WHY DO SO FEW
BLACKS STUDY
THE CIVIL WAR?
Notes From the
Third YearMY PRESIDENT
WAS BLACK,
Notes From the
Eighth YearFEAR OF A BLACK
PRESIDENT, Notes
From the Fifth YearIllustrations on the book’s endpapers represent each of Coates’ essays
106 TIME October 23, 2017Time OffReviews
THE SYMBOLISM IN TA-NEHISI COATES’ NEW BOOK,
We Were Eight Years in Power, runs cover to cover, starting with
the binding materials. The book’s endpapers, that wallpaper
glued to the inside cover, are both adhesive and cohesive,
serving as a visual table of contents and tone-setting allegory.
The design is toile, the whitest of white-bread decor,
a textile steeped in colonialism and cotton. Coates chose
illustrator Dan Funderburgh’s subversion of the traditional
form to complement other historical allusions (including
the cover design, which Coates wanted to reference the
autobiography of Frederick Douglass). Then there’s the word
itself—toile.Ane away from “work.”
Eight Years is about the work of black people, and the
striving and strife they have lived through in America, and
is based on eight columns that Coates wrote for theAtlantic,
one to represent each year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
“Obama was the realization of generations, a black ambition
as old as this country.” But what was the price? Coates
wonders. TheAtlantic columns are enriched with personal
memoir, and a stocktaking, as Coates takes the reader through
his own life and reflects on how the columns relate to the
present. Now things seem to be slipping scarily back into
the past under Trump, whom Coates has dubbed our “first
white President.” Obama isn’t so much a subject as a lens.The titular eight years are from
a quote by a South Carolina
Congressman reflecting on
the brief egalitarian respite of
Reconstruction, progress that
eventually fell victim to racist
backlash.THESE ARE THEMESthat
Coates has explored through-
out his career as a “Black
writer,” a mantle that he had
been hesitant to adopt but that
eventually became a calling—
one for which readers of all
races should be grateful. “The
notion that writing about race,
which is to say, the force of
white supremacy, is marginal
and provincial is itself parcel
to white supremacy, premised
on the notion that the foun-
dational crimes of this coun-
try are mostly irrelevant to its
existence.” The notion that
reading about race is similarly
marginal seems disastrous too.
It is foundational to our na-
tional identity. Which is why
Coates says Trump’s race sig-
naling makes him America’s
“most dangerous President—
and made more dangerous still
by the fact that those charged
with analyzing him cannot
name his essential nature, be-
cause they too are implicated
in it.”
No race or gender is a
monolith—just ask the women
who voted for Trump—and
Coates has detractors, most
recently and vociferously
Thomas Chatterton Williams,
who wrote in the New York
Times that Coates “fetishizes”
race, giving whiteness power.
But for those of us who would
like not to be complicit in a
backward-lurching culture, we
can’t “privilege the appearance
of knowing over the work of
finding out,” to borrow an
eloquent Coatesian turn. I’m
ready to do the work. □NONFICTIONTa-Nehisi Coates speaks
truth inPower
By Claire Howorth△
ANOTHER
COUNTRY
The book follows
Coates’ 2015
polemic,Between the
World and Me, which
won the National
Book Award