We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

We Were Eight Years in Power is ostensibly an essay collection about issues of note in America’s racial politics from 2008 to 2016, the years during which Barack Obama ran for and served as America’s first Black president. On the other hand, the book, especially the notes, is a writer’s memoir of the influences, historical context, and artistic lineage that shaped his writing. The main influences on Coates’s craft are exemplary Black men—Malcolm X, hip-hop artists like Chuck D, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama. In Malcolm X, Coates found a proclamation of self-love and the right to create new Black identities that shaped multiple generations in his family and community. In hip-hop, Coates found just the right attitude of defiance and commitment to telling the truth that he needed to claim his autonomy as a writer. Hip-hop’s focus on the importance of rhythm in language shaped Coates’s aesthetic, and one can see the strong presence of hip-hop in essay titles and Coates’s evidence (“My President Was Black” is a play on a line from a Young Jeezy song, for example).