I was trying to think of what thought or theme, if anything, best tied together this collection of Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s essays from the eight years of the Obama administration. As I was reviewing my notes, I came across this thought – honest writing is threatened at every moment by clichés and truisms – and I realized that Coates had given me the answer at some point in this remarkable work.
The theme is evident in so many ways throughout the pieces that make up this collection. He defines, for example, the problem of mass incarceration by simply noting that we jail more people than China despite being one-fourth its size. He does so again when he explains the Civil War – the death of two percent of our nation because part of the country wanted to continue owning other people. He reflects the same theme in subtler examples, such as when he describes the importance of asking for clarification instead of simply nodding along whenever we are uncomfortable with our own ignorance. Throughout the collection, Coates lives up to his thought by avoiding the clichés and truisms that would give away the power of his words and threaten the honesty of his writing.
The intent of this writing style is to create a work of art – as he himself notes in one passage, art’s responsibility is to reflect the world in all its truth. When done well, art rejects the world’s lies and replaces myth with reality. This collection, by its own definitions, is a true work of art, one that captures how the country balanced and juggled its failures, contradictions, and dreams during the most astonishing time of its history – the era of a black president.
