We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy QUOTES

1 " The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

2 " Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

3 " And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now—my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

4 " There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

5 " The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

6 " One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness—the black gangster, the black rioter—that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract—The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

7 " I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

8 " It did not occur to me that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

9 " The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest—$75 billion in today’s dollars—and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country’s exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the estates of large planters loomed. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

10 " For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

11 " The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

12 " But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

13 " Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

14 " and I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

15 " The focus on one sector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony, the bloody heirloom remains potent—even after a black president, and, in fact, strengthened by the fact of the black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of the country’s political life. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

16 " The tightly intertwined stories of the white working class and black Americans go back to the prehistory of the United States—and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of the other goes back nearly as long. Like the black working class, the white working class originates in bondage—the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery, the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In their early seventeenth-century primordial state, these two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by the eighteenth century the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution. From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged—the descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

17 " culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

18 " For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: The Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

19 " I was not always a believer in reparations. I’d read TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson’s work on the subject in the late ’90s, which convinced me that the negative conditions of black people were tied to the fact of slavery and that recompense for that crime made sense in the broadest way. But like most people who agreed with the idea in principle, I thought it was a wildly impractical solution. Some years later I read Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson’s history of the suburbs and the cities they ringed. I remembered the bracing section on how black families had been cut out of the FHA loan program and thus excluded from much of the suburban housing development in the postwar years. Jackson argued that there was a link between the impoverished cities where black people lived and the relatively affluent suburbs where they did not, and the link was neither mystical nor natural but was the knowable actions of our government. I knew that housing was a great source of the wealth for American families. So was the gap in wealth between black and white families tied to this government action? "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

20 " Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on in our politics today. Black workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn. Op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the sympathetic plight of working class whites when their life expectancy approaches levels that, for blacks, society simply accepts as normal. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy