can only imagine what Obama thinks now after all the racism and white supremacy reigns supreme in government and in the streets. No wonder, despite only being 59, he looked an old man giving the eulogy at John Lewis' funeral. It's all been laid bare and everything with his name on it torn to shreds. I wonder how his faith in Americans is holding up.<br/><br/>If you don't already have a copy of this book, get one and read it yesterday.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere