We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Looking back, Coates wonders why he didn’t see the Trump presidency coming: Any period of seeming racial progress is always followed by White backlash, and the Obama presidency was no different.

Coates only recognized this enduring cycle because the third year of the Obama presidency coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, inspiring Coates to become a history buff. As he consumed information about the war, Coates realized that White supremacy was not an aberration in America’s identity; it is a central, defining element of the American “brand,” no matter how much popular sentiment about the war, for example, obscures the role of White supremacy in American history.

The periods of so-called progress have their own myths that reflect Americans’ desire to believe in a "progressive American history" in which the dominance of White supremacy is a temporary, hypocritical departure from America’s love of freedom (65). In the essay that follows, Coates argues that observers of American history have all misread Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Obama presidency as proof of an inevitable march to progress on issues of race.