We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Coates remembers talking with Barack Obama over lunch about Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency. They both foolishly believed Trump had no chance. Looking back at the covert and explicitly racist attacks on Obama, Coates thinks they should have been able to predict that Trump could win. The essay that follows, “My President Was Black,” is Coates’s effort to pick apart their strange blindness to the lure of Trump for America.

Everyone was eager to write a feature piece on Obama and race in 2015. By then, Coates was positioned to get the access to Obama he would need to write such a piece. Between the World and Me had raised his profile. He had gained control over the genre of the essay. His work on the blog had given him a viewpoint, one in which White plunder of Black Americans was at the center of his understanding of the American experiment. His harsh criticism of Obama posed some impediment to getting access to the president, but not enough to make that lunchtime conversation with Obama impossible.

Coates closes the note with a re-articulation of his commitments as a writer in the tradition of defiant rappers and truth tellers like Baldwin.