Can This Country Be Saved?

TA-NEHISI COATES is an atheist, but in We Were Eight Years in Power he atones for sin. In a 2008 article about Bill Cosby for The Atlantic, Coates failed to thoroughly report on the sexual assault allegations brought against the comedian, only mentioning them briefly. On page 12 of We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates repents. “That was my shame,” he writes. “That was my failure. And that was how this story began.”

By “this story,” Coates means his ongoing career as a correspondent for The Atlantic, during which he has received a MacArthur genius grant, a National Magazine Award, and several other honors for his writings on race in America. Coates is one of the nation’s most popular living chroniclers of the plight of African Americans. But despite that, he is acutely aware of his failings.

We Were Eight Years in Power is both a collection of Coates’ best articles published by The Atlantic and criticism of those pieces. Prefacing most of the articles are short essays by Coates about the stage of life he was in when he wrote each article, the pieces’ triumphs, and their flaws. With sometimes savage specificity, the essays map the evolution of Coates’ writing skills as well as his personal foibles. At the same time, the articles themselves document the flaws of the United States and how the country consistently does wrong by its African-American citizens in favor of doing more than right by its white citizens.

Coates’ writing process is a metaphor for the social corrective he pursues: the abolishment of white supremacy. As a writer, Coates confronts on his laptop what he calls “the blank white page”—an area devoid of blackness except for a blinking cursor. With his words, he eliminates the page’s identity as a homogeneous space and partially carves away our nation’s status as a place dominated by whiteness.

But there may not be a greater challenge to such a quest than the election of Donald Trump, whose campaign was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and whose presidency seems hell-bent on eviscerating the legacy of his predecessor, the first black president of a country that once enslaved Africans. For the egregious moral failing that is Trump’s occupancy of the White House, Coates blames many people, including, surprisingly, himself.

“I am trying to remember that the best can happen to you in one moment and the worst can happen to your country in the next, and even still you can allow yourself to forget, get lost in your own story and forget that this really is chaos,” Coates writes as though he is a white liberal American who was shocked by Trump’s win. “I think we all should have known better.” In We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates notes that he and President Obama—two men whose job it was to keep their fingers on the pulse of America—failed to properly gauge Trump’s chance of winning.

“The challenge of writing,” Coates said in a video for the MacArthur Foundation, “is to see your horribleness on the page, to see your terribleness, and then to go to bed and wake up the next day and take that horribleness and that terribleness and refine it, and make it not so terrible and not so horrible.”

We Were Eight Years in Power is Coates’ look at both his “terribleness” and the horribleness of our nation. He knows he can refine himself—his book is proof of his immense growth as a writer, from the start of his career to now—but it remains to be seen whether America’s politics will also mature.

If racism is America’s original sin, there is a lot of atoning our nation must do. Coates may be an atheist, but his good works point our country in the direction of a confessional. I hope America will step inside and own up to every wrong it has ever done.