Updated by Constance Grady on October 3, 2017 11:40 am

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One of the recurring ideas of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, is that he hates being asked to offer white people hope of a better future in which America might become a post-racial utopia. But when Coates appeared on The Late Show Monday night, Stephen Colbert asked him to offer that hope — and appeared to be almost offended when Coates refused.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book is the story of race in America — and of Coates himself

In his book, Coates writes that he hates being asked to talk about a future he doesn’t believe in, and he simply does not believe that America is going to “get over” racism. As he sees it, white supremacy is so foundational to America that it will be impossible to ever eradicate it. “Our story,” he concludes at the end of Eight Years in Power, “is a tragedy,” but it’s one that Coates hasdedicated himself to resisting nonetheless.

There are also troubling racial dynamics to this question. Coates is one of the most important writers on race in America today, but that also makes him one of the only writers on race whose work many white Americans have read — and correspondingly, for many white readers, there’s a sense that by reading Coates, you are absolving yourself of complicity in America’s racism. As the Washington Post put it in 2015, “‘Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece?’ is shorthand for ‘Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality?’ If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

White people seem to have decided that it is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s job to teach us all there is to know about racism in America. And once he’s finished, we would also like for him to make us feel better, to absolve us of our guilt and tell us that things will get better. Which is a lot to put on a single person, however brilliant — to say nothing of the fact that, as Coates pointed out on The Late Show on Monday night, it’s not actually his job.

“You’ve had a hard time in some interviews expressing a sense of hope in this country,” Colbert said toward the end of the interview. “Do you have any hope tonight for the people out there, about how we could be a better country, we could have better race relations, we could have better politics?”

“No,” Coates said, to scattered laughter. “But I’m not the person you should go to for that. You should go to your pastor. Your pastor provides you hope. Your friends provide you hope.”

“I’m not asking you to make shit up,” Colbert interjected. “I’m asking if you personally see any evidence for change in America.”

“But I would have to make shit up to actually answer that question in a satisfying way,” Coates explained.

What about the coming demographic change to America, Colbert asked. White people will soon be a numerical minority in America: Won’t things change then?

“Your question presumes that there is a static definition of whiteness,” Coates said. “And that this is the first time that there’s been a demographic change.” The Irish, he argues, weren’t always considered white; neither were the Italians or the Jews. America, by implication, is perfectly happy to change the definition of whiteness if it means the country can remain a majority-white nation.

“In addition to the very definition of whiteness being malleable,” Coates added, “the ability to vote is also a malleable thing. So you might have the possibility of the demographics actually changing, but who has the ability to use those demographics in an electoral system might also change too.”

Colbert took a second to sigh, in frustration or in sadness. “I hope you’re wrong,” he said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363038)

Ultimately, those two narrative arcs form the spine of the book. In We Were Eight Years in Power, you can see America at first embracing the policy of a black president and then reacting in a violent and paranoid racist backlash, and you can see Coates developing both the theoretical tools and the lyrical, expressive voice that makes his analysis of that backlash so captivating.

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“I could hear what that voice sounded like in my head,” Coates writes of the voice he was aiming for as he profiled Michelle Obama. “It was a blues with a beat dirtier than anything I had ever heard anywhere in the world.” He didn’t, he concludes, capture such a voice in the profile, but as you read We Were Eight Years in Power, you’ll hear Coates incrementally refine and clarify his distinctive voice — steeped in poetry and hip-hop and the rhetoric of black liberation — into the formidable tool it’s become today.

For Coates, style and content are inextricably linked

Coates thinks of the aesthetics of his sentences as being inseparable from their content. His model is James Baldwin; for Coates, Baldwin’s writing is beautiful specifically because it is honest. “The beauty of Baldwin’s prose that I connected to was not ancillary to the dream-breaking but central to it,” he writes. “The beauty in his writing wasn’t just style or ornament but an unparalleled ability to see what was before him clearly and then lay that vision, with that same clarity, before the world.”

Beautiful prose, for Coates, is necessarily honest prose. Honest prose must tell the truth about America — and the truth is, he argues, that white supremacy is not incidental to America’s history or to its current wealth, but foundational to it. “America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land,” he writes, “without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.”

The drive to render this reality with honesty and clarity creates Coates’s evocative, emphatic sentences: To make the reader experience the horror of white supremacy with honesty, Coates must kill cliché.

Over the course of Eight Years, you can watch Coates develop the particular habits of diction and syntax that he falls back on in service of this quest: the repeated rendering of the black self as a black body, upon which racism works with physical force; the use of the word plunder to describe how white supremacy takes possession of black wealth and labor; the preacher-like repetition of sentence structure in a long cascading litany of American sins; the which is to say that links abstract, morally charged ideas to concrete action, illuminating both. Coates writes “about race, which is to say the force of white supremacy.” Nations are “atheists, which is to say they find their strength not in any God but in their guns.” Nas’s lyrics are “beautiful, which is to say [they are] grounded in the concrete fact of slavery.”

These writerly habits are not crutches or safety blankets; they’re carefully developed tools that serve a specific argumentative purpose. Part of the pleasure of reading Eight Years lies in watching Coates discover and refine these tools and then slowly discard them as they live out their purpose.

As the book ends, Coates is beginning to point his analytical attention in new directions

As Eight Years concludes, Coates writes, he is no longer as interested as he once was in arguing about the formation of America’s color line. He has made his investigations, seen the data, and convinced himself, but he is fairly certain that the rest of the country won’t care: “It simply broke too much of America’s sense of its own identity,” he writes. “So I felt after this last piece that I was done arguing. I was resigned. I was at peace.”

That air of resignation begins to bleed into Coates’s writing even before his last essay. He wrote “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” in 2015, and it pulls extensively from the analytical framework he established in “The Case for Reparations” and his second book, the National Book Award–winning Between the World and Me. It is, like all of Coates’s major essays, well researched and well argued, but it lacks the urgent, evocative sentences of his other work. That may be in part because it doesn’t make major theoretical contributions to the analysis Coates had already done. “It was, in many ways, an end point for my inquiries,” Coates writes.

Part of what animates Coates’s writing seems to be the desire to learn for himself. He waxes lyrical on his hope that “I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, have not yet run out of time,” and on his love for his now-defunct blog, where he could build up a base of knowledge and interact with experts. “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” doesn’t seem to offer Coates any new avenues for understanding the world, and as a result, it’s a quieter, less energetic piece of writing than its fellows in this book.

The story that Coates is telling about America throughout these eight essays ends with the election of Donald Trump, which for Coates is both inevitable and horrific. “Our story is a tragedy,” he concludes, although “that belief does not depress me. It focuses me.”

But the story Coates is telling about his own development as a writer ends differently. It ends with one of America’s greatest thinkers beginning to turn to new questions and recommitting himself to helping create “a world more humane.”

“My ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility,” he says, “to keep screaming into the waves — just as my ancestors did.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363039)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363357)

Guatemala? Honduras?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34366815)

Stop making shit up

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365605)

fuck this guy, he'd be a nobody if he lived in any other country in the world and possibly dead in he lived in africa

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34362633)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34362715)

I think he is hinting at the definition of whites being expanded to include maybe Latinos or lighter skinned Asians. This is possible. We are already seeing some Latinos get uppity.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363314)

"Does this mean that ethnic whites who were once considered non white can claim to have a shared experience with African Americans?"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363373)

Yes, the older generations most certainly could.

You, no. You're white.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365627)

Unrelated, but my great grandfather was from Spain and he hosted Cuban refugees back in the day. They were intensely racist, like I'd never heard before.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365704)

cubans ARE MAD racist. had a cuban woman call me a monkey to my face. when pressed on the topic--"well, of course you are black. you have dark gums and look at your arms. they are meant to climb trees". she was my then gf's mom. so it wasn't like i really could do anything. after some back and forth i asked this woman who couldn't speak english "wait a minute, you think you're white?". response, IN SPANISH: "of course, i'm white like the president" [GWB].

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365765)

I hope you plowed that ass.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365900)

secondly it's not that he's complaining about racism never ending (which is obviously true given libs obsession calling anything and everything racism), but it's the fact that he acts like this means the country has "no hope"

fuck this self obsessed faggot

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34363398)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#Causes

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34366792)

"Oh this racism is killing me!"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34364158)

racial groups evolved many similar and some different dominant traits. After Columbus shrunk the world and we all began to live together, the different dominant traits have become unavoidably visible. Even if you think (as Coates surely does) that Europeans have some dominant trait for exploitation and oppression, Africans are only the targets because of traits they have, by and large, which allow them to be exploited.

Everyone begins these conversations with some definition of "racism the sin" that means a systemic belief in one racial group's superiority in some traits. Well... such a belief is 100% true and scientific and your brain is defective if it does not suss this out, in an integrated society, by about age 15.

You want to have ANY talk about race in the US, much more any hope of utopian society, you had better begin by acknowledging these racial differences as the singular cause of racial social friction. No one, of course, is allowed to articulate such thoughts, so every conversation and book are meaningless.

The word "racism" needs to be aggressively confronted at every usage and finally thrown in the trash. Its like talking to Salemites about witchcraft. You cant address shit so long as you think this is a real descriptor.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3753116&forum_id=2#34365111)