Almost two decades after Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton America’s “first black President”, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pulitzer-winning author and writer with The Atlantic, finishes off his new book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy , a most eagerly awaited fall title, by calling Donald Trump his country’s “first white President”. And to understand the difference that these two labels bookend is to get an understanding of not just issues of identity very specific to the United States but also how power and exclusion are playing out in a wave of populism currently sweeping many democracies worldwide.
White, black presidents
In a blog post in 2015, Coates would explain what Morrison meant, and didn’t, by that label: “Clinton isn’t black, in Morrison’s rendition, because he knows every verse of Lift Every Voice and Sing , but because the powers arrayed against him find their most illustrative analogue in white supremacy.” Similarly, he now explains the title of the epilogue to We Were Eight Years in Power , “The First White President”, and it’s impossible to not quote it at length: “It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness — that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred it for others. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars… Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that… all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump — a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.”
Over the past decade, Coates has been a foremost commentator on issues of race, with his journalism and his 2015 book Between the World and Me written as a letter to his teenage son about being black in America. The bulk of the new book, however, is made up of essays published in The Atlantic , but made in the compilation into something altogether more powerful than those individual parts by adding long introductions to each one. They are articles written “during the first black presidency” (that is, the Barack Obama years), and the accompanying introductions to each put the essays in the context of both when they are written and what subsequently transpired. But they also track Coates’s evolution as a writer.
In fact, Coates suggests that the fact of the rise of Obama in the aughts compelled not only his own evolution as a writer/journalist, but of a whole “crop of black writers”. It was Obama’s “presence” that brought questions about identity centrestage. There was a sense of being at a transformative moment: “It is not that I logically reasoned out that Obama’s election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my lifetime.”
In fact, while introducing “My President was Black”, based on an extensive interview with Obama in the last months of his presidency, Coates recalls: “He can’t win. This is what the President of the United States told me when we first spoke about Donald Trump.” How it turned out otherwise is for Coates not simply a matter of a prediction having gone wrong, but of failing to realise all along that a pushback could come. In Between the World and Me , he wrote of the need for young black men “to be always on guard” — or in the current context of always being alert that, as he writes in the introduction of the new book, “in the collective sense, what this country (the U.S.) really fears is black respectability”.
Struggle for a just society
This is a book charged with rage, anger, regret, introspection. It couldn’t be otherwise if one draws the arc from that hopeful November day in 2008, when Obama, with his family who’d continue to reach for their better selves in their eight subsequent years in the White House, delivered his victory speech at Chicago’s Grant Park, a moment when the rest of the world too stopped in its tracks to inhale the optimism. That arc has now twisted to this statistic: Trump led his Democratic rival across practically every white demographic, so that: “According to Mother Jones , based on pre-election polling data, if you only tallied the popular vote of ‘white America’ to derive the 2016 electoral votes, Trump would defeat (Hillary) Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a ‘toss-up’ or unknown.”
The crux, as he writes elsewhere, is that in the struggle for a just society resistance “must be its own reward”. That, in the end, is as much a sign of hope as it is a statement of an “American” — or any other — tragedy.
