Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is My Person of the Year

I have just finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ two enormously affecting and, I hope, effective books, Between the World and Me and We Were in Power for Eight Years: An American Tragedy.  I have spent my entire adult life, professionally and personally, searching for the meaning of the American cultural ethos, not so much what America is, but rather who America is.  I think Mr. Coates has given me the key to what I’ve been looking for.

After my experience with the feelings and ideas in the books, I had the urge to respond somehow, to agree with Toni Morrison’s insistence that “This is required reading”, to find people who had read them and sit and talk with those people about the experience.  But I couldn’t get started.  Not until December 6, 2017, when President Trump, demonstrating his unique version of the arrogance of ignorance, announced his willy-nilly decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, to declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, to mock the history of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority, to light the fuse that will enflame the Middle East…and to carry the torch of American arrogance of ignorance and hubris forward.  And in all of this, the American President resonates what has been the greatest of American traditions—what Coates calls the Dream, the plunder and the pillage—all exemplified in the portrait of one of his predecessors Trump apparently most admires, Andrew Jackson, who methodically removed an entire nation of Native Americans from their lands and incarcerated them in alien territories, prefiguring the similar fate of the Palestinian people.

This is the Dream, the stain of plunder and pillage that Coates delineates in both books.  Between the World and Me, a cautionary tutelage for his son, Samori, digs deeply into the African-American experience, how American “exceptionalism” transacts a conscious threat to the African-American physical body and the way that essential experience engenders a fear of imminent destruction and radiates communally from body to body, no matter how one has elevated one’s body in society or isolated one’s body from others, no matter one’s gender or status…it is the mark of one’s persistent and dreadful destiny. 

This destiny links inextricably with the destiny of the Dream, the exceptional exploitation of a virgin land and its indigenous people, using the raped and plundered people of Africa to accumulate wealth and land to build the Dream and foster the incredible acceptance of that Dream to believe it is justified actuality.

The fear for the body arrives in the hearts and minds of one’s parents before one’s birth, is the primary source of learning in and out of school, and remains forever.  And it is the foundational construct of the Dream, the inherent element of dominance carried forward in the pillage and plunder—from Jamestown and the Bay Colony to Charlottesville and the current White House.

The Dream is who Americans think they are and how they appear.  It is characterized by a spirit of presumption and deserving, buoyed by periodic injections of Hope, a Hope based in the assumption of the rights of pillage and plunder, of both animate and inanimate worldly entities.  It is a firmly implanted figment of the dominant Americans who believe it to be the fulfilling continuity of their providential destiny.  This figment functions as a gloss that covers the actions taken to assure that the Hope will materialize, a view of life a former colleague called America’s secularized “polite escape.”  Coates’s lesson for and embrace of his son forms a poetic prelude to his more schematic essay assessing Barack Obama’s ironic tenure as President within the bubble of the Dream with his audacity of Hope, and why it demonstrates the tragedy, not only for African American people but also for all Americans as they are.

We Were in Power for Eight Years clarifies 2008-2016 as a tragedy for America, mostly because the experience signifies the vanity of Hope as attempted by the first (and perhaps last) “black” president of the United States of America.  It is a tragic irony, because President Obama needed to believe and to convince the Dream that he was the necessary catalyst that would meld America into a positive and regenerative force for good in the world, especially for (as Coates says) the people who “call themselves white.”  Coates’s methodical examination and assessment of Obama the person and especially Obama the President is that (and Coates never put it in exactly these words) Obama spent his political life, beginning with his candidacy for senator, fighting a rear guard effort to neutralize the perception of him within the Dream as an outlier and/or “one of them.” 

Coates indicates this struggle in a variety of ways, but perhaps the incident of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s arrest for breaking-and-entering his own home pictures it most clearly.  Obama chastened the arresting officer by saying he “did something stupid,” a muted rebuff, the kind of thing parents might say to their children, something mild and harmless, where he might have accurately claimed “something outrageous.”  And Coates makes note; neither he nor the African American communities thought it was cute and harmless.  Then Obama invites the two men to join him at the White House for a “beer summit,” a press opportunity for the President, an adolescent male bonding over a mishap, which mostly brought a sigh of relief to the Democrats and a shivering shrug in the African American community.  This scenario put in bold relief the pardoning of the Dream’s strong arm, the causation of their fear of imminent harm. They were not amused.

Such was the middle ground and soft amelioration of the Obama Presidency, which, for Coates and for the rest of those living with that imminent fear, formed the cold realization of tragedy, the extraordinary feeling of having come so far so brightly only to set the table for something so terrible in its aftermath.  This feeling of tragedy in his latest book places Coates in the forefront of all the recent attempts to understand how such a thing as Trumpism not only could grasp the Presidency but could also capture the  society in a Congressional chokehold for the foreseeable future.  The tragedy for Coates is the dreadful fate for America.  For me, this makes him the essential contemporary voice of who America is.