Olivia: Most people think the fiercest opposition to Barack Obama was about his policies—healthcare, the economy, foreign affairs. But what if the real threat wasn't what he did wrong, but what he did right? Jackson: That’s a heavy thought. What do you mean, what he did right? Olivia: What if his competence, his dignity, his scandal-free administration, his beautiful family… what if that was the thing America just couldn't handle? Jackson: Whoa. That flips the entire narrative on its head. It suggests the problem wasn't the substance, but the symbol. Olivia: Exactly. And that's the devastating question at the heart of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Jackson: And Coates is the perfect person to tackle this. He won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for his work, and these essays, which were originally written for The Atlantic during the Obama years, give you this incredible real-time view of his thinking as history unfolds. It’s not a look-back; it’s like reading the diary of a national tragedy. Olivia: It is. He’s not just analyzing history from a safe distance; he's living through it, and you feel his own understanding evolving with each essay. It makes the book both intellectually rigorous and deeply, sometimes painfully, personal. He starts the eight years in a state of personal and professional struggle and ends it as one of the nation's most vital public intellectuals, all while the country is going through its own seismic shifts.

Olivia: And he frames this entire idea, the backlash to success, with a chilling historical parallel. He pulls the book's title from a quote by a Black congressman in 1895, during the rollback of Reconstruction. Jackson: Reconstruction, the period right after the Civil War. I feel like most of us have a pretty fuzzy memory of that from history class. Olivia: And Coates argues that’s intentional. He tells the story of Thomas Miller, a Black congressman in South Carolina, who stood before an all-white convention in 1895. This convention was designed to write a new state constitution that would effectively disenfranchise Black voters. Miller pleaded with them, not by talking about injustice, but by listing the achievements of the Black-led Reconstruction government. Jackson: So he was trying to prove their worth, basically. "Look at all the good we've done." Olivia: Precisely. He said, "We have built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system... We have reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity." He was making the case for what Coates, borrowing from W.E.B. Du Bois, calls "good Negro government." Jackson: And how did that go over? Olivia: It was completely ignored. They stripped Black citizens of the vote anyway. And this is Coates's core, counterintuitive point: Du Bois observed that South Carolina didn't fear "bad Negro government." What it truly feared was good Negro government. Jackson: Wow. Because if Black leaders were competent, successful, and effective, it would shatter the entire ideological foundation of white supremacy. Incompetence you can dismiss. Competence you have to destroy. Olivia: You have to destroy it. Because competence proves equality, and that was the one thing the power structure could not tolerate. The narrative of Black inferiority was essential to maintaining the hierarchy. So, they had to invent stories of corruption and failure to justify taking back power. Jackson: That is chilling. And you can draw such a straight, clean line from that 1895 convention to the Obama years. The "birther" conspiracy, the constant questioning of his faith, his patriotism, his intelligence... it wasn't about policy disagreements. It was a campaign to invalidate his legitimacy. Olivia: It was the modern version of the same playbook. It wasn't a response to Obama's failures; it was a response to his very presence, his very success. A two-term, scandal-free Black president with a respected family was a direct threat to a deeply embedded narrative about who is fit to rule in America. Jackson: It’s so tragic because it dismantles that whole "twice as good" philosophy that so many Black families have taught for generations. The idea that if you just work harder, speak more eloquently, and be more respectable, you'll overcome racism. Coates seems to be arguing that being "twice as good" might actually invite a more ferocious, more desperate backlash. Olivia: It’s the paradox at the heart of the book. The very thing that should prove your worth is interpreted as the greatest threat. And that threat isn't just political. Coates argues it's always been, at its core, about the money.

Jackson: Okay, so let's talk about the money. This is where his famous essay, "The Case for Reparations," comes in, right? It was a huge deal when it was published, and it’s probably what he’s most known for. Olivia: It is, and it’s the centerpiece of the book for a reason. To understand the backlash, you have to understand what Coates calls the "plunder economy." He argues that for centuries, American prosperity wasn't just coincidentally happening alongside racism; it was built on the direct, systematic theft of Black wealth, labor, and land. Jackson: Plunder is such a strong word. It’s not "disadvantage" or "inequality." It’s active theft. Olivia: It’s active, and he makes it devastatingly personal through the story of a man named Clyde Ross. This story is the anchor of the whole argument. Ross was born in Mississippi in the 1920s. His family was successful—they owned their land, had livestock, they were building a life. Jackson: Which was already a huge achievement for a Black family in Jim Crow Mississippi. Olivia: A monumental achievement. But the local white authorities decided they wanted the land. So they simply invented a $3,000 tax debt that the Ross family supposedly owed. There were no records, no due process. They just took everything—the land, the mules, the wagons. Everything. Clyde Ross watched his family’s wealth get stolen right in front of him. Jackson: That’s just… unbelievable. It’s pure banditry, sanctioned by the state. Olivia: Exactly. So Ross, like millions of others in the Great Migration, flees the South for a better life in the North. He ends up in Chicago, works hard, saves his money, and wants to buy a home—the American Dream. But in the 1950s and 60s, Black families were systematically denied normal, government-backed mortgages. The FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, would literally draw red lines around Black neighborhoods on a map and refuse to insure loans there. Jackson: This is "redlining." I've heard the term, but I don't think I've ever understood the mechanics of it so clearly. It wasn't just individual racist bankers; it was official government policy. Olivia: It was policy. So, with no access to legitimate loans, Black families were pushed into a predatory system called "contract buying." Speculators would buy a house in a white neighborhood for, say, $12,000. Then, as Black families moved in, they’d sell that same house to a family like Clyde Ross's for $27,000 on a contract. Jackson: Hold on. So they're paying more than double the price. What's the catch with the "contract"? Olivia: The catch is brutal. Under a contract, you build no equity. None. You are essentially a renter. And if you miss a single payment—for any reason—the seller can evict you and keep every penny you've ever paid them. They then sell the same house on contract to the next desperate family. Jackson: That is pure evil. It’s a system designed to extract every last dollar from a community and ensure they can never build wealth. It’s a trap. Olivia: It's a trap. And it's how entire neighborhoods like North Lawndale in Chicago, which were once thriving, were systematically drained of their wealth and turned into ghettos. So when Coates makes the case for reparations, he's not talking about some abstract sin from 200 years ago. He's talking about the stolen land in Mississippi. He's talking about the thousands of dollars stolen from Clyde Ross and his neighbors in Chicago, within living memory. Jackson: This makes the argument for reparations feel so much less theoretical. It's not about slavery in the 1800s; it's about the compounding interest on theft that happened to our parents' and grandparents' generations. Olivia: That's the power of his argument. He writes, "The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now. It’s because of then." The plunder is continuous. Jackson: And yet, this is his most controversial idea. It’s the one that gets the most pushback. Critics often say he’s too pessimistic, or that he’s only writing for a specific audience of "guilty white liberals." How do you square that criticism with a story like Clyde Ross's? Olivia: I think the resistance comes from what Coates himself points out: to truly accept the case for reparations, America would have to fundamentally rewrite its own national myth. It would have to admit that it's not a story of innocent progress, but a story where the prosperity of many is built on the deliberate, state-sanctioned plunder of a few. And that is a very, very difficult truth for a country to accept.

Jackson: So you have this political backlash to competence, and this deep, ongoing economic plunder. It feels like the book is building towards an unavoidable, tragic conclusion. And for Coates, that conclusion was the election of Donald Trump. Olivia: Absolutely. The final essays in the book grapple with this directly. And he tells this incredible story about a lunch he had with President Obama in the White House. Jackson: I can't even imagine what that conversation would be like. Olivia: Well, Coates describes it with his typical self-awareness. He’s nervous, he’s running late, he’s in jeans. But he and Obama have this long, candid conversation. And eventually, the topic of Donald Trump's candidacy comes up. This is in 2015 or 2016. Jackson: Right, when most people still thought it was a joke. Olivia: And that included them. Coates writes that he and Obama, two of the most insightful observers of race and politics in America, both basically dismissed Trump. Obama said it point-blank: "He can't win." Jackson: Wow. That's incredible. The very people who should have seen it coming were blinded by… what? Hope? A belief that the country had moved past that? Olivia: Coates seems to think it was a kind of faith in the arc of progress, a faith he himself was starting to lose. And this is where he makes his final, explosive argument. He says that Donald Trump is America's "first white president." Jackson: Okay, you have to explain that one. Weren't all the others, except Obama, white presidents? Olivia: Of course. But Coates draws a crucial distinction. He argues that previous presidents benefited from whiteness as a passive, implicit condition. It was the default, the norm. They didn't have to run on it. Trump, he argues, was the first president whose power was derived from an active and explicit appeal to white identity and white grievance. Jackson: So his entire political identity was constructed in opposition to the Black man who came before him. Olivia: Precisely. His political career was launched on the racist lie of birtherism. His rallies were fueled by a nostalgia for a time when white identity was unchallenged. Coates argues that Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again," was a direct response to the perceived threat of a Black president. The "again" was a promise to restore a racial hierarchy. Jackson: It’s the ultimate backlash. If a Black man can be president, then his successor must be the most explicit, unapologetic assertion of whiteness possible. It’s a pendulum swing of epic, tragic proportions. Olivia: And that's the tragedy of the book's title. The eight years of a Black man in power were not the beginning of a new era, but a brief, hopeful moment that provoked the very forces of history it sought to overcome. The progress was real, but the backlash was, in Coates's view, inevitable.

Jackson: So when you put it all together—the fear of "good Negro government," the plunder economy, and Trump as the inevitable backlash—it's a deeply unsettling picture of America. Olivia: It is. And the power of We Were Eight Years in Power is that Coates connects these three acts into a single, cohesive American tragedy. He shows that the racist memes and disrespect aimed at Obama, the housing discrimination faced by Clyde Ross, and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction are not separate events. They are all symptoms of the same fundamental, unresolved conflict at the heart of the country. Jackson: It’s a conflict between the American ideal—that all are created equal—and the American reality, which has always been built on a racial hierarchy. Obama represented the ideal, and the backlash represented the reality reasserting itself. Olivia: Exactly. The book is a chronicle of that reassertion. It’s a refusal to accept a happy ending to the American story. Coates insists that we look at the wreckage, at the cost of our national myths. Jackson: It’s a heavy book, and Coates leaves us in a pretty bleak place. The book is called a 'tragedy' for a reason. It makes you ask: If progress always creates this kind of backlash, what does resistance even look like? What does it mean to keep fighting? Olivia: It’s a profound question, and one he doesn't offer an easy answer to. But he does offer his own form of resistance: to keep writing, to keep telling the truth, to "scream into the roaring waves" even if they keep coming. It's about remaining conscious, even when it's painful. Jackson: That’s a powerful thought to end on. And it’s a question we’d love to hear your thoughts on. Find us on our socials and share how this book, or this discussion, made you feel. We're always listening. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.