reading review - we were eight years in power (riff-offs)

Let’s wrap up my series about We Were Eight Years in Power with a riff-off using some leftovers thoughts.

An essay differs from a feature in terms of how the writer interacts with the narrative. In an essay the writer imposes the narrative on the work whereas in a feature the writer simply follows the narrative through the subject.

I think having these definitions stated in such simple terms will prove valuable for me at some point in the future. For now, it gives me a working idea for what makes a poor essay – the author failed to impose a narrative on the piece. I suppose a similar thought could apply to a poor feature, but I don’t read features all that much these days and therefore cannot speak to whether most subjects fail to lead the writer along a clear narrative.

Though mass appeals to conscience are often compelling, they rarely lead to any kind of response. Groups of people are in general mostly self-interested.

The first statement here is a little misleading because it suggests groups make decisions in the same way individuals make decisions. It also oversimplifies the idea by subordinating collective considerations to conscience, an individual concept. The barrier to group action is rarely the lack of a compelling reason – if I needed to guess, I would suggest it is some combination of poor coordination, unclear information, and lack of immediate social proof.

Getting involved in a community and trying to help others solve problems allows us to connect our ideas and aspirations to universal causes.

I like this idea but I like the reverse even more – getting involved in helping others also gives people the chance to connect their ideas to smaller-scale, grassroots initiatives.

One way to calculate a figure for black reparations would be to find the difference in per capita wealth or income between white and black people, then multiply the difference by the number of black people.

A part of me appreciated using simple math to answer what is otherwise a very complicated question. Of course, the ever-present danger of using math is the threat of oversimplification. It’s not just the calculation that I am referring to – a neat result suggests that the major obstacle all along was just figuring out the math and, the math now figured out, everyone can shake hands and move forward. Life is rarely so simple. When real hurt was involved, the drawback of calculations is revealed in their inability to factor hurt into its equations.

Trump’s support was, in short, white, and his dominance among whites cut across every measurable age, gender, or educational demographic.

Oh, here we go, the Trump section… not today, folks.

Maybe I'll go research how many white people in Boston voted for Trump -

It isn’t hard to imagine a more ‘effective’ demagogue in the future who will do far more damage than Trump.

Gee, I can't wait to meet this person. Or maybe...

Has Ta-Nehisi Coates met The Business Bro?

The city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors.

Yes, good call, it is nice out, sunny, and I have been here for what feels like days, hammering out these TOAs, and do I really want to go on about politics right now? Maybe I should just go out…

...huh?

So... what?

Fine...

That last thought isn't from Ta Ne-Hisi Coates, it’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘City Looks Pretty’. But who better to end a riff-off?

Thanks for reading.

reading review - we were eight years in power (comparisons)

One thing I concluded about Ta Ne-Haisi Coates as I looked over my notes from We Were Eight Years in Power was that he did not have much patience for comparisons. Longtime readers will understand why this is a notable observation given my own distaste for comparisons because I feel they often act as a substitute for deep and rigorous critical thinking.

The note that made me first consider this was Coates’s comment about ratios. He notes that the problem with a ratio is how although it requires understanding two components, they are commonly manipulated to state truisms about just one component. He cites a 2012 study from the Manhattan Group to make this point – in this study, the group suggested that segregation had declined since the 1960s. Great, Coates comments, but comparing two eras fails to account for why African-Americans still remain the most segregated group in the country and does nothing to determine what must be done to remedy the ongoing injustice.

I view Coates’s thought as an example of a larger problem with comparisons. If we become too accustomed to using comparisons against the past as a marker for progress, we risk complacency before all of our work is completed. Instead, we should understand what the ideal is that we are working toward and resolve not to finish working until the ideal has been reached.

reading review - we were eight years in power (racism)

As I read Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, I found myself taking notes anytime he wrote about racism in a way that I considered important, interesting, or novel. Today’s post collects a few of the notes that stood out to me when I was preparing to write about this aspect of his work.

Regular readers will recall that one of my recent posts about this book centered on Barack Obama. In the context of how racism influenced his Presidency, Coates notes that one way racists coped with the reality of a black President was by denying Obama his blackness. He also points out that Obama appealed to the country by seeming to suggest that the country’s historical errors regarding race were due to the malevolence of a small minority of racists, an approach that underscores a certain white innocence about the brutality of the country’s history.

I also wrote a general post about this book that pointed out the straightforward and cliché-free manner of Coates’s writing. The way he writes about racism exemplifies this method. One example is how he cites research showing that a white person with a criminal record is sometimes as likely to get a job as a black person without a record. He also challenges the narrow interpretation some have of patriotism, asking why people talk about America’s history of freedom without considering our foundations as a slave economy. I like the simple manner he uses to raise these details because it forces readers to consider their own thinking without challenging them in a way that encourages hiding behind existing positions, identities, or affiliations.

The thought that made the biggest lasting impression on me was his description of how social policy affected land values in certain neighborhoods where an unwelcome black homeowner moved in. In short, Coates describes how the wrong combination of laws and systems has come together to drive down the value of certain properties regardless of how the landowner feels about the new black neighbor. This situation would often force all homeowners, bigoted or otherwise, to resist anything that might upset the homogeneity of their neighborhoods because such changes would lead to a reduction in land value. The idea gets at what I consider the most important policy level question about racism – how do we organize and run our cities and towns so that people are not being asked to choose between what is best for their families and what reinforces the systemic racism built into our policies and institutions?

reading review - we were eight years in power (obama)

A major connecting link in Ta Ne-hisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power was Barack Obama’s presidency and the way his two terms influenced Coates’s writing. This was something I expected given what I knew about the book before I started reading (and the title, I suppose). What I did not anticipate was how much I would learn about Obama, mainly through the piece ‘My President Was Black’ in which Coates interviewed the President at the end of his term. When I looked back on this collection, I recognized that these insights into Obama were among the most valuable things I learned from this book.

I suspect history will look back on Obama as an early example of how the leadership standards for the US presidency changed during the 21st century. The country is approaching a certain form of crossroads at the moment. Do we remain loyal to our long history of waiting for important problems to become urgent before we commit our time, energy, and resources to resolving them (1)? Or, do we change our approach and take the initiative as de facto leaders in the international community? Obama’s approach to leadership, one where he looks at those in his charge and says that he believes, trusts, and sees the best in all of them, would help future presidents set the right tone as world leaders and help the US demonstrate the ethos of cooperation and mutual accountability required in our future leaders to tackle the global challenges we face in the century ahead.

The way Obama described how he applied his leadership philosophy helped me develop a greater understanding of how to lead within large, complex organizations. For Obama, it was always important to consider the consensus for what he could accomplish and weight it against the risks he needed to take in order to achieve beyond the limits set by that consensus. The calculation was essentially a measure of the expected stability after a change because leadership through consensus limits the opportunity for counterattacks from opponents. On the other hand, change driven by force is vulnerable to resistance from those who feel the hurt, anguish, or injustice that necessitated the change has gone unacknowledged in the implementation.

One up: Another consideration Obama highlighted for leaders was the importance of remembering that people are better at talking about doing things rather than simply doing things. When too much talk threatens a group’s ability to act, the leader’s responsibility is to refocus the group on what can be accomplished and steer the group away from simply outlining all that must be done.

I think those thoughts bring added clarity to how he described his frustration with activists. An activist who fails to understand the limits of a public office will often make a leader feel like not enough is being done to address the concerns of their downtrodden, repressed, or marginalized constituents. A leader tempted to respond to this pressure must remember that an activist will always demand more than what can be accomplished in a given time period. If the leader forgets this basic truth, he or she will risk exchanging the stability inherent in progressive changes for the volatility that comes with sweeping reforms.

One down: Obama drew two lessons from countries that could not maintain sustained support for their attempted reparations-like measures (South Africa and India). First, he noted that the underlying society must accept nondiscrimination as a basic principle. Second, the society must hold itself accountable for its failures in equal measure to how it celebrates accomplishments. I found these lessons discouraging because I don’t see the US doing a very good job in either respect.

Just saying: Reading about Obama in this book was such a highlight for me that I made reading his two published works one of my reading goals in 2019. I’m not sure if this will extend to reading about Obama, though I could probably be convinced if the right author wrote such a book.

Footnotes / US leadership concepts

1. Because, like, what could I possibly know about this topic, right?

Another way to look at this is to consider how Trump might be looked back on as the last President to exemplify a certain kind of leadership standard – a profit-driven, strong-armed figure encouraged by our country’s unquestioning acceptance of easily digestible corporate success stories. I think the world’s success in the future hinges on us losing our patience for the kind of leader energized by narratives, interruptions, and urgency ahead of reality, focus, and priority. In other words, we need more of the standards Eisenhower set for the job during his tenure and less of the oversimplified transactional mentality Trump is reintroducing to the office.

i read we were eight years in power so you don't have to

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates (July 2018)

I was trying to think of what thought or theme, if anything, best tied together this collection of Ta Ne-Hisi Coates’s essays from the eight years of the Obama administration. As I was reviewing my notes, I came across this thought – honest writing is threatened at every moment by clichés and truisms – and I realized that Coates had given me the answer at some point in this remarkable work.

The theme is evident in so many ways throughout the pieces that make up this collection. He defines, for example, the problem of mass incarceration by simply noting that we jail more people than China despite being one-fourth its size. He does so again when he explains the Civil War – the death of two percent of our nation because part of the country wanted to continue owning other people. He reflects the same theme in subtler examples, such as when he describes the importance of asking for clarification instead of simply nodding along whenever we are uncomfortable with our own ignorance. Throughout the collection, Coates lives up to his thought by avoiding the clichés and truisms that would give away the power of his words and threaten the honesty of his writing.

The intent of this writing style is to create a work of art – as he himself notes in one passage, art’s responsibility is to reflect the world in all its truth. When done well, art rejects the world’s lies and replaces myth with reality. This collection, by its own definitions, is a true work of art, one that captures how the country balanced and juggled its failures, contradictions, and dreams during the most astonishing time of its history – the era of a black president.