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jr3083
Oct 16, 2018jr3083 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This book is a compilation of long-form essays, one for each of the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Each essay is prefaced with a 2018-dated reflection on the article and the circumstances in which it was written. There is a dialogue going on at two levels: Coates explaining and challenging himself as author at an earlier time, and the laying out of an argument from author to reader in the essay itself. ... I don’t know whether Coates “grew into” himself as a writer, or whether there is a qualitative difference between the earlier essays in this book and the ones that came later. Perhaps the opening chapters were more current (at the time), or required a familiarity with Black History which I don’t have. For me, as a reader, the intensity of his writing really cranked up with his essay from the Fifth Year, ‘Fear of a Black President.’ This chapter was followed by his Atlantic cover story ‘The Case For Reparations’, which was awarded the George Polk Awards. Here, he demonstrates the structural basis of racism in passionate, logical, informed writing. He extends the argument into his Seventh Year article ‘The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration’. The final chapters reflect the sorrow that twenty-first century ‘eight years’ have led to Trump and such a vulgar reassertion of white supremacy. For this is just how Coates calls it – structural racism to bolster white supremacy – without any liberal loopholes.... These are excellent exemplars of the long form essay, running in some cases to over fifty pages in length. They show the shuttling of an argument from the personal to the political and back again, and the balancing of data and anecdote. For my complete review see https://residentjudge.com/2018/10/16/we-were-eight-years-in-power-an-american-tragedy-by-ta-nehisi-coates/