In his new book, "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy," Ta-Nehisi Coates assesses Obama, Trump -- and his own evolution as a writer.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has published a collection of the major magazine essays he wrote throughout the Obama years, and the hits are all here: "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," "My President Was Black" and several more. You may have read most of them already — hasn't everyone? — as well as one or both of Coates's memoirs. If you're really up to date, you've also inhaled the book's epilogue, a savaging of President Trump's white-supremacist ideology "in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power," which appeared recently in the Atlantic, where Coates is a national correspondent.
It does far more than that. Together, these introspections are the inside story of a writer at work, with all the fears, insecurities, influences, insights and blind spots that the craft demands. There are two books here, really. Coates's Atlantic essays betray a growing disillusionment with America and with the possibilities of the Obama presidency; his more personal digressions show how the age of the first black president propelled Coates's career to unexpected heights, making him one of the most sought-after and overanalyzed interpreters of the era — the kind of fame, Coates realizes, that brings a severe risk of believing your own hype.
While Obama never sought the label of black candidate or black president, Coates reveled in his emergence as the Atlantic's black writer, "a phrase that described both my identity and my interests," he explains. "I did not feel pigeonholed in my role. I felt advantaged." His essay "Fear of a Black President," published in the midst of the 2012 campaign, lamented the inherent limits of the Obama revolution, charging that the president's acceptance in white America depended "not just on being twice as good but on being half as black." The piece won its author awards and devotees, but for Coates, it also prompted mixed emotions.
"All those years I had attempted to mix my influences — poetry, hip-hop, history, memoir, reportage — and produce something original and beautiful," he writes. "This was the first time I felt I succeeded, and more, felt I understood the how and why." At the same time, a question began nagging him. "Why do white people like what I write?" At least in these pages, he offers no definitive answer.
Even as they reveled in his indictment of American racism, Coates's expanding audiences begged him for hope. "What if there was no hope at all?" he wondered. "Sometimes, I said as much and was often met with a kind of polite and stunned disappointment." The Obama interpreter would not parrot the Obama mantra of hope and change, much less the notion that history's arc bends toward justice, that American exceptionalism meant a country ever striving toward that more perfect union. "The American story, which was my story, was not the tale of triumph but a majestic tragedy," Coates concludes. Not quite the bullet-point solutions expected of today's public intellectuals.
This work of deep reporting and seething understatement made Coates a literary star, and soon the writer once nervous about profiling Bill Cosby was trying to emulate James Baldwin. His publisher warned him that "the road is littered with knockoffs of The Fire Next Time," but still Coates tried, and the result was "Between the World and Me," which won the 2015 National Book Award.
I would have continued reading Coates during a Hillary Clinton administration, hoping in particular that he'd finally write the great Civil War history already scattered throughout his work. Yet reading him now feels more urgent, with the bar set higher. Early in this book, Coates writes that having the Obamas in the White House "opened a market" for him. Trump opens one, too.