We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Black leaders of the Reconstruction period bemoaned, "We were eight years in power," as the American experiment in multiracial democracy came to an end with the restoration of white supremacist control in the South. Ta-Nehisi Coates now examines the sad parallels between that past and the present, including the historic election of a black president and the ensuing violent response that helped support the candidate Coates claims is America's "first white president."

However, the tale of these last eight years reaches well beyond presidential politics. This book also looks at the fresh perspectives, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged during this time, as well as the lingering, unsettling legacy of our country's past that has yet to be resolved. From his personal and intimate point of view—that of a young writer who starts his trip in a Harlem unemployment office and finishes it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president—Coates compellingly analyses the events of the Obama period.

We Were Eight Years in Power includes eight new essays that examine each year of the Obama administration through Coates's personal experiences, observations, and intellectual growth. The collection is capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminates the tragedy of the Obama era. Coates's iconic essays, first published in The Atlantic, include Fear of a Black President, The Case for Reparations, and The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. One of the key voices of this historic time provides a crucial assessment of contemporary America in We Were Eight Years in Power.