To-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power (Book Review)

Ta-Nehisis collects 8 essays he wrote during the 8 years of the Obama presidency with contemporary introductions.

The shimmering Ms. Obama.  P. 45

The only way to dispel the mythology of the Civil War is thru the study of its true history.  P. 64

"The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth.  To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see that an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of American as a beacon of freedom.  How does one face the truth or forge a national identity out of it?  P. 64

I need to read Edmund Morgan's book about Virginia and how slavery made this country possible.  P. 66.

The rights of whites was seen as a function of the degradation of blacks.  P. 67

Enslavement provided for the basis of white prosperity.  P. 67

American history reaches out from the graves of millions.  Only radical action could make it right.  P. 69

One group of Americans tried to create a new country based on the concept of property in Negroes.  P. 73

Summary of the "Lost Cause."  The South didn't so much as lose as they were overpowered by superior numbers.  Robert E. Lee could do no wrong.  Slavery, though benevolent, was not a cause of the war.  The Lost mythology helped the North also by mitigating slavery's centrality in the cause of the war.  The Lost Cause also disguised the North's profit in cotton as well as the section's long historical record in appeasement and compromise with slavery.  P. 74-75

Many famous American historians downplayed slavery as a cause.  P. 75

The false claim that Lee was against slavery.  Though he once said that slavery was a "moral and political evil,"  he also said that there no sense in trying to do anything about it because slavery was in the hands of a wise and providential God.  P. 76

Contrary to Shelby Foote, the war was not the result of a tragic misunderstanding.  A compromise would have left 4 million people still enslaved.  P. 76

The Civil War was the world's first great defense.  The country will never apologize for slavery but will continue to apologize for the war.  P. 80

Faulkner's "southern boys" are all white.  P. 81

Reconstruction: the unwillingness to finish what the war started.  P. 82

"America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered."  P. 85

Gentrification is a more pleasing name for white supremacy.  P. 86

The complexity of the life and meaning of Malcolm X is beyond my understanding.  P. 93

Manning Marable's biography of Malcolm X.  P. 98

African Americans are used to half-wins.  P.116

Have working class white been tricked into voting against their interests?  How real is the liberal of uniting working class whites?  P. 154

The myth of the virtuous white working class.  P. 353

Coates is necessary though tough reading. I don't always follow his line of thought but I can say that he has his own way of thinking. The author and I come from completely different backgrounds. We agree on the fact that American history is the starting point for coming to grips with what is going on currently in our country. He makes a strong moral case for reparations though I agree with President Obama that other ways of dealing with the problem will have to suffice. Coates talks of his interactions with President Obama and gently chastises him for being naive thinking he could work with Republicans. What I appreciate most about Coates is his approach of grounding everything in American history. This is how I think also. He is pessimistic about our prospects, and I would agree. This country was founded and developed upon white supremacy. It has always been this way. The current situation flows naturally from 1619 thru the Civil War, Jim Crow, and Obama followed by Trump. Business as usual.