We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

In the Introduction, Coates frames Black Americans’ participation in governing the United States during Reconstruction and the Obama presidency as “period[s] of Good Negro Government” (xv). White supremacists consistently misrepresent these eras to bolster their belief in inherent Black inferiority. Coates also explains the rationale behind the organization of the collection: Coates has included an essay from each year of the Obama presidency.

In 2007, the year leading up to the election of Barack Obama, Coates was unemployed and felt like a failure as a breadwinner and a writer. His state of mind was not improved by the consistent messages he received that his situation was due to a lack of effort. His fortunes improved when he got an assignment to write a piece on Bill Cosby for The Atlantic. This trajectory-changing assignment had little to do with hard work. It was luck, rather than that mythical “self-generated success” that Americans so love (7), that saved him. With growing interest in Obama, people and publications were more interested in hearing about matters of race, so there was a market for Coates’s work.

When Coates wrote the essay, what he aimed for was a critique of Cosby’s conservative racial politics.