We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

“I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates

This was my pick for "a book you’ve been intimidated to read."  For a long time, I couldn't bear to look back at the tragedy of Obama giving way to Donald Trump. I still can't read about the 2016 election.  The pain is still too raw; even with Joe Biden now being in the White House, the spectre of Trump still lingers. But I got this book, a paperback copy no less, and decided this would be the one.

This is a collection of Coates's Atlantic essays, one each for the eight years of the Obama presidency, with an introduction contextualizing the essay, ruminating on what Coates wishes he might have done differently and the impact each essay had on his career . The Wikipedia page links to the essays themselves. My favorite was "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" and I also thought "The First White President" (presented as an epilogue) was illuminating. It punctures the myth of the "white working class" that we (white people) like to "blame" for Trump.  

Coates published this in 2017, a dark time for the country, and it ends in a place of semi-despair. (Even before we knew how very bad Trump would be, how close we came to outright fascism, how many people would die in a pandemic.) I would like to believe that Coates despairs a little less now. He criticizes Joe Biden's prison policies a lot, for example, but Biden has put racial justice at the center of his agenda in a way that I am not sure Coates would have predicted in 2017.

Nonetheless, this was a confronting and frankly depressing read, and it took me a while to get through it.  I'm going to read What White People Can Do Next and try to focus on the continued resistance that, as Coates says, must be in some respects its own reward.