We Were Eight Years in Power summary

In 2008, the year of Obama’s election, the author was filled with euphoria. Had racism finally been banished from the face of the earth? Was this the end of white supremacy?

At the time, such achievements seemed possible, and it was in this climate that the author got an assignment from the Atlantic magazine to do a profile on Michelle Obama. However, as he heard her story, he was surprised.

After Barack Obama took the presidency, intellectuals began proclaiming the death of the Republican Party. Mired in white resentment, conservatism was supposed to drown as people of color flocked to liberalism. However, these intellectuals failed to recognize the deep roots of white supremacy in American society.

For the author, studying the American Civil War clarified this long history and the centrality of slavery to America as a country. Commonly, we’re told that slavery was an early American sin, that it belongs to the past, and that America has moved forward toward the liberal, democratic ideal.

To this day, the human rights activist and American Muslim minister Malcolm X is an enigma. Initially rising to public notice as a flat-out criminal, he eventually became a military ascetic; he walked the line between religious dogma and an open mind. In his later years, he was even as contradictory as to espouse both socialism and capitalism. How can such a paradoxical figure be pinned down?

Well, whatever conflicting claims can be made about Malcolm X, one thing is certain: he played a key role in the shaping of African-American consciousness.

Before Obama was elected president, the thought of a Black president of the United States was a recurring joke. For instance, the comedian Dave Chappelle once said that a Black president needed to have a “Vice-President Santiago” because only with a Hispanic president ready to fill the Oval Office could a Black president survive assassination.

Given the seeming impossibility of the accomplishment, Barack Obama’s election was, of course, a major victory for Black Americans. Obama had realized the collective dream of generations, a dream that was as old as the country itself. He had interrupted the seemingly never-ending streak of white presidents that spelled out the white domination of US political power. In the process, Obama instilled a new confidence in Black America. Black parents could tell their children that they could accomplish whatever they wanted and know it was true.

In summer 2014, the author published an article in the Atlantic called “The Case for Reparations.” While the demand might appear outlandish, the author argues that there’s just cause to consider compensating Black Americans for the racial atrocities of the past.

For starters, American wealth is founded on Black slavery. Yale historian David W. Blight says that, before the Civil War, American slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing, railroads and total productive capacity of the US.

Did you know that America’s incarceration rates have set a depressing record? With over 750 people out of every 100,000 in prison, the United States tops the charts for global incarceration rates, even surpassing autocratic countries like Russia and China.

But that’s not the only sad truth about incarceration in America: it’s also clearly racially charged. Black Americans are locked up at a far higher rate than whites.

Barack Obama is, if anything, a committed optimist. Before 2016, he never thought for a moment that a person like Donald Trump could be elected president. And even after Trump’s victory, Obama retained his sunny outlook for America’s future.

However, few Black Americans share this optimism. Rather, they are filled with a deep mistrust of white America. For Obama, there is no Black America and there is no white America either; he still believes in a truly United States of America.