As I read Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, I found myself taking notes anytime he wrote about racism in a way that I considered important, interesting, or novel. Today’s post collects a few of the notes that stood out to me when I was preparing to write about this aspect of his work.
Regular readers will recall that one of my recent posts about this book centered on Barack Obama. In the context of how racism influenced his Presidency, Coates notes that one way racists coped with the reality of a black President was by denying Obama his blackness. He also points out that Obama appealed to the country by seeming to suggest that the country’s historical errors regarding race were due to the malevolence of a small minority of racists, an approach that underscores a certain white innocence about the brutality of the country’s history.
I also wrote a general post about this book that pointed out the straightforward and cliché-free manner of Coates’s writing. The way he writes about racism exemplifies this method. One example is how he cites research showing that a white person with a criminal record is sometimes as likely to get a job as a black person without a record. He also challenges the narrow interpretation some have of patriotism, asking why people talk about America’s history of freedom without considering our foundations as a slave economy. I like the simple manner he uses to raise these details because it forces readers to consider their own thinking without challenging them in a way that encourages hiding behind existing positions, identities, or affiliations.
The thought that made the biggest lasting impression on me was his description of how social policy affected land values in certain neighborhoods where an unwelcome black homeowner moved in. In short, Coates describes how the wrong combination of laws and systems has come together to drive down the value of certain properties regardless of how the landowner feels about the new black neighbor. This situation would often force all homeowners, bigoted or otherwise, to resist anything that might upset the homogeneity of their neighborhoods because such changes would lead to a reduction in land value. The idea gets at what I consider the most important policy level question about racism – how do we organize and run our cities and towns so that people are not being asked to choose between what is best for their families and what reinforces the systemic racism built into our policies and institutions?
