Ta-Nehisi Coates

A portrait of the historic Barack Obama era features essays originally published in "The Atlantic, " including "Fear of a Black President" and "The Case for Reparations, " as well as new essays revisiting each year of the Obama administration.

An American Tragedy

We Were Eight Years in Power

Laurel 

I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama's embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America's tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement a black president with a broad sense of the world should know better. Except a black president with Obama's past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president's inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on everything. Race is not simply a portion ot the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

Should Joe Biden run for president, he has to be asked about his time spent cheerleading for more prisons. Some of the quotes Murakawa unearths —particularly the ones where Democrats know the bill is bad and vote anyway— are little more than cowardice and put the lie to the notion that mass incarceration is a well-intentioned mistake. 

We Were Eight Years in Power quotes

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